Gourmet Every Day [Made in Napa Valley]

by Catherine Bergen

Pasta with store-bought sauce, a frozen something-or-other, take-out Chinese . . . Does this sound like a typical weeknight dinner? More than likely, your everday life is hectic and you don't have... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0978849000
• ISBN13: 9780978849009
• Release Date: January 2006
• Publisher: Tulocay
• Weight: 1.95 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Book Review

I love this book. The recipies are very easy to follow. They make very yummy meals. I would order this book again.

Yet another 'quick and easy meal' book. Better than average

'Gourmet Every Day' is 'Gourmet' magazine's entry into the '30 minute meal' / Rachael Ray domain of quick and easy cooking. This is not their first attempt, as they did a 'quick and easy entertaining' book a two or three years ago, which every reviewer correctly pointed out was neither quick nor easy. 'Gourmet' seems to have learned a few things with this book, as, at the very least, these recipes are all pretty easy (Quick depends on your level of kitchen skills). While I have a lot of respect for Ms. Ray's style of recipe, I can appreciate that some people find her bubbly atypical style and frequent abbreviations and neologisms pretty annoying. This book is a remedy for those aggrivations. Like Rachael, all these meals are done in one fell swoop. There is none of the planning ahead mode which is only a second best solution to being short on time. Unlike Rachael (although I suspect this is changing fast), these recipes are the product of a large professional recipe factory, with a corp of professional recipe testers, copy editors, and internal reviewers who make certain that anything upon which they put the 'Gourmet' imprimatur is worthy of the honor. In fact, most of the recipes come from the monthly column in 'Gourmet' dedicated to quick cooking, although a large number of recipes were done especially for this book. I think it is no surprise that many of the recipes seem to speak with an Italian accent. The dish on the cover is an obviously Italian pasta salad with olives, basal, and tomatoes. In fact, it looks remarkably like my favorite Jamie Oliver pasta salad. Thankfully, the book is organized by principle ingredient or style of dish, these being 'One Dish Dinners', 'Salads for Dinner', 'Stove Top Dishes', Grills, 'Soups', Sandwiches and Burgers', Pastas and Pizzas', Vegetables', 'Grains', Snacks', and 'Desserts'. This is not an ideal organization, and if is further confused by listing the first two on a separate page from the other chapters in the Table of Contents. And, these first two sections are presented differently from the rest of the book, in that recipes in these sections are given with a full page picture. This is mostly nitpicking, as I was genuinely pleased with almost all the recipes, and found almost all really quite easy, without selling out to using too much prepared ingredients. The pizza recipes are 'made at home' using store-bought pizza dough. The only quibble I have with the ingredients is that every once in a while, I think the authors lost track of their audience and used obscure ingredients such as ramps. (Not only are ramps highly seasonal, many megamarts simply don't carry them, even if they could, as they loose money on them.) And, since we are getting 200 good, true to their word recipes for under the common list price of $35, this is a worthy purchase, especially if you are not already fully stocked with Ms. Ray's publications.

Wonderfully Simple Recipes

Maximum taste and minimum prep time is what this book is all about! Beautifully illustrated - The photographs of dishes are great. I cooked a pasta recipe from this book using pasta, olive oil, garlic, capers and bread crumbs. It was delicious and took about 20 minutes to prepare. My husband couldn't stop raving about it! We love this book!

Great easy gourmet meals

When we recieved our book, my husband and I couldn't wait to get started. When we get home from long days at work, this book is ideal! The recipes are quick, simple and the dishes and complete,even including wine suggestions! The book is easy to follow with divisions such as grill, soup, pastas, salads and sandwiches and more. Highly recommended