MisterHobgoblin
13th November 2011, 09:27 AM
Bill's Basics is supposed, as I understood it, to be a set of basic recipes that every kitchen should have. They were supposed to be simple, easy and universal.
On the positive side, I cooked up the Polenta Bolognese and it worked a treat. The whole family liked it, including the hard-to-please boys. It took a while; an hour and a half if memory serves me well. That's hardly an everyday recipe but as a weekend treat, it was great.
But there are other recipes which are quicker. Many of them are Asian influenced and contain chilli. Now, I like chilli, but our five year old doesn't. This makes much of the book a no go area for us and does make us wonder what kind of Anglophone kitchen would see Seafood Laksa as a staple when it wouldn't have a recipe for steak and kidney pudding.
A further weakness of the book is the division into sections, each of which has 24 pages. This leaves us with rather more options for breakfast than anyone would ever need (and these days, we all get our breakfasts out of packets and jars anyway). Ditto soups. Twenty foutr pages of salads felt like overkill too. And baking (do people really still bake?). But it leaves us somewhat bereft in the vegetable department, vegetables being a staple of most diets. At least chicken was separated out from meat so we did get 48 pages of "meaty" meals.
I'm sure there are better cookery books out there (Baghdad Kitchen by Nina Garbutt is a favourite of mine), but perhaps they don't look quite as chic left out on coffee tables.
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On the positive side, I cooked up the Polenta Bolognese and it worked a treat. The whole family liked it, including the hard-to-please boys. It took a while; an hour and a half if memory serves me well. That's hardly an everyday recipe but as a weekend treat, it was great.
But there are other recipes which are quicker. Many of them are Asian influenced and contain chilli. Now, I like chilli, but our five year old doesn't. This makes much of the book a no go area for us and does make us wonder what kind of Anglophone kitchen would see Seafood Laksa as a staple when it wouldn't have a recipe for steak and kidney pudding.
A further weakness of the book is the division into sections, each of which has 24 pages. This leaves us with rather more options for breakfast than anyone would ever need (and these days, we all get our breakfasts out of packets and jars anyway). Ditto soups. Twenty foutr pages of salads felt like overkill too. And baking (do people really still bake?). But it leaves us somewhat bereft in the vegetable department, vegetables being a staple of most diets. At least chicken was separated out from meat so we did get 48 pages of "meaty" meals.
I'm sure there are better cookery books out there (Baghdad Kitchen by Nina Garbutt is a favourite of mine), but perhaps they don't look quite as chic left out on coffee tables.
***00