Recipes

[tdog]

I have several Weight Watchers recipe books and many of the recipes are not good. I have vowed to stop buying them. I have found a few I like and use often, but so many of them are too dry and use ingredients that I don't like. I want to cook healthy and low calorie, but taste still matters!!! So many recipes using spray cooking oil - how is that supposed to give any flavor to anything??

[I am still oxox]

Classic example on here Mary Beth had a recipe for lasagna which used cottage cheese instead of ricotta, I am a NYer who know her Italian food and my comment was eww that so so salty and tarte, Ricotta is the only way to go in a lasagna

[ChynnaBlue]

On 3/3/2014 tdog said:

I have several Weight Watchers recipe books and many of the recipes are not good. I have vowed to stop buying them. I have found a few I like and use often, but so many of them are too dry and use ingredients that I don't like. I want to cook healthy and low calorie, but taste still matters!!! So many recipes using spray cooking oil - how is that supposed to give any flavor to anything??

It's not. I sauteed vegetables in spray cooking olive oil last night and the flavor came from the vegetables. Oil isn't always for flavor.

[Sooner]

The ones I never buy or even look at any more are the Gooseberry and Taste of Home ones. There's way too much cheese and soup and most of the recipes are the old church cookbook style, and I know how to do that without a cookbook. I buy a cookbook that can offer me some different ideas about cooking and suggest ways to cook lighter food--and something easy I could serve guests is a real bonus for me! I love ideas for the newer grains on the shelves now and how to incorporate them and make salads with them.

I cook fish or chicken (bake, grill, broil, steam or saute) and season or sauce it differently; some pasta dish and put sauces on pasta; make side dish vegetables pretty plain; and roast veggies; make soups with what I have in the house; and that's how we eat. Oh and salads and homemade dressings.

I rarely cook Mexican, cook a lot of Italian, Mediterranean, and Indian, and some French!

[mima]

Sometimes it's not the cookbook's or recipe's fault. My mom can take a wonderful recipe and screw it up every time.

I get kind of irritated sometimes. I will give her a recipe I love. She will make it and then will complain about "it wasn't done". Well, duh! Cook it longer. Or...."it had too much salt" then realizing she used one tablespoon instead of a teaspoon. She will ask for recipes from my daughter because she likes the dish so much. She will make it and say it didn't turn out good at all and she will never make it again. Never fails. I vowed to quit bragging about wonderful recipes to her.

[DeeJoyce]

My test for a new cookbook is to open it up to about 3 different recipes and ask myself if my husband would eat this and are the ingredients ones I would have on hand? Many times there are foods that don't fit our likes. So I don't buy. Although there are cookbooks that just make good reading, especially the seasonal ones.

[stilltamn8r]

On 3/5/2014 mima said:

Sometimes it's not the cookbook's or recipe's fault. My mom can take a wonderful recipe and screw it up every time.

I get kind of irritated sometimes. I will give her a recipe I love. She will make it and then will complain about "it wasn't done". Well, duh! Cook it longer. Or...."it had too much salt" then realizing she used one tablespoon instead of a teaspoon. She will ask for recipes from my daughter because she likes the dish so much. She will make it and say it didn't turn out good at all and she will never make it again. Never fails. I vowed to quit bragging about wonderful recipes to her.

Yep, lousy cook trumps lousy cookbook any day!

[Moonlady]

Also, believe it or not, sometimes the recipes aren't even their own. I just saw that on TV a few days ago. A "ghost recipe writer" was featured, and she provides recipes for even well-known cooks/chefs. That really floored me.

[chickenbutt]

I'd be willing to bet that a good percentage of them aren't recipes of the author, especially a lot of celebrity (not necessarily celebrity CHEF) type cookbooks.

That bothers me a little bit, I guess. I cannot imagine writing a cookbook with recipes that I didn't write. I suppose if there are some that are family recipes (and I had permission to publish them), it is appropriate.

A recipe is intellectual property of the person who wrote it, so I like to respect that.

[Beebee2]

One of my pet peeves is people reviewing recipes, telling about all the changes they made to it, and then proclaiming it either awful or great. Is this the result of the American educational system or in spite of it, and how can you tell? This is a response to Mima's post.