recipes

Perfect Recipes for Having People Over
$35.00
I appreciated the variety of foods she covered and the way she laid it out time wise so that I could prepare foods ahead of the party. I also liked the the way she set it up to show what dishes could be served with other dishes at an event.

Demy Kitchen Safe Touchscreen Recipe Reader
$299.95
Upon receiving the Demy Recipe Reader, we found the product to be of good quality and an easy to use 'user interface' for looking up recipes. It's durable, very clear font for reading recipes and plenty of capacity for our recipe library.

Several downsides:

Boot up time slow: We don't leave the unit plugged in and turned on 24x7 given it wouldn't be a 'green' thing to do by wasting energy. Boot time is rather slow when you just want to 'flip' to a recipe and pull something up

Cost: $300 is steep for the level of technology. I think a more competive price for the technology would be in the $100-$125 range.

Loading Recipes: In order to load recipes into the unit, you must do this via a web-based account. So, even your existing recipes have to be entered on the web and then downloaded to the unit via a USB interface. I would've preferred to see a direct method for entering recipes into the unit.

Chocolate and Cocoa Recipes and Home Made Candy Recipes
$19.75
First published in 1909, this is a detailed, illustrated recipe book containing two works: Chocolate and Cocoa Recipes by Maria Parloa, and Home Made Candy Recipes by Janet McKenzie Hill. Janet McKenzie Hill (1852-1933) was an American author, she introduced the baked bean sandwich as a "substitute for meatless cooking."

America's Most Wanted Recipes: Delicious Recipes from Your Family's Favorite Restaurants
$15.00
I have mixed feelings about books like this, since in some ways it represents the very worst of American restaurant culture -- the dull, homogenized, served-with-a-shovel-and-fake-smile corporate casual dining world. On the one hand, the casual dining chains of today have done a masterful job of taking food that is, at best, adequate and making people feel like they're eating fancy. On the other hand, it would be foolish to claim that there's no creativity there -- yes, it's all being done in a corporate kitchen by a chef who hasn't worked a line in fifteen years, and it's often underseasoned, overfatty and oversalty, but some of these dishes are actually memorable enough to reproduce.

Todd Wilbur has trodden this road before to good effect, so it's not as if Douglas is in unfamiliar territory; he even gives a shout out to Gloria Pitzer, the patron saint of recipe cloners. And he covers quite a lot of ground, possibly (though I wouldn't put money on it) more than Todd Wilbur covers in one of his books. And in one important regard, Douglas seems to have opted for the bazaar over the cathedral in his approach, acknowledging the help of his Secret Recipes Forum, and the selection of recipes is gratifyingly wide-ranging as a result. You definitely get your money's worth of recipes for it.

There is one thing I don't like about it -- compared to its forebears, this book is rather dry. Compared to Wilbur's screwy, slightly surreal sense of humor and Pitzer's insufferably lame puns, Douglas is all business. This isn't a bad thing, but he doesn't add the technical background of, say, a Cook's Illustrated book either. Strictly business. Some people prefer that sort of thing, and I can respect that, but there's already a bit of a standard for the copycat genre, and this doesn't quite live up to it.

Not that this is a bad book; there will of course be overlap with Wilbur's and Pitzer's material, but it's got a bunch of its own stuff going for it as well. It's... adequate.