Too many obvious recipies
925120
A cookbook for gluten free cooking should concentrate on foods that usually contain gluten. There are only a few recipies for breads and desserts.  Main dishes, vegetables and salads seldom contain gluten or sugar anyway and this cookbook has 145 pages out of 207 of these recipies.
624335
I have a family of those with celiac disease ( I do not have it) and I cook and bake for friends who have celiac disease. This struck me as a celebrity cookbook with good intentions but perhaps too ambitious. Does anyone with celiac disease get out of the MD office not knowing you can eat a salad? Or short ribs? Some of these recipes are fine but not necessary here. The breadth of recipes is too much for the book in my opinion. There is not really enough here on combining flours. I thought the information given was too vague. Also, teff and amaranth flours are dismissed wholesale here. I think that is a mistake and reduces the arsenal of useful ingredients.

I don't think this is as useful as Hasselbeck meant and that is too bad. Learning substitutions that work is really the essence of the celiac diet. There is a book in that but I don't think this is it.
4815665
I expected a less esoteric and chatty cookbook.
The ingredients are expensive and also some of them are not easy to come by. However, there are a few that used more "everyday" ingredients...a quiche and a stuffed vegetable receipe that are truely outstanding.

A lot of the book is centered on the people (friends, relatives and acquaintances) that the author met, and their relationship to a particular receipe. I'm sorry, but for me, this is a lot of blah, blah, blah.

My advice is take it out of the library, copy the recepies that you like, and don't waste your money on this book.
4764861
Some nice recipes but too many that are strange and really aren't ones the average person would even try.
1683836
Most of these recipes start with a box of cake mix.  There is not one basic yellow cake in here.  One recipe says add sparkle by dusting confectioner's sugar.  Sparkle?!  The "hacks" are well-worn advice, such as use a pastry brush to get grease into all the crannies of a pan.  There is a reasonable variety, but  bit odd, such as cakes with fruit, ice cream cake, and the flavor combination chapter has things like Red Velvet cake.  This is just not a good basic book of easy cake recipes, unless you want to start with a mix. I rarely return anything to Amazon, but this is going back.
608888
I consider myself a pretty good cook but a pretty bad chef.  While I can cook individual dishes very well, I'm not so good at creating menus.  Even with a six-burner stove, I find it hard to juggle the preparation of several things at the same time, and I frequently get confused.  So, I was excited to receive my copy of America's Test Kitchen's "Menu Cookbook", a book that appeared to be aimed directly at me.

The book consists of 51 menus -- 10 for each of the four seasons of the year plus 11 "Celebration and Holiday" menus.  Since there are 52 weeks in a year, apparently you get to take a week off.  Most of the seasonal menus serve 8 people, while the celebration menus serve 12.  Each menu contains an estimate of the amount of time each component recipe should along with pictures, drawings and descriptions.  In fact, the illustrations are a little better than ATK's previous books.

At a minimum each menu consists of an appetizer, an entre, a side and a dessert.  But, some menus are more exotic.  The "Tapas Party", for example, contains seven courses.  The recipes appear to be pulled straight from "Cook's Illustrated" and "The America's Test Kitchen Cookbook", but I haven't compared them one-for-one.  In other words, they don't appear to be simplified in any way.

And therein lies the problem. Although a rationale is presented for why each recipe works, there is no rationale for why each menu works.  How do you coordinate the cooking, presentation and consumption of simultaneous dishes?  Short of preparing some of the dishes the day before, the book offers no guidance.  There's no indication of the best order for things to be prepared.  There's no discussion of how to hold one dish hot while you're preparing another or how to avoid needing two different oven temperatures at the same time (a problem evident in the very first menu).  An integrated timeline would have been a good addition.

This feature has always been the weakness of Test Kitchen recipes.  Although magnificently optimized, they're also time-heavy, making it difficult to prepare more than one item at once.  They seem to assume you have a staff.  For example, how am I supposed to prepare a 15-ingredient entre while serving the appetizer?  Who prepares the intricately timed dessert while we all eat the entre together?  Do I ever get to sit with my guests, or should I just stay in the kitchen?

Hence, I'm left to conclude that the central premise of the book has been poorly addressed.  In spite of the jacket assertion that the book contains "...strategies that guarantee less stress", I found very few.  Maybe this information reveals itself once you start cooking, but I'm reluctant to take the risk with a room full of guests.

