Martin Yan's Feast: The Best of Yan Can Cook

In response to previous reviewers, this is not authentic Chinese food that Yan is making. That said, in reading this book I never got the impression from Yan that it was. Yan includes recipes for many favorites that you would find in Chinese, Thai, Vietnamese, and other asian restaurants in the US. These are very good. I'm not buying General Tso's chicken or Sweet and Sour chicken again in a restaurant because these recipes were so much better and easy to make (it's amazing what lychees and chili-garlic sauce add to sweet and sour chicken). There are also cute anecdotes and nice pictures for almost every dish. If you are interested in more authentic Chinese cooking, I've found that "Chinese Cooking Made Easy: With Simple Sauces and Dressings (Wei-chuan°s cookbook)" is indispensible and I use it all the time. If you want a good cookbook for restaurant style asian food, try Martin Yan's Feast. I haven't tried his recipes for Thai food, as I'm half-Thai and probably I wouldn't like them (too americanized), but Wei-chuan's Thai Cooking Made Easy is also really good and I've used it quite a bit.

Martin Yan's cookbook is truly what you want in a book of recipes.Each recipe is very thorough and goes step by step (even telling you how many teaspoons of oil and garlic you should use). My roommate had a Martin Yan cookbook in college 10 years ago when I was just learning how to cook. I remember I was able to follow the recipes without diverging from them and end up with great food. Now, I've grown more experienced in the kitchen and bought this book last year. I learned that the recipes here work just as well if you don't follow them strictly but introduce your own variations, change sauces, change from deep fried to stir fried or vice versa, and so forth. So I recommend Yan's books for either a beginner of an expert.Finally, as long as you don't mind spending a bit of time chopping lots of ingredients, the recipes are fast and don't take much work or skill. I have never been to China, but I do know that I am now making Chinese dishes that are as good as many of the dishes at my local Chinese restaurant or the Chinatown restaurants using Yan's recipes.

Here's why I always recommend Martin Yan's books; for some reason, his recipes will result in that authentic taste that is often missing from other Chinese or Oriental cookbooks. He gives techniques that really work, like marinating chicken or meats in a cornstarch-soy sauce mix that give the meat that succulent coating when stir fried. Yet most of the recipes can be made with ingredients found in a majority of American grocery stores that stock a foreign food shelf and some exotic vegetables like sprouts and chinese cabbage. I learned to cook Chinese food as a kid from my Dad (he bought an enormous wok right from a restaurant in San Francisco in the 60's. It was so big we had to store it in the garage. But that was the only kind there was, no one sold them in the kitchen department until much later.) We used to make fried rice and Chinese egg omelets (egg fu yung) that tasted like the Chinese restaurants we loved. But it wasn't until I found Martin Yan's cookbooks that I found any book that could duplicate that flavor.

This book is a must for my library, resting in the area reserved for the Ultimate Book. It is the bible of all of my oriental cook books and I have plenty of them. Yan is not only a superb Chinese chef but an artisan with foods. That's where his magic is. I will never learn to chop as fast as he does and I never seem to have a smile on my face, like he also does, when I'm doing this. But his recipes are easy to follow and 400 pages of them leaves nothing left out. This book is a winner.

As I was flipping through this cookbook with a friend, we would stop every two or three pages to exclaim, "I love that dish!" I've tried about seven recipes so far, and six have turned out excellent. Make sure you try the green onion pancakes. The recipes are for the most part very simple, and Martin Yan includes a lot of hints for making your dish perfect. The book also contains beautiful photos, so it makes a great gift.