Product Description

This sturdy kitchen organizer is the perfect companion for any home cook-and essential for fans of Alton Brown's I'm Just Here For the Food.

Designed to be a constant kitchen companion, the Kitchen User's Manual has eight separate sections for your recipes, notes, and other cooking essentials. Each section includes a durable full-page plastic pocket to hold clippings, equipment manuals and warranties, and other kitchen paperwork.

Blank pages have plenty of space for clippings or handwritten recipes-plus notes on the side. And it's the place for all that cooking information that's rarely gathered in one place: temperature and measurement conversion charts, ingredient substitutions, guides to cuts of meat, cutting and carving diagrams, sanitation and safety information, and much more.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #139291 in Books
• Published on: 2003-10-01
• Original language: English
• Binding: Ring-bound
• 160 pages

About the Author
Alton Brown is the host of the Food Network's Good Eats. He began his TV career as a cameraman and commercial director, but when e wasn't shooting he was cooking and watching cooking shows, which he thought were dull and uninformative. Tired of the griping, Brown's wife, DeAnna, suggested they do something about it. They moved to Vermont, where Brown attended the New England Culinary Institute. During the years that followed, he concocted a new kind of food show, one that blends wit with wisdom, history with pop culture, and science with common cooking sense. Alton and DeAnna live in the southern United States with their daughter, Zoey, "one worthless hound dog," and an iguana named Spike.

Customer Reviews

Disappointed
Unfortunately, this "book" is basically just a ring-binder with blank pages and pockets for your own recipes.
I was expecting an Alton cookbook - with his Good Eats recipes & pictures. I was NOT expecting a ringbinder filled with blank pages, and a few pages with information such as oven temperature conversions. Perhaps I misread the Amazon description.
If you're looking for an actual Alton Cookbook, get his "I'm Just Here for the Food: Food + Heat = Cooking" book instead. If you're looking for an overpriced repository for your own handwritten recipes & notes, buy this.

Like his show, a great starting point
Alton Brown's Food Network TV show, Good Eats, is one of the most educational shows on cooking that I have seen. He likes to explain how and why things work. I love both the pedantry and the humor of his show (although I have heard others who dislike the child-like approach he takes; not childish! Child-like. There's a big difference.)

As my title says, his show is a good starting point. Alton Brown can help you understand how food and cooking work. He provides good solid information and he lays a foundation that gives you the confidence to invent your own food. ("Play with your food!"). But he cannot, in a half hour show that includes comedy sketches, teach you everything. His book, "I'm Just Here for the Food: Food + Heat = Cooking" is much the same. He presents good basic information on cooking methods and techniques in a book with catchy graphics and his typical humor. If you want to learn the WHYs of cooking, this book is a great start. From here, move on to Shirley Corriher's "Cookwise," which gives greater depth a slightly more serious science.

I *love* this book. But here are the negatives: 1) Not a cookbook. Don't look for a lot of recipies. 2) Not loose or spiral bound. All cooking books should be, and too few are. 3) Covers all major cooking methods (from boiling to microwaving), but no baking! Baking is my main hobby. Maybe a future book -- "Cookwise" has baking info.

Alton Brown singlehandedly changed me from a recipie slave to a creative cook. I've moved on to other food writers, and I've invented my own food, but Alton will always be my kitchen hero.

Do Not Buy This Book Without Looking at a Copy!
In many ways, this is the book I expected to find when I looked at AB's Cook's Notes volume, but there are still many reasons to warn potential buyers to look before they leap. In my opinion, the book looses one star for costing 22 bucks for about 12 dollars worth of material, most of which can be found in other sources. The book looses a second star for not filling my expectations for completeness of the material. The table of substitutions, for example, did not have the first three things I looked for, that being buttermilk (!!!), creme fraiche, and Aleppo pepper. I may forgive the last, even though it does appear as a common ingredient in at least three recent cookbooks, but no BUTTERMILK. At least two culinary reference books in my library have substitutions for buttermilk and creme fraiche, not including the Larousse Gastronomique. The book looses a third star for, like the Cooks Notes volume, not being loose leaf bound. The book lost a few points for me when the generally very good diagrams of meat cuts from cows, pigs, and sheep did not include any reference to what Mario Batali calls the fifth quarter, being things like heart, liver, kidneys, sweet breads and (my favorite) guanciale. I have this fantasy that the only thing keeping AB from having his picture on the cover of Gourmet magazine is that he has not, like Mario, done a show on guanciale (pig's jowls). Unlike the Cooks Notes volume, I would not dismiss this volume totally. If you the prospective buyer have no other culinary reference and are inclined to own everything you can with AB's name on it, then I would not want to stop you. But please page through it before laying down your 23 bucks! Otherwise, save your money for a more complete volume such as the Williams Sonama 'Kitchen Companion' volume.