Customer Reviews

Sharing Mountain Recipes: The Muffin Lady's Everyday Favorites

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Living at 7500 is wonderful but presents problems with cooking. This is a great book with good re4cipes. I also recomend "Pie in the Sky" and "Chocolate Snowball" - they both have altitude adjustments.

What a work of passion this is! Through the book, one learns about cooking, joy of cooking and then about putting together a spectacular meal in any circumstance and whatever the whether conditions may be. There are snippets of altitudinal wisdom prevalent through out the books; including special dietary adjustments, ingredient substitutions and equivalents.
It is an amazing cookbook and a must in every home because it conveys passion and wisdom.

This is a good book with many excellent basic recipes, with spelling errors and errors of omission ie oven temps, etc. Interesting to read and fun to use.

Reviewed by Cherie Fisher for Reader Views (9/06)

The Muffin Lady strikes again! "Sharing Mountain Recipes" is Randi Lee Levin's second cookbook. Her first cookbook "Baking at High Altitude; The Muffin Lady's Old Fashioned Recipes" won the Colorado Independent Publishers Association award, the Best First Cookbook in English, USA and then the Best First Cookbook in the World 2004 award. Her latest book completely lives up to the quality of the first cookbook.

As a person who is dating an Italian chef, has several subscriptions to cooking magazines and owns over 100 cookbooks that have been read from cover to cover, I found "Sharing Mountain Recipes" to be one of the best and most comprehensive cookbooks I have ever read. The Muffin Lady incorporates sound advice on cooking techniques at all altitudes, wonderful recipes and puts a lot of love into her work. You will feel like you are sitting in her kitchen trying out recipes with her when you read this.

The book starts off with the statement "There is one extraordinary ingredient that goes into everything that I cook and bake. Please do not forget this ingredient, for it is imperative to all recipes. Whenever I am cooking or baking, I add extra spoonfuls of Love to all of my recipes. Love added to all things good, makes them just a little bit better." Almost all of the recipes have stories about where they came from and how other people responded to them.

This cookbook is for all level of cooks. Levin has basic recipes for starter cooks and breaks down even her most complex recipes so that even the most novice cook will be able to create these wonderful recipes. I was also impressed with the fact that she is conscious about different dietary needs. She usually has several variations of each recipe, the original in all its fattening glory, the heart healthy version and the diabetes friendly version. As the Executive Director of the Diabetes Foundation of Rhode Island I would not hesitate to recommend this book to families that are adjusting to a diabetes friendly menu (if they promised to use the healthy recipe variations!).

"Sharing Mountain Recipes" is broken down into several sections including comfort foods, breakfast, lunch, dinner and of course, dessert. The Ultimate Comfort Food section is full of favorite mac n' cheese, mashed potato and chocolate recipes. Oh yes....I can feel my diet going right out the window with these beauties. Each section is filled with recipes from Levin's treasure trove that she inherited from her grandmothers, friends recipes and her own creations.

This book will make a great gift for the Holidays, engagement parties and showers. It would also make a wonderful host gift when I am going to someone else's home for dinner. Well, onto my biggest dilemma for this weekend, am I going to make Aunt Lil's Matzo Ball Soup or Doe's Beef Stew from "Sharing Mountain Recipes"? What would the Muffin Lady advise? Hmmmm.... she would probably give me a taste of something delectable in her kitchen and tell me to do both because there is always next weekend too!

Book received free of charge.

"Sharing Mountain Recipes: The Muffin Lady's Everyday Favorites" by Randi Levin (aka The Muffin Lady) showcases a compendium of nutritious, delicious, and thoroughly 'kitchen cook friendly' recipes of easily prepared dishes ranging from breakfast favorites to special occasion treats. Ingredient supplements for special dietary needs are provided in addition to diverse tips for cooking and backing that will prove especially helpful for the novice chef. With recipes ranging from Dreamy Cheese Mashed Potatoes; Lemon Poppy Muffins; Berry Baked French Toast; and Sunshine Salad; to Sweet Poultry Kabobs; Seafood Au Gratin; Fried Bananas; Butter Cream filled Coffeecake. Of special note is the two pages devoted to 'A Few Favorite Submarine Sandwiches", the chapter on 'The Accessories of Foods', and unique recipe cited as being 'The Gourmet Mash for the Elder Horse'. There's even a poem to 'The Alligator Pear'. Enhanced with a 'Cooking Language Conversions' page, a U.S. to Metric Conversions chart, an a detailed index, "Sharing Mountain Recipes" is a welcome and recommended addition to any and all personal, professional, and community library cookbook collections!

Having lived in the Denver, Colorado area for five years, I finally heeded advice and purchased this cookbook with hopes of getting some baking recipes that would solve my flattened cake/baked goods problems. Well, let me tell you! Every recipe has come out truely perfect! Let me also explain that I haven't been a great cook in the past, nor have I had much interest in becoming one. In fact, I rarely buy a cookbook because I haven't been known to enjoy cooking or trying new recipes. But because I couldn't even get a box cake to look normal, a friend suggested I get a high altitude cookbook. So I found this one on Amazon and I have now been transformed! The baked goods as well as the regular meal dishes I've made from this cookbook have elevated me in the eyes of my neighbors and friends to being called "a great baker" and a "marvelous cook" (Imagine that!).
The best bonus in this book was to find that in addition to wonderful bakery type recipes, it has a huge allotment of delicious recipes that you remember weeks after having eaten them. Most of the recipes have a short description that tells how the recipe was aquired and why it was included in the book. Each recipe has been carefully selected and added because it was loved before it was ever put into this cookbook. I have now tried over 25 recipes in this cookbook and will most likely try them all eventually. I've recently purchased her other book, "Baking At High Altitude--the Muffin Lady's Old Fashioned Recipes" and it proving to be as valuable as this one.