Something's Cooking
Book Review: "Everyday Cooking for Beginners"
Satyajeet Salgar, '07
Issue date: 11/30/06 Section: Humor
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I've always wanted to do a book review for ChiBus, mainly because that way I'd get around to actually reading a book that wasn't a required text. Oh, I've never read any of those? So make that reading a book period. But the book I wasn't expecting to read was "Everyday Cooking for Beginners" by Vineeth Subramanyam, '07. What started as a request by a friend, turned out to be a very enjoyable, informative, and some people are now hoping, ultimately actionable journey.
"Everyday Cooking" is a cookbook for, well, beginners, and a good one at that. But the title is deceptive. It's much more than just a cookbook. It starts out as a call to enter the kitchen, convincing you why you should be cooking, telling you how to prepare for it, how to actually get yourself to enjoy it, how to sound like you know what you're doing and finally how to cook successfully.
Vineeth, who developed a passion for cooking as a teenager, draws on his own experiences and frustration at not having a systematic guide to help with learning to cook. In the first part of the book, the reader learns not only the benefits of cooking, she learns about the necessary tools (every utensil is lovingly explained and covered), the necessary (how to handle the confusing world of grocers, and online grocers, for the very first time) and has the basic cooking practices and methodologies (seriously!) explained.
The cookbook section itself provides a range of recipes from breakfast food to soups to wraps to more traditional fare. He goes over Indian, Italian and Chinese cuisines, with plenty of vegetarian options. Since Vineeth, is after all an MBA student, he even gives you a framework (matrix and everything) to think about the food you are going to prepare and how to prepare it. I think I'm going to be ambitious and try to work my way to "Chicken Yakishoba" sometime next quarter.
Stylistically the writing is engaging, but crisp and the book is extremely well-organized. My favorite little tweak to the book was the really pithy "take-aways" at the end of each chapter. Even the recipes are conveniently annotated with difficulty levels and estimated time to completion.
So if you want to start cooking, or think it's something you want think about, or even just know someone who does, you now know a resource that would help. The book is available from Amazon ($12.95), as well as online at www.lulu.com ($11.95, $5.02 for the electronic version), and to get the author to sign it, Vineeth will be happy to oblige if you drop the book in his mail-folder.
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"Everyday Cooking" is a cookbook for, well, beginners, and a good one at that. But the title is deceptive. It's much more than just a cookbook. It starts out as a call to enter the kitchen, convincing you why you should be cooking, telling you how to prepare for it, how to actually get yourself to enjoy it, how to sound like you know what you're doing and finally how to cook successfully.
Vineeth, who developed a passion for cooking as a teenager, draws on his own experiences and frustration at not having a systematic guide to help with learning to cook. In the first part of the book, the reader learns not only the benefits of cooking, she learns about the necessary tools (every utensil is lovingly explained and covered), the necessary (how to handle the confusing world of grocers, and online grocers, for the very first time) and has the basic cooking practices and methodologies (seriously!) explained.
The cookbook section itself provides a range of recipes from breakfast food to soups to wraps to more traditional fare. He goes over Indian, Italian and Chinese cuisines, with plenty of vegetarian options. Since Vineeth, is after all an MBA student, he even gives you a framework (matrix and everything) to think about the food you are going to prepare and how to prepare it. I think I'm going to be ambitious and try to work my way to "Chicken Yakishoba" sometime next quarter.
Stylistically the writing is engaging, but crisp and the book is extremely well-organized. My favorite little tweak to the book was the really pithy "take-aways" at the end of each chapter. Even the recipes are conveniently annotated with difficulty levels and estimated time to completion.
So if you want to start cooking, or think it's something you want think about, or even just know someone who does, you now know a resource that would help. The book is available from Amazon ($12.95), as well as online at www.lulu.com ($11.95, $5.02 for the electronic version), and to get the author to sign it, Vineeth will be happy to oblige if you drop the book in his mail-folder.
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