Customer Reviews

Sara's Secrets for Weeknight Meals

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

If you don't have perfect eyesight, don't buy this wonderful cook's latest book. I agree with all the raves from other reviewers about the content, but I'm having to strain and squint to read the text, which is in alternating pale beige and pale green type. The ingredient lists are set in even paler shades of those colors. It appears to be a case of a graphic designer's aesthetic sense running amok over the user's need for easy readability in the kitchen.

Moulton talks about the comments she heard while publizing her last book "Sarah Moulton Cooks at Home". Most of them were about wanting to cook those recipes but not finding time. Moulton was puzzled, thinking these are favorite recipes, but not much time expended on thinking about required minutes to prepare. She goes on to recall how she discovered her need for the same, great food without much fuss for weeknight craziness.

Thus, this volume of some two hundred such recipes. They are organized well into common groupings: soups, salads, poultry, etc. She gathers with international flair and flavor, which should help expand many weeknight chef's cusine range. Ingredients are not difficult, given access to normal supermarket pantry offering, however she provides internet and mailorder sourcing as well.

There is good section on pantry stocking, as well this collection doesn't take the mese en place attitude, but one that I've followed, doing some things in what would otherwise be down time, waiting for such and such step to be completed. Also, upfront she lists her assumptions which one would do well do peruse and return to on occasion, e.g. "eggs are large; vanilla extract is pure" etc. Time is given for each recipe in two categories: hands-on and total prep.

Found absolutely attractive were such as: "Charred Tomato, Chicken and Tortilla Soup"; Mexican Chicken Salad; Brie, Bacon and Spaghetti Frittata; Annie's Favorite Pasta (Cartwheel Pasta wiht Breakfast Sausage and Creamy Tomato Sauce; Thanksgiving Hens; Baked Fish with Horseradish Crust;Potato-Crusted Salmon with Red Wine Sauce; Asian Spiced Roasted Baby Carrots; Radish and Orange Salad with Peppery Orange Dressing; Meditteranean Orzo Pilaf; Blueberry Yogurt Pie.

As evident, too many good recipes here. One wants and likely will try many of them, so this purchase represents valuable collection. Even accomplished chef will thrive on this, weeknight exciting food with quick prep.

Hats off to Broadway Books of Random House for this stylish offering which rivals Clarston-Potter and Ten Speed Press for good paperstock, clean design and magnificent fourcolor photos.

This is destined to be bigseller. Buy one for yourself, then give one to friends, family, etc. Weeknight excellence will be spread without sacrifice of our busy over-scheduled lives.

I admire Sara Moulton and appreciate her cooking skills. I've used several of her recipes in the past and will continue to consult her version of dishes. What disappoints me about this book is the publisher's error in using pale ink throughout. As others have mentioned, this book is difficult to read. What's up with publishers who make it hard for you to read text? Looks like the designers had an upper hand over the editors in this case. Shame on them!

This is an excellent cookbook, especially at the price (200 recipes for less than 20 bucks!). Sara, while classically trained as a chef, has a good grasp on what your average home cook is capable of, both time-wise and technique-wise. Her recipes are things that your family will actually eat and that you'll be able to afford - no truffle-braised jaw of chilean seabass with balsamic pomegranate reduction here.

The book is filled with useful tips about ingredients and cooking methods, and the recipes are clearly well-tested... as far as I can tell, they all work! Learning to cook from Sara Moulton seems a lot like what learning to cook from your mother should be.... and for those of us who are children of the '70s and '80s and had working moms who almost never cooked, that is a real blessing!

Well done, Ms. Moulton!

This cookbook is great, I use it constantly. The recipes are very clear and she really pays attention to the details, which makes all the difference. Plus they are unique without being too unique, if you know what I mean (my kids will still eat the food!) Some of my favorites are the pork tournedos, the southwestern sweet potatoes, basically the whole salads chapter, escarole and white bean soup, keema matar... okay I have a lot of favorites. Am thinking of buying this cookbook as a christmas present for someone because I've had such luck with it. Only complaint is some of the ingredients can be hard to find, but that's probably because I live in a rural area and so grocery store options are limited.

I've learned so much from Sara on Food Network. She was always my favorite so I'm glad to see so many tips and techniques in the new book. However, the faint print and glossy paper make for difficult reading while trying to prepare a recipe. I wish all cookbooks came with spiral binding and dark print!

I really like Sara. I think she has a great mastery of cooking quick, simple and delicious meals. However, I am also a fan of beautiful cookbooks, and I find it hard to decide whether or not I want to make the meal without being able to look at a picture of the food. They say we eat with our eyes first, and that makes sense to me. So if you're like me, you might want to go to the bookstore so you can check out the book before buying it.

`Sara's Secrets for weeknight meals' goes part of the way to explaining why author, Sara Moulton has been absent from new episodes of shows on the Food Network. While her content on her various shows never impressed me quite as much as my favorites, Mario Batali and Alton Brown, she was always next in line, especially after `In Martha's Kitchen' left the Food Network when Ms. Martha took her little enforced vacation in a federal prison.

Much of my appreciation for Sara's shows was based on her being the protégé of the great Julia Child, but even more was based on her great personality on the air. She seemed to have none of the more annoying tics or mannerisms of Emeril, Rachael, Paula, or Tyler, even though I have much respect for the latter three of these hosts' shows and books.

