Cooking Beyond Measure: How to Eat Well without Formal Recipes

By Jean Johnson

This title is about the simple, healthy, thrifty, green kitchen-but it takes this timely message one step further: There are no measurements or prescriptive directions. This is a cookbook that's more... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0981527108
• ISBN13: 9780981527109
• Release Date: August 2008
• Publisher: Seventy-Sixth Avenue Press
• Length: 209 Pages
• Weight: 1.23 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 7.0" x 8.2"

Customer Reviews

Good recipes, needs better layout

Good recipes for food combinations, but I have two problems with the book as written. 1. The recipes are written in paragraph format, which is fine, but they could have and should have been written with the ingredients highlighted or in bold face type, or on a separate list, so that you can easily look through the recipe to see if you have the ingredients at home. As written, you almost have to rewrite the recipes to be able to use them quickly, and who has time for that? 2. Often you'd have a recipe, broken up with commentary, that has variations of the recipe afterwards. Again, the recipes and variations should be together, on the same or facing pages. I hope these shortcomings are fixed in a future edition. I don't mind writing in a cookbook occasionally, but this one practically requires at the very least that you go through and highlight ingredients, or go through and put the recipes (or formulas, or whatever you'd like to call them) on recipe cards for ease of use. Also, there is more commentary than there are recipes. Borrow from the library first. The opinions against recipes, well, for many things you don't need a recipe, true, unless you want to replicate the dish for uniformity standards (yours or someone else's). Nothing wrong with that.

The point of this cookbook is you don't need a recipe!

This book is written to reacquaint the cook with "cooking to taste" instead of measuring every last ingredient. You know, the way our grandmothers and their mothers cooked? Why, you ask? Because a lot of us are tired of recipes calling for expensive and/or exotic ingredients and trying to master the myriad cuisines of the world. We constantly let our minds and tastes be tempted with delicacies in an effort to educate our palates while expanding our waistlines. Our time is more valuable than ever. We arrive home too tired to cook so we open a package, throw it in the microwave 3 minutes, plunk it on the table - viola', dinner! Then we go to a restaurant or prepare elaborate menus on the weekend to make up for having eaten processed foods the other five nights of the week. No wonder the average metabolism is whacked! Particularly in these poor economic times quite a lot of us want to shop and cook from natural foods stocked on the perimeter of the grocery store that will give us more nutritional bang for our buck. Having the author encourage us to do so is helpful in building the confidence to ... make a soup with fresh foods on hand without using precious time and gasoline to run to the store for a missing ingredient ... experiment with favorite flavors without having a renowned chef directing us with a recipe ... discover adventure in our cooking by combining healthful foods. It may seem elementary to instruct people how to "just let go in the kitchen" but several generations have become increasingly dependent on high-calorie, highly processed ingredients and will stand there looking at a parsnip in the palm of our hand as if it were extraterrestrial. Perhaps this book helps those individuals to take the leap of faith that simple food preparation will taste good as well as be a wise nutritional choice. If the book changes perceptions in a healthy way, it has accomplished it's mission. When I wanted a snack as a child I walked to the garden, pulled up a radish or carrot, washed it off with the hose and relished the fresh flavors in the outdoors. This book can alter the way we think about food and the way we experience nourishment. I'm for anything that will aid positive change in the way America eats so I highly recommend this book.