Sunny Days Taco Nights by Enrique Olvera
I love tacos and Mexican food. My favorite summer snack is homemade salsa. So, I'm always checking out taco/Mexican cookbooks to get new ideas. This one was a huge disappointment. I've never seen LESS appealing taco photos - like NONE of them looked good. Several were like a tortilla with a huge slab of some kind of meat on it. Surely that's not how you're expected to eat it? So why not show what it looks like with either cut or shredded meat and some toppings? It was just a disappointment overall.
Grow Cook Eat: a food lover's guide to vegetable gardening by Willi Galloway
This is a unique half gardening half cookbook. The first 40 pages cover gardening basics - planning your space, creating good soil, planting, etc. Then the rest of the book is divided into types of plants - herbs, greens, legumes, squash, cabbage family, roots, warm-season vegetables, and fruit. Each section covers specific plants and tips for growing and then a recipe for that plant/veggie. There was a lot of good information but I do wish there were more recipes, one per plant/veggie just didn't seem like enough. But I think this would be a good book for a beginner gardener to help decide what to grow.
The Cook and the Gardener by Amanda Hesser
An American cook is working for a year in a French chateau and befriends a curmudgeonly French gardener. While the premise sounds great, I was expecting a cookbook. This was like half memoir/story of her time working as a chef at this French chateau and how she becomes friends with the older French gardener and his wife. I would read that book if it was published as food/gardening memoir/nonfiction book. But a cookbook with not one picture or photo of the recipes? No thanks. In the future, maybe I'll revisit when I have time to read all of the writing around the recipes. I also agree with one review I read that said it had a know-it-all vibe too. I haven't read any of her other books and after this one I'm not inspired to.
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