Rick & Lanie's Excellent Kitchen Adventures: Chef-Dad, Teenage Daughter, Recipes, and Stories

Getter book for my kids to cook with

"Rick and Lanie's Excellent Kitchen Adventures" is a perfect description for this book. Renowned Chicago chef Rick Bayless,who's recently sworn off rumors that he'll be cooking it up at the White House, collaborates with his daughter in a culinary journey. Bayless' Mexican restaurants are favorites with the soon-to-be First Family, and his cooking is for President and everyday people alike. In "Kitchen Adventures",Rick and Lanie explore the cuisines of France,Mexico,Thailand,Morocco,and Peru. It's pleasant to see they don't delve into the usual Latin American cooking. Peruvian cuisine is underrated--and as Lanie jokes-it's all about potatoes! There's a delightful familial interplay throughout the book. "Kitchen Adventures" is a sonic pleasure as well. The Baylesses recommend world music to play while cooking. There are A LOT of Putumayo compilations. In the Thai section,they recommend "Asian Groove";in the Moroccan section,they recommend "Arabic Groove." It turns out the Bayless family not only has good taste in food,but music also. "Kitchen Adventures" is a delicious global journey.

This is a great cookbook for family cooking with step by step instructions. Highlights prep work to do first before everyone starts cooking. Family meals from all over the world - that Rick and his family have traveled to. Will encourage you to try new things with your kids or maybe encourage your kids to get in the kitchen and cook the family a meal.

How many kids get to grow up, travel and publish a cookbook? We the purchasers get to enjoy this achievement. Famous Mexican chef Rick Bayless teams up with his teenage daughter Lanie to provide a 230 page beauty filled with their trips to Peru, Oklahoma, Mexico, Morocco, Thailand and France. In each destination they each relate their highlights and lowlights of the trip. Lanie's are so cool, e.g. "Eating in Peru basically means eating potatoes ... my dad bought two of EACH One, 'Research,' he kinda barked at me--I mean all I did was ask politely WHAT he was doing. He didn't even seem to care that it took an hour." This is getting some great cooking basics, plus intro to this family's favorite recipes, and exposure to other culture's culinary creations. Both Rick and Lanie comment on each, so you get both perspectives: gourmet chef and teenage daughter. There are sidebars which provide great tips and even suggests for CD listening as well as what to buy when in a Mexican grocery, how to grow three popular herbs indoors. Great, unique, well thought out fun stuff to read and cook with. There is also a limited mail-order source listing for ingredients, music and cooking supplies. Some great recipes which most family will dig into include: Lime Zest Ice Cream with Mexican Caramel; Vegetarian [or not] Soft Tacos with Guacamole; The World's Greatest Chili; Grilled Pizza with Goat Cheese, Green Salsa and Bacon; Chinese Potsticker Dumplings; Moroccan Meatballs in Tomato Sauce. All this done beautifully with prose and great photos and layout. Fine addition to one's own collection and/or for giving.

`Rick & Lanie's Excellent Kitchen Adventures' by Rick Bayless and his daughter is the third kids oriented cookbook I have reviewed and I am very pleased that I gave the earlier two books by Emeril Lagasse and Rachael Ray only four stars, as this volume by Bayless and daughter has really shown us how such a book should be done. To be sure, Bayless and daughter have done the book where the child is a mid-teenaged daughter who has been around the cooking all her life of a world-class teaching chef. Therefore, the book does not address all the important safety issues involved when you put kids into the most dangerous room in the house. But, this is definitely a book with which a cooking minded teenager could connect. That is, if the kid is a good reader, this is the book you want to give them. The book is made doubly interesting in that the Bayless family are great travelers and have a long and interesting history of family in the food service industry. This sets up one of the two main themes of the book by setting each chapter in a different location around the world, some of which are very familiar to the Bayless clan and some of which are being seen for the first time. The five venues are a combination of the obvious and the unexpected. The first is (big surprise) a trip to the southern highlands of Mexico and the Oaxaca valley which is one of Bayless' favorite parts of his favorite country. This chapter is spiced up by a side trip to Peru and an essay in ceviche recipes. The second location, small town Oklahoma may be a big surprise to most of us until Bayless tells us the story of his parents who ran a very successful barbecue restaurant in Capitol Hill, Oklahoma. The highlight of this chapter is Bayless' attempt to write out his parents' recipes from the `Hickory House' restaurant with very mixed results when his family gathered together to make the recipes from paper rather than from memory. The third destination is France, almost as predictable as the trip to Mexico. This chapter is spiced up with culinary side trips to Italy and Ireland. The fourth venue, Morocco and southern Spain is not to surprising to foodies, as the Moroccan cuisine is one of the most distinctive centers of Mediterranean cuisine next to Italy and Provence, especially after the attention paid to it by Paula Wolfert's books. The fifth venue, Thailand, with side trips to Japan and Hong Kong are only a surprise in that Thai cuisine is about as different from Mexico as you can get. There is not even the distant connection in play between Japan and the West Coast of Latin America that fertilized the development of ceviche. The main format of each chapter is that Rick introduces each locale with a relatively long narrative of why this venue was chosen and the family's general reaction to both the familiar and the unfamiliar. This is followed by a similarly long take on the same location and events by Lanie. And, Lanie provides a very clear counterpoint to her father's ta

Mix family dynamics, personality, food, and travel, and dish up an entertaining, humorous and, yes, useful father/daughter cookbook venture. Rick, chef/owner of the Mexican restaurant, Frontero, and his daughter, Lanie, 13 (younger when they began the project), eat and cook their way from Mexico to Thailand, by way of Oklahoma, France and Morocco, with side trips to Spain, Japan and Hong Kong. The occasions are family vacations or celebrations and the cooking is done in relaxed settings with friends. Each chapter begins with essays by each of them describing the travel and food experience, from shopping and cooking to bad roads and old memories. Rick's tend to be more rhapsodic and reminiscent; Lanie's are sassy, direct, and funny. Each chapter also includes "five cool CDs" to play while cooking, like Johnny Cash for barbeque and Kahled for Moroccan food. Each attractively designed, well-organized recipe starts with a brief intro from both authors. Rick's include cultural background and cooking tips; Lanie's are conversational and opinionated. For example, Rick describes choosing exactly the right peppers and accompaniments to a tapas of Spanish Ham Salad. And Lanie says: "This tastes exactly like an Italian sub without the bread." It's a teaching book with "do this first" boxes included in each recipe and thorough step-by-step directions. Lanie (who likes steak tartare but isn't crazy about raw tomatoes) often describes the experience of cooking, the taste sensations, and her personal ratings. The dishes, from breakfast to dessert, are mostly simple classics: Huevos Rancheros; Bangkok-Style Chicken Satay; Moroccan Meatballs (cumin) in Tomato Sauce; Tartiflette (French potato and cheese supper); Hickory House (his parents' barbecue restaurant) Deviled Eggs; Pad Thai; Potato-Leek Soup with Bacon; Profiteroles; Chocolate Truffles. There are a few more complex, or at least time-consuming dishes too, like Crispy Meringue Shells with Ice Cream and Fruit Salsa (France), an Oaxacan Red Mole, and Chinese Pot Sticker Dumplings. Color photographs throughout accent the recipes, the ingredients and the people. This is a book for anyone who'd like to cook with their kid (Lanie has cooked all of these recipes) or enjoys a wide variety of thoughtful classic recipes, or just likes to laugh while reading about food, families and travel.