Golden Door Cooks Light and Easy, The Review

Some cookbook's, such as Shirley O. Corriher's excellent Cookwise, focus on teaching; the recipes are merely there to aid each of the lessons. The Golden Door Cooks takes a more traditional approach focusing on the recipes themselves. The introductions to each recipe are generally short and usually involve a story about how much guests enjoy that particular recipe - and it is quite easy to see how they do.

All of the recipes I've tried so far in this book have been delicious. It is a clear demonstration that for certain dishes you don't need loads of oil or cream to make them work (though Shirley will teach you that for some dishes they are!) The soups are a particular favorite of mine both in terms of flavor and ease of preparation.

While the recipes of a cookbook like this one should weigh heavily in the grading, they are not the only thing. Organization and information architecture matter too, and here the book falls down.

The Golden Door Cooks misses on some basic information like the time to prepare a recipe. The reader is left to sort through the various instructions in the recipe to try to add up the time for different steps and guess which ones can be done in parallel. Trying to do this for multiple recipes at once might require MS Project.

The book also focuses on healthy cooking but doesn't make some of the calorie data clear. For example the Salmon with Dill Yogurt Sauce recipe is listed at 130 calories per serving, but the ingredient list includes the Parsnip Potato Puree that is listed at 200 calories per serving. So is the serving size for the puree different when served with the salmon? Does the calorie count for the salmon not include this one ingredient? The book leaves us guessing. While one might be able to intuit the answer in this case, the answer is not so clear when it asks us to drizzle Multi-Pepper Puree on top of the Creamed Corn Soup.

Overall I can heartily recommend this book, but a little more care would have made it 5-stars.Get more detail about Golden Door Cooks Light and Easy, The.