Customer Rating: 
Summary: Sara Moulton Cooks at Home Review
Comment: I like Sara. She has a warm loving personality and it shows through in this recipe book. She is a very good cook and easy to understand. She explains the recipes, ingredients and methods in a way that anyone can understand. I am happy with my book. I love watching her on Food Network.
Thanks, Thelma Price
Customer Rating:
Summary: alotta book for the money (p.s. I made the herb spaetzle)
Comment: It's not quite ten pounds and it's not intimidating at all.
I tend to resist buying popular cookbooks and use internet recipes instead. I will be referring to both of SM's recipe books before looking on the internet because her recipes suit my appetite. Also, I try to watch Sara's Secrets whenever it is on Food Network but I don't like Food Network's website so I tend to not get the recipes off their website. This book has some of the recipes including tomato pie.
In the introduction where Sara Moulton expresses her support for ingredients in their original state and cooking for yourself as opposed to grabbing convenience meals.
Here is what I particularly like about this book:
-the author's advice to adhere to the recipe the first time and then make adjustments in subsequent attempts; I actually need this to be expressed as I tend to veer off.
-roasting vegetables: I like this method and prefer to flavor soups with leftover baked veggies rather than sweating the veggies in butter and then adding liquid.
-using tahini with crab meat
- Plenty of the ingredients are yummy favorites but not super healthy e.g. chicken livers (slurp).
- The mushroom rolls recipe is just what I was looking for to make baked bao from my cuisinart french bread recipe.
- 450 degrees for Blasted Chicken
- The recipe of Indian Style Shepherd's Pie is the way to go with lamb leftovers: whenever we indulge in lamb chops, we always have at least two chops leftover and that's not quite enough for each person and leftover chops just aren't delicious. The only method that has worked is using the cubed chop meat in a lamb curry with both coconut milk and yoghurt. One person thought they were eating chicken and tasty chicken at that.
- I have to stock up on mustard and wine in a box.
- I agree with distinct portions for each person e.g. mini meat loaves.
- Bahamian Fish
- I have to make spaetzle!
- Mom's Brushed Eggplants
- Vanilla Sauce
Customer Rating:
Summary: Delicious Recipes with a " Wonderful Story "
Comment: From the warm and attractive picture of Sara on the front cover to the tasty recipes this cookbook brings gourmet cooking to the home chef. I tried the seared sea scallops, chicken piccata and onion soup omelets. Preparation wasn`t easy and some ingredients were a bit difficult to find but overall they turned out just great! Iam looking foward to trying more recipes. I really enjoyed how Sara connected each and every dish with family and friends. Thank you Sara for being such a good teacher! I would highly recommend this cookbook to all cooking enthusiasts!
Customer Rating:
Summary: Very good recipes, especially well suited for the home cook
Comment: As the title of her book indicates, Sara Moulton's recipes are aimed precisely at what one would want to cook at home if you enjoy cooking, have the time to spend on longer procedures, and do not wish to chase after a lot of special ingredients. In a way, that sounds like a very retro scenario, predating the current popularity of fast cooking, the renaissance of gourmet cooking of the seventies and eighties, the convenience product / soup can cooking of the fifties, and the dark days of the thirties and forties. If you ignore the cosmopolitan sources of many recipes, this a refurbished look at the kind of cooking your first generation American grandmother or great grandmother did at home.That is not to say these recipes are especially easy. Many are not. However, I have made several dishes from this book and I have gotten more personal favorites from this book than from all my Italian cookbooks combined. That doesn't mean these are the very best recipes either, but they work. When you compare Sara's recipes for chicken stock with those in `The Best Recipe', you find many differences, but I will bet on Sara's recipe or even James Beard's recipe over the `Best Recipe'.
Sara's book includes several things I love to find in a cookbook.
First, it's very chatty and informative about how she arrived at the recipe. Outside of the kitchens of Thomas Keller, Tom Colicchio, and Charlie Trotter, for example, there are probably very few genuinely new recipes being created even today. Almost all are variations on traditional classics. How many ways, for example have you seen tomato, basil, and mozarella combined. You will see at least five more variations on this very old theme on the Food Network over the next year.
Second, Sara revels in her roots, and she has very interesting roots to celebrate, as her mentors are three of the most distinguished culinary writers of the last fifty years, including Jean Anderson, Jacques Pepin, and the incomparable Julia Child, for which Sara was an assistant for many years.
Third, the book begins with a feature which should be manditory in all cookbooks. The notes on how to use this book give the meaning of a large number of common ingredients such as eggs meaning large eggs, flour meaning general purpose flour, and butter meaning unsalted butter.
The book includes a wider variety of dishes than you may find in restaurant or speciality cuisine cookbooks. It also contains a lot of classics such as crab cakes, fried green tomatoes, apple strudel, rice pudding and oven fried chicken. While these are classics, there is usually some twist to make them fresh.
I would recommend this as a very good second cookbook, after the `Joy of Cooking', `James Beard's American Cookery', or Mark Bittman's `How to Cook Everything'. The recipes will be fresher and have greater cachet by being able to announce that they are from a celebrity chef.One caveat is that this will not teach great technique, so your third book should be the excellent books on cooking technique by Jaques Pepin or James Peterson.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Not Home Cooking 101, but she is Gourmet's Exec Chef
Comment: This is a terrific cookbook and while I feel that the title might lead some to believe that the food prepared here is more basic than what is prepared on her Food TV shows, the opposite is actually true. That said, it's important to note that these recipes, while not primer-simple are still straight-forward, well written and very user friendly. Menu/accompaniment suggestions are included as well as wine suggestions and from my experience, they work beautifully together. The combination of Tarragon Chicken,Lemon Roasted Potatoes and Provencal Tomatoes is one of my personal favorites.
There is a great variety of recipes here that can be used for family meals as well as entertaining. A very "able" book - usable, doable, reasonable recipes. This one will not collect dust on a shelf.
