Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I consider myself an experienced cook but I have had frustrating experiences with cookbooks and recipes I'd find in magazines and newspapers. Something would sound wonderful, I'd buy ingredients, spend hours cooking and the results would be...OK. Not terrible, not inedible, but a disappointment none the less. Even cookbooks that I love and contain recipes I think are wonderful would also have recipes that I found pretty so-so. In fact, in many cookbooks the ratio of successes to non-successes is pretty small. Finding The Best Recipe (the edition that preceded this one) was a revelation for me. Each recipe I tried was a success. When The New Best Recipe was published, I bought one immediately and was thrilled to find so many new recipes. This is now my go-to cookbook, the first place I look when I want to find a recipe, and a book I check other recipes against when considering recipes from other sources. I use this book in the way my mother used the Joy of Cooking when I was growing up in the late 60s and early 70s. And just as Joy was the book she used when she needed a recipe for a classic like beef stew or a then fashionable food such as quiche or cheese fondue, The New Best Recipe has recipes for classics (spaghetti and meatballs, pot roast, coq au vin, shrimp scampi) and also has recipes for foods that have hit the American culinary radar more recently such as pad thai, beef fajitas, and pozole. In fact the huge range of foods is one of the things that makes this cookbook so wonderful; for instance, the pasta section includes recipes for lo mein, tuna noodle casserole and ravioli. This is a great book for beginners because of the detailed explanations of how the ultimate recipe was achieved which include discussions of different techniques that were considered or used and why they were rejected, as well as the many sidebars which give information on technique and equipment. Plus there is nothing that teaches you to cook like cooking, and nothing that keeps you cooking as much as having success. But it is a book that an experienced cook will find just an interesting and useful. I have been cooking for years and I have learned from this book. This is not (and does not represent itself to be) a low-fat cookbook. The recipes are about achieving maximum flavor and taste. It is also not (and does not represent itself to be) a cookbook full of fast recipes. However, this book contains so many recipes that low fat and fast recipes can be found among them. The recipes are always clear and easy to follow, and the results will speak for themselves. I love cookbooks and have many but if I were forced to have only one cookbook, this would be the one