Product Description

From scratch dishes ready to serve in under an hour and many in less than 30 minutes Winner of the 2004 James Beard Cookbook Award The Quick Recipe offers 300 exhaustively tested real recipes for real food, all with contemporary flavours from around the world. There are chapters on appetizers, salads, vegetables, grains and beans, pasta and noodles, soups, poultry, meat, fish and shellfish, grilling, stir-frying, eggs, biscuits, cakes and cookies, fruit desserts, ice cream and puddings.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #322625 in Books
• Published on: 2003-04-01
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 454 pages

About the Author
Founded in 1980, Cook's Illustrated has emerged as 'America's Test Kitchen', renowned for its near obsessive dedication to finding the best methods of home cooking. The editors of Cook's Illustrated are also the authors of the range of best-selling cookbooks and they present America's Test Kitchen cooking show on public broadcast TV. The show features editors, test cooks, equipment testers and food tasters and has its own web site www americastestkitchen.com

Customer Reviews

Very good book from Cook's Illustrated team.
I understand where another reviewer got confused: you might assume that this book would consist of quick little recipes--fast reading and fast prep. For the Cook's staff these are quick recipes, but compared to the recent success of Rachael Ray's books these recipes aren't that quick!

I should say that I really like this collection. I turn to it often for ideas. I may have spent half a day preparing an entree only to remember that I forgot to prepare a vegetable--out comes the book! The same goes for starches, salads, dessert, etc. If I need an idea fast I pull out this book along with Joy of Cooking and possibly Bittman (though don't get me started on his shortcomings).

Let me remind potential consumers here that this is indeed a collection. You will see overlap if you have read the magazine for years. Though, strangely, they will update certain things in the book without making that crystal clear to magazine subscribers. In other words, you may think that Cook's favors a certain brand of unsalted butter based on magazine reviews. In the book you may find that they have switched brands on you!

Here are a few recipes I have tried that work:
Chinese chicken salad
Broiled asparagus
Glazed carrots
Warm spinach salad
Roasted potatoes (memorize this one)
Pan-seared salmon (high heat saute of fish will smell up your pan and your kitchen)
Quick chicken noodle soup
Stuffed chicken breasts
All forms of stir-fry
Cinnamon rolls
There are others I have tried, but suffice it to say that I really use this book. If you have an expanded definition of "quick," and you respect the Cook's Illustrated methods then you will find this to be one of their better tomes.

More goodness from Cook's Illustrated
If you aren't already familiar with Cook's Illustrated or the Best Recipe series, and you realize that cooking involves more than a microwave, you absolutely need to get familiar with both. The combination of real-world cooking, detailed research, clear goals, and well designed recipes makes any of the series (or magazine) well worth seeking out.

In The Quick Recipe, the focus is on dishes that can be made from start to finish in 30-60 minutes. My mouth was watering going through this book for the first time, you'd be amazed at what Cook's has managed to keep under the hour mark, without resorting to low quality short-cuts... Even Jambalaya appears in this volume!

Great for time-challenged novice chefs
We've had this cookbook for about one month and have made 21 recipes (several twice) already and look forward to making more. We have 17 cookbooks -- which hardly qualify us as devotee chefs -- but this is the one we reach for most often. Most of the dishes we've made come close to an hour to prepare and cook, which undoubtedly will make the term "Quick Recipes" debatable to some. But if you start with good ingredients that are well laid out and are fairly adept at chopping and slicing (which we are not) you should at least come close to the times listed for making each dish (it takes us about 15% - 20% longer than expected). Nevertheless, for the time-challenged, these recipes are certainly quicker than many we've used from our other cookbooks. And if your guest's reactions are as favorable as ours, it's well worth the time. Most of the recipes are fairly simple in structure but surprisingly tasty. Certainly for those new to the kitchen, serious consideration should be given to this cookbook. Explanations of why each recipe was formulated the way it was are interesting and may help some to avoid possible less-tasty or more time-consuming substitutions.