Best book on Trinidadian cooking
589291
Growing up in trinidad and tobago is a unique experience and the foods there are definitely #1 compared to a lot of other islands. When I first moved to the USA, I was not all that concerned with trying to find the foods since there was a place for roti near our house, and you can find most of those ingredients in Miami. It was not until after college when i moved to the Northwest States that I felt "homesick" for dahlpuri and callaloo and other such things. I have purchased and tested several books that are a generalized Caribbean cookbook, as well as hunted down the Naparima Girls Guide to Cooking. It was not until I found Sweet Hands and read through it that I found what I needed.

The pictures of Trinidad and the stories bring that element of history and home and passion to the recipes. And I LOVE that she offers substitutions for some of the ingredients. I made a callaloo stew with swiss chard and spinach as suggested, and while the taste was slightly less sweet, it carried such a good flavour that I felt I was home again. Those other cookbooks maybe going to the second hand store.
4699741
Charmaine Solomon has written a wonderful book for all those interested in  the flavours and tastes of Thai cuisine. Charmaine, now a long time  resident of Sydney which boasts thousands of Thai restaurants, de-mystifies  many of the staples of Thai cuisine. She easily conveys how to make a green  curry paste from scratch, how to get the perfect textured fish cake and how  to make a wonderful pepper and coriander marinade for chicken.
The only  downside to the paperback version of this book compared to the hardback  version is the lack of colour photos. I have tried many of the recipes and  found her writing style easy to follow and her instructions concise and  clear. Charmaine also adds cultural and historical notes to round out the  full picture of this great cuisine. I have had the pleasure of attending a  Thai cooking class conducted by Charmaine and her husband Rueben. The book  is filled with the same infectious love for cooking Asian food as her class  was.
1867698
What a great reference source for recipes of the Puerto Rican cusine.  Easy to follow and delectable to eat.  Wish he had more and/or collections to buy.
4924150
Su-Mei Yu's book is tasty and yet informative.  Not knowing a lot about Thai culture, I found the chapters breaking down the origins of the food to be most interesting.  In one instance she gives a synopsis of how important the coconut is to the Thais but also explains how to prepare the coconut so you will be able to prepare the food authentic Thai-style. The instructions on how to prepare the food are very concise and simple.
Most of the recipes are from scratch, which means if you have limited time, it is not the cookbook for you (on avg it takes me 2 hrs to create one dish including the chopping/pounding of the curries and cooking time).  All the curries/chile waters/pad thai involve many ingredients, so unless you have a strong interest in Asian cooking, it might not be worthwhile to purchase the book for one recipe.  For example, she talks about creating tamarind juice from soaking tamarind pulp in water and advises against short-cuts such as pre-processed tamarind juice.  Unless you have other recipes you want to use this ingredient for, its going to sit in your cupboard.  I also found that the recipes call for a huge amount of spicy chiles, so cut down on it if you can't handle the heat.
Also, there are a minimal amount of pictures in the book, if you don't have any idea what certain ingredients look like or haven't had exposure to Thai food, you might have a hard time figuring out what the dishes are supposed to look like.  Pictures of the ingredients would be very helpful as well.
Overall, the book is one of my favourites.  Well written and entertaining, it is a cookbook for serious (and patient) cooks. The recipes are delicious and the flavours are complex. But for beginners of Asian cooking or for people on the go, you might want to try something simpler.
1384353
This book truelly accomplishes the West African style, specifically Nigerian style, of cooking. My husband and I have enjoyed cooking many of these recipes. I highly recommend this book for anyone wanting to experience true west african cooking.
1418429
This book is FABULOUS.  Most ingredients are easy to come by.  The cooking methods are appealing to me, and nothing is very complicated.  I have tried several recipes from it and have not found one that is not top notch!  I cannot recommend it enough to anyone who likes to eat Indian food.  Alamelu knows her stuff!
4301264
One of the best cookbooks I've gotten my hands on. Its amazing how the author captures many of the flavors of the most populous continent in one book. I can vouch for the authenticity of recipes in different Sections of this Cookbook. Tom Holden's advice for substituting hard-to-find ingredients is extremely useful, as are the explanations of foods in the glossary. I highly recommend Tom Holden's book to anyone wishing to expand their cooking repertoire.
2784362
Thai food has been around in Sydney for a long while, but as the cuisine becomes more popular, the food becomes more standardised until standard Sydney Thai-fare becomes much-of -a muchness.