I actually liked Sara's earlier one hour `Cooking Live' show than I did the later half hour `Sara's Secrets' show, as, like Martha's show, I really liked the guests on both shows. This seems to be a feature that has disappeared from Food Network shows except for an occasional appearance on `Emeril Live'. `Sara's Secrets' also seemed to be misnamed, as the show was rarely about basic technique. It was all about doing three dishes at home for a typical meal. And, that being so, the `make ahead' aspect of the show seemed to be a bit bogus, as making ahead for Wednesday would take up time you need to make dinner on Monday and Tuesday. The `make ahead' plans seemed to be useful only if you were entertaining, but the quantities were rarely for more than four to six people, so it really wasn't `entertaining' quantities, except on a few special shows dedicated to parties. Therefore, I was just a bit skeptical about what I will find in this new book. I am very happy to say that the book gives us everything I liked about Sara Moulton's TV shows, and very little of what I did not like.

As Sara says in her introduction, her first book was simply a collection of all her favorite recipes she cooked at home, with no concern for how long it took to make the dishes. This book is dedicated to `200 recipes for quick and easy dinners', including timings for how long it will take in active and total time to prepare the dishes. In spite of the fact that Sara is poaching on Rachael Ray's territory, this book could not be more different from Rachael's breathless, neologistic style. Being the culinary professional she is, the book is much more like Jacques Pepin's excellent recent book, `Fast Food My Way'. Every recipe is lovingly framed with excellent headnotes on the source of the recipe and ways in which it can fit into a meal with other dishes plus very good tips after some recipes on selected ingredients such as nuts and spices.

I recommend this book especially to those who have few cookbooks and may have few cooking skills, but as someone, who has reviewed upwards of 500 cookbooks, I still found important tips and suggestions in this book. Most were not so much a totally new idea as a familiar idea presented in such a way that makes me take more notice of it than I may have in the past, such as her suggestion to grate and saute sweet potatoes, using the food processor's grating disk to do the heavy lifting for the grating. The connection that highlights this technique is the observation that by many methods such as roasting and boiling, sweet potatoes take a long time to cook. Grating turns these tasty tubers into a quick cooking starch which happens to be more nutritious than it is white lookalikes from Idaho and Maine.

To cooking novices, I must give the warning that you will probably not be able to finish these dishes in the time Sara gives you until you have made the dish three or four times, even if you carefully read through the recipe several times and give it your full attention. One way I know this is the fact that I recently did a recipe very similar to her roasted then pureed squash for which she allocates 5 minutes of hands on time. I found that scraping the flesh out of the roasted butternut squash while avoiding the skin requires just a bit more technique and time than you may expect, especially if you embark on the dish with the expectations that it will be easy and become rushed while you herd your squash into the food processor while your fast cooking seafood is demanding attention on the range. Sara suggests using precut squash as an alternative. I would suggest you skin the humongous gourd before roasting. Then you can truly throw the whole roasted veggie into the processor and dispatch it in little time as promised.

There are several extremely useful recipes for both novices and experienced amateurs. My favorite is the fourfold method for doing breadcrumbs, including estimates of the shelflife of the four different results.

Sara has still not yet learned how to do rice, as she still cooks it as if it were pasta, although I am happy to say she doesn't apologize for her choice of technique as she routinely did on her shows.

I am generally not very fond of pantry lists, but I think Sara's is much better than average, simply because it coincides almost exactly with my own pantry contents. While the book does include a few desserts, it focuses on the things that are really important, such as soups, salads, breakfasts, pasta dishes, poultry, meats, seafood, vegetables, and easy pantry preparations. One of the most attractive chapters gives recipes which make use of supermarket prepped ingredients.

This is a very good cookbook. If you like Sara's shows and you like reading cookbooks, this is a must buy!

This book is well-written, and has a wonderful selection of recipes.

The content is varied and it is a good book for all levels of skill. I've enjoyed reading it and, also, have made several of the recipes in the month that I've owned it.

It's only drawback is the colors of type. Every other page is in a lighter color of ink and difficult to read. But....buy it anyway - Tempting ideas, skilled writing and originality are evident through-out the book.

In cooking, like many ither areas of life, I've come to the conclusion that nothing good comes easy. I am happy to say that Sara Moulton has proved me wrong.

I like to think of myself as a discerning, if occasional, home chef. I pride myself on cooking intricate recipes with gourmet results (often after hours of slaving in the kitchen). However, between work and kids and school, I have not alot of time to pursue culinary perfection each evening for the family dinner. I often resort to staples from my childhood: tuna casserole, chicken and broccoli or plain and simple grilled hunks of meat with corn or green beans on the side.

Sara's Secrets has proved to be a happy medium between full-on gourmet and the typical daily grind fare. The kids have enjoyed everything we've made out of this cookbook and so have my husband and I. The girls are 3 and 6 and a bit on the picky side, so I think that says alot.

The book lists out "Hands On Time" and "Total Time". I am more concerned with "Hands on Time", so that is what I judge the quickness of the recipes by and most are under 30 minutes, if not 15. Will you be able to cook to those times right off? With some recipes, yes. With others, I think it takes a couple rounds to get familiar with the process to whip them up in 10 miutes or less.

Last night I made Middle Eastern Pizzas from scratch. The dough took about 5 minutes to throw together in the food processor. The biggest effort was washing the food processor. The kids were amazed at seeing the rapid-rise yeast in action! The ingedients were all readily avaiable at the local grocery store and even wth a side of roasted veggies and accompanying dessert, the whole meal came in under $10. There was more than enough left for lunch today.

I think the best part is that even with the time considerations and ease of the recipes, they still come out tasting like a gourmet meal. The crispy pumpkin ravioli is to die for! And I like that there are quite a few little international twists to the recipes. I love the quick desserts at the end! The pecan squares were incredible- like pecan pie without the work.

This is a cookbook of weekday meals that I'm using regularly- glad I found it!