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102 of 104 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Contains some useful recipes and some useless recipes, January 2, 2002
If you want to make a reasonable selection of pastas, this book will give you recipes to do it. Spinach, tomato, and other flavored pastas, as well as pastas made from a variety of grains. It also contains a reasonable selection of sauces that are generally easy to make, though if you have any experience making pasta sauces (or another cookbook that covers the topic), I doubt you'll find anything terribly interesting or innovative to try as far as sauces go.However, I guess that wasn't enough to fill up a book, because the book also has a bunch of recipes that look questionable at best. It looks kind of like the author sat down and tried to brainstorm everything she could possibly think of to make pasta out of -- kind of an illustration of the old adage that if all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. For example, there are some recipes for curry pastas here, which seems like a reasonable enough idea if you can think of something to make that wuld go well with it. However, the author's only serving suggestion is to then make a curry and serve it over the curry pasta, which makes a lot less sense to me than making a pasta with a flavor that would complement whatever curry you are making. There are a number of recipes like this, where the author suggests using a set of ingredients from a dish in a pasta to go with the dish. Beyond that there's no discussion of making tortellini and only a brief discussion of making ravioli, with only a few ideas for fillings. This seems like an area where the author's creativity could have been put to far better use, as there are a vast number of possible fillings that might go really well tossed lightly with oil or with a simple cream sauce. This is a very inexpensive book and it contains a wide variety of of useful recipes for various pastas, so this book does the job it sets out to do. However, I can't help but think it could have been a much better book if a little more thought and discretion could have been put into it.
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by Cook's Illustrated
