Hi everyone welcome to Le Gourmet TV, today we’re going to tackle a celebrity cookbook and not just any celebrity cookbook but the Oprah magazine cookbook.
Now, at first I thought I’m probably not going to like this, but you what, once I've got it, I looked through it, it is an absolutely great cookbook. I think that’s because Oprah has taken a step back, she writes the foreword and what she’s done and her magazine has done is pull together an incredibly diverse array of recipes and that makes this book an all-rounder. This is the kind of book that you can pull off the shelf and there are recipes inside from different regions, from different ethnic backgrounds and they’re not all presented in the same style, each chef presents their own style and I think that’s great. I think that allows you as a cookbook buyer or a cookbook owner to not get pigeon hold.
A lot of cookbooks today and I mean these cookbooks have their place. A lot of cookbooks today zero in on a specific regions or specific style of cooking, or even if they don’t do that, they’re written by one person and that persons style kind of overrides all of the recipes. In this case, that doesn’t happen. So what you have inside this book are a 175 different recipes by over 60 different chefs. Some of these chefs you’re going to know like Bobby Flay. And other people you’re not going to be too familiar with. Even as appetizer recipe from Oprah’s hairdresser is solid.
So far over the years, you’ve been buying Oprah’s magazine and you’ve been pulling the recipes out and saving them away in a file, this would be a great book for you because they’ve taken the best of the best and they presented them in one really nice slick package, everything that you would expect from a cookbook today. In the back of the book, there’s a section called what to serve, and they laid it out in a way so that, you know, they say, “When you’re really short on time, here’s a bunch of recipes that are going to work for you. If you want to make your children happy, here’s a bunch of recipes that are going to work for you.” What this allows you to do is to go to the back of the book and say I'm time starved, I’ve just come home from work, I need something quick, boom there’s 4-5 recipes or you might say I'm time starved I want to keep it simple, there’s a section when you want to keep it simple, boom a whole bunch of recipes. So it’s laid out really well.
There’s also a littler section with bio’s of the chefs and contributors. So if you don’t know who somebody is, you can go to the back, you can find out who they are. You can do a little bit more research on them, so if you really like the recipe by Patrise Clayton, you can come to the back and you can find out. He is the owner Harlem Room in New York. You can find out a little bit more about him, you can search him out. You can get one of his cookbooks if you want or you can go meet him at the Harlem Room.
I really like this cookbook because it keeps it simple and doesn’t pretend to be something that it isn’t but leads to my problem with this cookbook—sometimes the recipes are too simplistic. A recipe for a tomato sandwich, I don’t know many cooks who really need a recipe for a tomato sandwich, maybe there are people out there who do need a recipe for a tomato sandwich.
I want to be pushed a little bit, I want recipes that challenge me and those that are represented here as well and I think that’s what saves this book. So, if your out there and you see this book and see Oprah’s name and you think “Oh cookbook with a 175 recipes by Oprah Winfrey,” that’s not the case. These are really good recipes, solid recipes by solid chef’s. Oprah just ties it all together, puts it into a package that really works and gets it out there.
So to wrap it up, I think it’s a god solid three-star cookbook. Its something that most people are really going to enjoy, something that if you put it on your bookshelf you’re going to pull it off quite often because it offers such a wide range of recipes. Overall, I'm pretty happy to have this in my collection. Oprah, why don’t you come over and cook your recipe for us.
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