The Family Table: Where Great Food, Friends, and Family Gather Together

by Christy Rost

Gathering together around the table provides us with the opportunity to celebrate the most important things in life - love, family, good health, and good friends. Christy Rost is passionate about family meals. Besides flexibility, the key to successfully preserving the family meal is an arsenal of family-friendly recipes that emphasize the beauty of simple foods, fresh, wholesome ingredients, and reasonably priced wine selections. In this first cookbook...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1933102047
• ISBN13: 9781933102047
• Release Date: August 2005
• Publisher: Capital Books (VA)
• Length: 380 Pages
• Weight: 1.85 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.7" x 8.8"

Customer Reviews

An excellent resource for family dining.

This new, first book by local Dallas food columnist and PBS food show host, Christy Rost, is a cookbook to celebrate families gathering at meals. To that end, it's recipes are divided by the different kinds of gatherings in the home, including `Everyday Meals', `Weekends', `Entertaining at Home', and `Holidays'.This locally produced book has one very national supporter, Martin Yan of the very long running PBS show `Yan Can Cook'. Yan provides a foreword to the book where he also finds the objective and organization of the book to be its most attractive feature. He also applauds the wine and food pairings cited in the book, a very unusual feature for a cookbook for home and family. This material is done by Eric Little, a local wine expert rather than by the author herself. This can only improve the quality of the book, as wine expertise is a whole game unto itself and I applaud the author for calling in expert assistance. Since I have virtually no knowledge of wine, I will simply applaud the author's including the material and her use of an expert to cover wine. I will also note that the book's editor or layout designer did a great service by placing each wine tip on the margin to the left or right of the recipe where it could either be sought out or ignored with equal facility. Again, with no knowledge of wine myself, I find the wine tips singularly informative, much better than similar material in books by many a nationally known writer / chef.Within each chapter, recipes are divided by traditional `Entrees', `Side Dishes', `Soups and Salads', `Desserts' plus special chapters where appropriate such as `Afternoon Tea' and `Halloween Treats'. The contents of these sections sometimes strays from concept like the case where a valuable page early in the book is taken up by a recipe for maitre d'hotel herb butter used in the preceeding recipe. Another example in the same section is a recipe for a marinara sauce. At the same time, some recipes cite a `to be served with' recipe such as spaetzle or noodles, yet no recipe for the dish appears in the book, or at least in the index to the book. On the other hand, the Index does appear to be especially friendly in assisting one to find a recipe. This is important in a book like this where similar recipes are spread out in several different chapters.The recipes are well written, yet they are not for the novice cook. The book uses and does not explain many common cooking terms such as deglaze, consomme, bouquet garni, and dice. Cases like this often came up when I was developing software when something did not work quite as expected, the issue was whether this was a feature or a bug. In this case, I am more than willing to give the author the benefit of the doubt and say this is acturally a feature. Other books which include sections on culinary instruction tend to give just enough to appear to add value to the book, but not enough to work as a good text on techniques. These features just end up taking space a

The joy of cooking for family and friends

The organization of The Family Table by occasion - family meals, entertaining, holidays - and the author's personal anecdotes make this cookbook delightful both to read and to use. Emphasis is on the pleasure of meals in the company of family and friends, and the recipes range from simple meatloaf to sparkling "special occasion" desserts. Wine notes provide useful and down-to-earth suggestions for meal accompaniments. Look carefully at the book's design, too - appropriate table linens have been used as backgrounds for each section, from lace to checked picnic cloths. Novice and expert cooks alike will want to add The Family Table to their collection of cookbooks.