Addendum 3/1/2012 - I just learned that when I ordered this book, I failed to realize that I had inadvertently signed up to receive preview copies of all of ATK's future books.  I can't begin to tell you how much I object to this "Book of the Month Club" strategy.  It's cheap and below the dignity of a previously high-quality enterprise.
1864535
I like the book, but overall I'm pretty dissatisfied with many of the recipes (especially the cookies). The cook times given and the reality of how long they actually take is about 5-8 minutes different, and the carry over with the cookies is huge. Many of the recipes are just not practical for execution in a home kitchen (like the fact that you are asked to portion the cookies on to sheet pans with about 4 cookies per pan and store them in your refrigerator for an hour before baking them) something you would be able to do if you had an industrial walk in cooler in your home. Another thing that I dislike is the ingredients called for, they are either impossible to find in a regular grocery store and/or expensive. The techniques that many of the recipes call for are not those of your typical home cooks, I have a BA in culinary arts and found many of them a bit challenging when trying to make them at home. The recipes are creative and inventive, but best left to the professionals.
536344
Some recipes have an unusual combination of ingredients that I would never use together.
1144438
I have no complaints about this recipe book except that many of the recipes are very complicated and not basic.  For instance, there is no basic honey wheat bread recipe.  Every recipe has on average about 15 different ingredients, which is not very basic and makes utilizing the recipes a bit tedious when you have to hunt down ingredients, like gluten, rye flour, etc.
1133194
The ingredients in these recipes are difficult to find. Too complicated.
4756854
I really wanted to like these recipes; I mean, cupcakes are one of my favorite things.
I'm a pro with a cookbook collection of over 100 cookbooks. The recipes in this cookbook concern me for a variety of reasons.
First off, the beginning of the cookbook had some good content hidden in the wordy narrative. The history part was good. The last parts were somewhat like an overprotective mom.
The first recipe, Snickerdoodle cupcakes, says it's for 6-8 (given the ingredients would make 7-8 cups of batter, that has to be wrong) cupcakes and calls for 1 whole cup of butter! Although this recipe calls for only stevia, in many of the recipes in this book it calls for stevia and sugar, odd. Also stevia seems to be the author's sweetener of choice. The egg measurements are often in cups?  This same first recipe calls for 1 cup of eggs-that's 6 eggs; then again, you'd need that many eggs to make that much butter rise.
On to frosting, the author allocates 1/4 cup frosting per cupcake. The Simple Vanilla Frosting has1 cup of butter,  2 1/2 cups powdered sugar and 1 tablespoon vanilla extract-for 12 cupcakes that's more than 1 tablespoon of butter per cupcake; not to mention that's a lot of vanilla for that amount of frosting. Let's guesstimate the Snickerdoodle cupcake recipe actually makes 12 cupcakes, if you first them with the recommended amount of Simple Vanilla frosting, that's almost 3 tablespoons of butter per cupcake!
All in all, there are many cupcake cookbooks out there, get one of them. To be honest (me), I'm not sure the author even tested these recipes.
3228703
Some of the recipes are good, but some have obviously not been tested carefully enough.  I just did the Moroccan Chicken with Cauliflower and Cashews--it *smelled* wonderful, but it was bland as dog food.  Six cups of cooking liquid that go down the drain will wash away all the garam masala, and waste the pomegranate molasses (a fairly expensive product to waste).  The sweet potato burgers sound better than they are--turned into nasty messes in the pan.  The Gingered Chicken with Cashews, Carrots, Raisins and Scallions is delicious--except it has a lot of kale and not a single raisin.

Who proofread this thing?
4059045
The Mad Genius Tips is sort of a combination recipe book and multi-tasking handbook. I instantly cringe when I see the word "hacks" to describe using an object in a way that it wasn't originally intended, but to be quite honest, Justin Chapple does come up with some ideas for various items - like using a bundt pan as a substitute for a 'beer can chicken' cooker - that I would never have thought of. Other 'hacks' are pretty generic and very clickbait in nature, such as grating breadcrumbs into a ziploc so they don't go everywhere, or making a frosting bag for pouring pancakes. If you're a big Alton Brown fan, many of these hacks will seem recycled to you.

There's quite a few interesting alternative uses listed in this book, and this might be a good cooking book option for that friend who loves Pintrest projects. There's a little bit here and there for the serious at home cook, but probably not a volume you'll reach for often.
4525204
I agree with what many other reviewers have said here - that the recipes are too complicated and don't even appear all that appetizing. As I pages through the book I saw maybe 5 -7 recipes I wanted to try. I don't expect to love every single recipe but that is too few.
I will admit I felt forewarned that this book might not be for me. Before it was published the author clearly announced that it was meant for people who wanted fancier meals, were willing to spend a little more effort in the kitchen.
But I'm begging you Melissa - please put out another book with more recipes like the ones in the original Whole 30 book! :-)
1942525
Difficult to figure out how to add own recipes instructions not clear on how to add more than a few ingredients for one part of a recipe
3505538
Lots of great food ideas in here. However, some of the instructions are a bit vague and there are several recipes with more than five ingredients. So far, two of the five recipes have flopped, one being the fudge (they said to microwave instead of boil which caused the fudge to come out more like pudding) and the raspberry chicken (the sauce hardened like candy only seconds after being cooled). I am by no stretch of the imagination a cook, however I can follow instructions very well. I fault my lack of knowledge via food partly and the cookbook instructions a little more heavily. Better if you have a strong base of culinary knowledge before getting this.
4809674
I was a little disappointed. I went through the book and it seems to be for more advanced cooks. Majority of hte receipes call for a LOT of ingredients. I do have a nice variety of Middle Eastern Markets in my area but most of the dishes would be quite pricey to make because of the ingredients. Lots of spices not available in the local supermarket. Just looking through I saw one receipe that called for chicken hearts and livers, they use a spice called Baharat a lot which you can buy or make yourself and another ingredient I saw more than once was Baharat Spice ?  Not for the typical Americna like myself. The book has beautiful pictures of the food but I am positive it would not even look close to the photo if I made it. Interesting sounding receipes though like , Burnt Eggplant and Mograbieh Soup,Lamb stuffed Quince with Pomegranate and Cilantro and Wheat Berries and Swiss Chard with Pomegranate Molasses. So this definitely is not a book for someone new in the kitchen or new to Middle Eastern Food.