Weekend Cooking

This book is a must have for everyone that loves great tasting food that doesn't take forever to get on the table! I love Jennifer's recipes and my family does too. What an asset to the culinary arts!

I was delighted with this book. The format is contemporary and easy to use. The recipes are interesting and extremely delicious. Last weekend I made the Cinnamon coffee cake, the marinated shrimp and the chipotle glazed short ribs to rave reviews from family and friends. The book is loaded with recipes I cannot wait to try. I bought Jennifers first book and cooked almost every receipe in it. Her food is really wonderful and I have great sucess with these recipes. I highly recommend it, for busy families who want to eat well!

I had the good fortune of taking a class with Jennifer based on this book. Everything starts with filling your pantry, as she directs in the beginning, and the rest is easy! The recipes are GREAT (shrimp and white bean sage chili, short ribs, ice cream cake roll and Mom's fruit pizza are "must-makes") and not very time consuming. Jennifer's enthusiasm comes through in her great commentaries and explanations. Definitely buy this cookbook - you WILL use it!

`Weekend Cooking' by cooking teacher and writer, Jennifer Bushman, is one of a series of books set up under the rubric of `Kitchen Coach'. This is the kind of book which is most useful to a non-foodie who may have no more than a dog-eared copy of `The Joy of Cooking' and her church's fund raising cookbook in her kitchen. To someone with a collection of twenty or more cookbooks, this book will be a waste of space and money, since such serious or semiserious Food Network addicts will probably know most of the support material in this book already, and they will have more than enough books to supply them with good recipes when they have the time to cook something special. The `Weekend Cooking' notion of the title is just a bit misleading. The book is actually oriented towards the niches in people's lives where they have a little extra time and inclination to cook something special for some special event. While these situations most commonly happen on the weekend, the book actually has a broader appeal. Unlike some other books which tout the weekend as an opportunity to cook ahead in order to salt away meals in the freezer for weeknights, this book is more oriented to whole, multicourse meals when a family has time to sit down together and spend more than fifteen minutes at the dinner table (although the book does contain brief chapter on cooking for the week ahead). Part of the reason this book is a waste of time, space, and money for the experienced amateur cook is that it spends a sizable amount of pages on general tips for getting your kitchen organized and stocked for serious cooking. Even the least experienced foodie will have gone through this exercise and be well on their way to working efficiently in the kitchen. One aspect of the book that enhances it's billing as a `weekend' cookbook is the amount of space dedicated to grilling. The kitchen tune-up introduction includes an inventory of grilling equipment and a relatively large number of the recipes are either specifically designed for the outdoor grill or can easily be done on a grill rather than in a saute pan. One of the best features of the book may be its good selection of burger and sandwich recipes. I'm quite happy with my classic Julia Child recipe, but a family with three kids will probably need some decent variety in their burger lineup. It is also a great addition to have a good recipe for the New Orleans classic Muffoletta sandwich without having to invest in a Cajun cookbook. In fact, the whole book seems to be oriented towards the well-equipped kitchen, as it recommends, with only a brief nod to the expense, that the well equipped kitchen include a Kitchen Aid stand mixer, a digital kitchen scale, an immersion blender, and electric ice cream maker, and a fondue set. The problem with this lineup is that it may turn off part of the potential audience for this book. That is, those people who want to cook occasionally and need a cookbook which will give them thorough directio

Weekend Cooking is the logical next step for those of us interested in getting a great meal on the table. The "journey style" instructions make it a breeze to follow for anyone who can "walk and chew gum". Even where I have had failures in the past, this has brought all of those to an end. Three cheers for Jennifer Bushman.