Title: The Pampered Chef Season’s Best Recipe Collection Fall-Winter 2002
Author: Doris Christopher
Publisher: Pampered Chef
Date: 2002
ISBN: none
Length: 32 pages
Quote: “Once you taste the results of our recipes, you might want to host a Kitchen Show.”
Why do people buy “books” that are written entirely to market things—in this case, pricey cooking utensils? Often these books are packed with the utensils. Somebody apparently gave this little cookbook to a friend for Christmas, before it reached me. Apart from the holiday message hand-written inside the front cover the book is in good condition.
The recipes? Not my kind. Though some of them are dairy-free they’re all “cheesy” in the sense of “extravagant to the point of vulgarity.” Though some do mention fruits, nuts, or vegetables they all use a lot of prepackaged junkfood—refrigerated dough, dry soup mix, pre-packaged cookies, pre-packaged candy, instant pudding mix, canned pie filling, cake mix, prepackaged “toppings,” all those “time savers” to free up more time for more elaborate visual effects with more chemicals added to them. Some of those visual effects can be reproduced with the utensils you already have; some cannot.
If “trendy and spendy” is your cooking style, or if you want a demonstration that the 1980s yuppie beat goes on for your cookbook collection, you will love this book. It explains how to create pre-mixed sandwiches by tucking the fillings inside the loaves of bread, then twisting two long thin loaves together on the baking sheet, er, stone. It gives several recipes for eccentric, trendy confections inspired by pizza. It’s awful, and if you’re thinking “That sounds like a book for my mother-in-law, or for the lady whose son I’m glad I dumped if only because now I’ll never have her for a mother-in-law,” see me.
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