This is a fabulous book because it truly breaks the mould of bulk standard Australianised Thai cuisine.  Tom's recipes are of two types Firstly, recipes that I would never have thought of making.  These include some Fish salad,geng gars curry, spice roast poussin with lemongrass and hot and sour green mango salad.  Secondly, there's the old favourites; prawn noodle salad, sesame seed tuna and satay.  But each of the latter recipes is kept simple but with that extra bit of innovation that gives the dish an interesting flavour.

I wholeheartedly recommend this book.
4880971
One of my favorite cookbooks in my international collection. Naomi has put together *the* best English language cookbook on Burmese cooking. And it's so much more than just a cookbook, as she weaves in stories of Burmese culture and her travelogue throughout the pages. This is a book that fun to read from beginning to end, before you ever sit down to make any of the recipes. When you do get to making them, you won't be disappointed. Everything I've tried here has been fantastic. Most recently, I made a late summer supper pairing of lemongrass chicken soup and shrimp salad (with the addition of fresh tomatoes from my garden). It was very well received. This is an essential cookbook on southeast Asian cuisine to add to your collection.
3462223
excellent book. They have curries for all the different spices and pork,chicken, seafood etc. The book is packed with good information. I made a spicy potato with spinach receipe that was out of this world as well as a shrimp recipe with crushed cashew nuts. Book is very thoroughly written and easy to follow recipes.
3300488
At last, I can find now an excellent African cookbook on Amazon! The recipes I have tried are very tasty, and I cannot wait to eat more of  Ms Sabina Jules's menus. I can live on her foods all year long. I like the step by step intructions as well as the pictorial displays.  She shows how good cooking is an act of love, joyful and rewarding to the palate. Besides, the foods and ingredients are nutritious.  This cookbook is a must for us African food lovers, with delicately balanced blends.  This is a "tour de force", a real masterpiece. I give it the highest rating.
2494838
I would like to give not five, but ten stars to Cocine Conmigo cookbook by Dora Romano.  Best Puerto Rican cuisine cookbook ever.  It's very easy to learn how to cook with this book and most of all simple.  I learned how to cook delicious Puerto Rican dishes 35 years ago with one of the first editions of this book (the red cover).  I purchased the Vigesima Edicion, Spanish as a gift for my son who loves to learn the best recipes from the country he was born and which he loves.  Excellent gift idea.
p.s. My son is already an expert with the 'Tembleque' recipe from Dora's book.  I think I'll buy the newest edition for my collection.
1474496
I love this book.  Not only does if contain GREAT recipes, the discussion of techniques are very accessible.  I love the conversational tone of the writing.  If you are a Top Chef fan, you recognize Tom's speaking style.  Short direct sentences.  I like the tips that you would only get by experience or standing at a cook's elbow -- such as knowing when oil is hot and why high heat is really not your friend.  I make his version of roasted chicken several times every month; it is so easy and so tasty.  I like this book so much I bought tow, one to use in the kitchen (splattered with oil and garlic) and one for my bookshelf.
948073
`Tapas, the Little Dishes of Spain' by noted Spanish cookbook specialist Penelope Casas is one of my very favorite types of books which Ms. Casas has brought off with great success. It is part of his great influence on American culinary writing that even this recent book written after the death of Craig Claiborne, still shows his fingerprints as a major influence on Ms. Casas actually producing the book.

