Mary Beth Lind

This is one of our top go-to cookbooks. I found it at the Ten Thousand Villages in Champaign and picked it up because of the focus on eating seasonally. The recipes are divided by season, with a handy list of that season's foods at the beginning of each section. The layout of the recipes is very nice -- the ingredients are in bold, in order of what gets used first, and the relevant instructions come immediately after them. There are plenty of recipes for both vegetarians and meat-eaters. The only downside of this cookbook is that the recipes are collected from lots of different families, and the editors didn't clean them up as much as they should have. So, for example, you'll get a recipe that just calls for 2 cups of beans but no indication of whether these are canned, baked, dried, or what. If I was a more experienced cook, the distinctions might be obvious but for us beginners, a little more description would go a long way. Even with that, I still give the book five stars since it has proven so helpful and reliable. We're even making soups - a section I usually don't even look at in other books since they sound like too much work. Highly recommended!… (más)