I have purchased this cookbook three times, and I have never lost it once. I have given it away twice; once to my good friend Tom and once to my cousin and his new wife as part of their wedding gift. I would have given it to Jen & Dave for their wedding gift, but there was some history behind giving them (her in particular) the older How to Cook Everything. That’s how much I like this cookbook.
I don’t recall where I bought it for the first time, but it was my introduction to smaller-scale cooking. An introduction I badly needed, because part of what made cooking so daunting was the copious amount of food most recipes make. While I don’t think everyone gets tired of leftovers at some point, I know most folks do. I can tolerate them for awhile, but after about three days of the same meal, I’m done. Bill likes them even less than I do. He’s not anti-leftover (though I thought he was for awhile), but the thought of repeatedly having the same thing for lunch as he did for dinner the previous night puts him off.
Yes, you can freeze things, and I even have a small, apartment-sized stand-alone freezer that I use and love (and am going to cry over when it breaks, as freezers inevitably do). Even so, sometimes your freezer is full or things don’t freeze well. Or any other number of reasons why freezing isn’t the end-all answer.
The one drawback to this cookbook, as with all “scaled-down” cookbooks I’ve cooked from so far, is that it suffers from the ballooning portion sizes we see all around us. I think it’s more noticeable in smaller cookbooks, though. I’ve definitely made a recipe “for two” that was really “for two plus two”.
I love, though, that this cookbook takes the time to lay out how much of each ingredient you need for cooking for two OR just cooking for one. As we all know from doubling recipes, sometimes you don’t double or halve everything. That makes this cookbook excellent for cooking for a date, cooking daily for you & your partner as well as cooking for “just you” when you’re on your own.
Number of recipes in this book: 200 (From the back cover)
Number we’ve made: 0
You can click the “healthy cooking for two” tag below to see all the recipes we’ve made from this book.
I am going to have to go buy that book now, if it was going to be given to us with love but was superseded when you decided to give us a different love instead! And we love that other love, so it was a totally good call and meaningful gift. Thanks again!
Seriously, though, if it’s that good, I’ll need to have a little look (even though we are extreme lovers of leftovers) and possibly pick it up, since I have no self-imposed rules about buying new cookbooks. Neener neener! 🙂
I really do like this cookbook, though it’s not as “elegant” as the other two “for two” cookbooks. Also, I find her claim that she’d never seen a photo of or heard of Martha Stewart a bit eyebrow-raising. But, you know what? It’s generally good, if not amazing food, and it’s REALLY nice to have a cookbook sized for two around.