This is only the second book on Spanish cuisine I have reviewed, and it is clearly more valuable than the first, `My Kitchen in Spain' by Janet Mendel. While both Casas and Mendel know Spanish cuisine as well as anyone writing in English, Casas is a bit more of the scholar which shows in her deeper background information on the nature and origins of `Tapas' and the great variety of Spanish tapas bars in Spain. This variety should be no surprise to someone familiar with the Italian food scene, as it closely parallels the variety of `restaurante', `trattoria', `osteria', and `enoteca' in Italy. The book also benefits, I'm sure, from the firm hand of the `El Suprimo' of cookbook editors, Janet Jones.

A quick look at the book gives one the sense that it is a no nonsense collection of recipes with few frills and an emphasis on number of recipes rather than on the quality of recipe writing. This is a mistaken impression. The very first thing I did was to compare Ms. Casas' recipe for the tapas poster child, `Tortilla a la Espanola' with that in Ms. Mendel's book (which I have just finished making) and find that Ms. Casas' description is virtually identical to Ms. Mendel's with the added touch of suggesting to interleave sliced onions with the potatoes rather than just sprinkling in chopped onions. This simple change is eminently in keeping with the consistency you want, where you don't want the potato slices to stick together to create an undifferentiated mass of potato. Ms. Casas also adds a mini-recipe for a tomato sauce to the Tortilla, something I have seen with no other recipe for this dish. But then, I give credit back to Ms. Mendel for largely duplicating a recipe from a book that specializes in Tapas recipes.

Aside from the quality of the recipes, the large number of recipes, and the very informative introduction to the subject, the next best thing about the book is the organization of recipes into chapters that most easily distinguish styles of preparation and presentation. The chapters are:

Tapas in sauce

Marinades, Pates, Salads, and Other Cold Tapas

Tapas with Bread or Pastry

Tapas with Some Last Minute Preparation

I'm tempted to say that this organization could be have been taken one or two steps further. It would not have been hard to imagine all the frittata styled dishes to be in a separate chapter. The author warns us to not serve too many similar tapas at one party. For example, don't do too many bread based tapas at one time. This (and tapas in general) remind me of Thomas Keller's rationale behind small servings. He argues that the first bite impresses, the second bite verifies that the first was not a fluke, and with the third bite, boredom starts to set in. One could easily apply the same logic to using tapas as the basis for an entire meal. Otherwise, even if tapas are served in their usual role as a supplement to sipping sherry or other afternoon drink, they should still be kept small so as to not blunt the appetite for supper.

This book is an excellent supplement to Clifford A. Wright's `Little Foods of the Mediterranean', Joyce Goldstein's book `Enoteca', Anissa Helou's `Mediterranean Street Food', Diane Kochilas' `Meze' and Carol Field's `Italy in Small Bites'.

Highly recommended.
1360197
This is an excellent book for experienced and novice cooks. It explains the principles of Indian cookery lucidly and then translates those principles into easy-to-understand recipes for a wide range of dishes. Of the several cookery books written by Madhur Jaffrey this is the most sound and the most instructive. It succeeds in explaining Indian cookery in straightforward but stimulating terms and in helping the reader to avoid the most common error - that of making all Indian dishes look and taste alike. The principles learned are valuable both for Indian and for many other genres of cooking.
125737
I have worn out this cookbook!  I absolutely love it!  I learned how to make ghee, parathas, curry powder, garam masala, paneer, chipatees and indian fudge (burfi).
It has many delicious recipes. Everything from rice to beens to koftas!  Wonderful!  I've only come across a couple that were bland for my taste.  By far one of the best books on Indian cooking there is.  My copy is worn and dirty. I only wish they would have made it spiral bound instead with coated pages.
3324309
This is a great cookbook. For years I have wanted to know how my mom made some Puerto Rican dishes and this cookbook offers it all. It has great instructions and pictures throughout. A great buy.