Whitney Miller

I liked Whitney quite a bit when she won MasterChef awhile back. I was very interested in her cookbook.

The actual cookbook is a little too frilly and girly for me. It's very sweet. A little too sweet - I stared at the picture of Game-Day Chili served in dainty teacups. With saucers. REALLY?

That being said, some of the recipes looked quite good. Whitney cooks a lot with dairy products - lots of heavy cream. I don't cook with dairy much. If I did, the Cauliflower "Mac 'n' Cheese" looked intriguing.

I did make a delicious dish called Braised Cabbage with Bacon and Onions. It was wonderful! My cabbage quarters did not stay intact, but who cared? The chicken broth made the fried cabbage taste so good. I will make that again.

I also tried the Sweet Potato Peanut Butter Blondies. I didn't have a sweet potato to mash so I used some frozen pureed butternut squash. I live at a high altitude so I decreased the sugar. That may be why it puffed up like a cake. The picture shows a much more dense dessert. It's good though, just a bit too crumbly.

So I liked this cookbook but there weren't a lot of recipes I wanted to make from it.… (plus d'informations)

This review is also available on my blog, Read Till Dawn.

Okay, so I saw this cookbook available for review and I thought it would be fun to have an excuse to try out some new recipes. I always want to cook but never have time for it, so this was meant to be my motive for actually getting my butt off the chair and into the kitchen.

Yeah, it didn't really work. I tried one recipe (the olive oil biscuits - definitely recommend!) and then handed the book off to my brother and made him cook a few of the recipes for school. I know, I'm an awesome teacher, aren't I? This is what happens when you make the sixteen-year-old her brother's Spanish teacher. It wasn't a complete waste of time for him, though: he had to translate the recipes into Spanish first and then use his copy to make the recipe. I don't think I've ever seen him so motivated to do his Spanish homework as when he was scrambling to try out that homemade white hot chocolate recipe!

All of the recipes that we tried were pretty easy - once we managed to track down the ingredients, that is. Whitney Miller may have stone-ground grits or pear juice just sitting in her pantry all the time, but we had to wait for our mom to get some. She kept forgetting when she went to the grocery store, so that significantly slowed our progress in the recipes. Assuming you actually have everything you need, though, the recipes are quick and easy (far simpler than the recipes in my beloved Harry Potter cookbook, which are delicious but ridiculously convoluted).

Now for the big question: are the dishes in the cookbook tasty? And from our experiments, I'd say it's a very strong maybe. Some of them are delicious - I don't think I've ever had such wonderful biscuits before (though to be fair, I'm not exactly a biscuit aficionado). Other recipes, though, produced rather mixed responses in our taste testers. The white hot chocolate that my brother was so excited about, and that he slaved over for half an hour on the stove, was certainly tasty but it was so rich half of us got stomachaches afterwards - including me, and I couldn't even bring myself to finish my cup, it was so rich. And this from the girl who absolutely adores white chocolate.

There are still a number of dishes I really want to try, especially the Pb&J Chicken Satays, which looks extremely delicious. There are others, though, like the Creole Succotash Salad that don't really appeal to me - they're just a little too far outside of my comfort zone. All of the recipes seem very good, though, and I think it's just a matter of what sort of food you like. I like about two-thirds of the foods in this recipe book, so I think it will be supplying me with tasty new treats to try for a long time.

Especially if I can't even manage to get myself into the kitchen more than once a month.

Disclaimer: I received a complimentary copy of this book through the BookLook Bloggers program in exchange for an honest review.… (plus d'informations)