Wolfgang Puck Makes It Easy: Delicious Recipes for Your Home Kitchen

This book will not disappoint any one who enjoys good food. The recipes are easy. The ingredient are easy to find and the dishes tastes great and look like the pictures in the book! I carry this book everywhere I go and the recipes are so easy that I can just pull the book out of my bookbag and take it in the grocery store with me. I give it to friends who enjoy cooking as gifts. Not one recipe has turned out bad. Every time I use a recipe from Chef Puck's book, people comment on how I should open a restaurant! The recipes are also fun. I figure if I purchase a recipe book and there is one recipe I adopt, I consider it a good cookbook. This book has paid for itself over and over. It's great.

I had this book on my shelf for about a year and finally decided to make some homemade pizza. I had always been intimidated by making dough of any kind but this book made it easy. The pizza crust came out great, so much so that my kids said that they never wanted me to order out anymore for pizza. So, with that success I decided to try other recipes and as of yet I have had nothing but great success with every one of them. Chef Puck has created a great book with easy to follow instructions and with great tips in the margins. This is a great cookbook from beginning to end. Thank you Chef!

Wolfgang puck's cookbook is out of this world! The recipes are easy and most do not take a long time. The ingredients are easy to find and are not expensive. All of the recipes are absolutely delicious! You will not be disappointed in this book.

What's in the title of a cookbook? Everything in a good one! Take this latest by world-class chef Puck: Makes It Easy! His goal is just that, what he does for home cooking. Taking shortcuts that he wouldn't in restaurants with helps for sauces, e.g hoisin and bbq purchased, etc. Second subtitle: Delicious recipes for home kitchen. That's his goal and he achieves it in this liitle over than 300 page offering with 4-color photos. What I find enchanting about this is His "Easy Tips" with each recipe. Here he unloads some of the technique, or ingredient shopping, or substitutes, or secrets when adding an ingredient. These are the things one learns when cooking which add that extra pizazzzz that we all know we've discovered when eating food really well prepared. Here he also offers ideas about other dishes to serve with and sometimes beverage suggests. The recipe collection is wide and succulent. Try the likes of: Pistacio-Vanilla Crusted French Toast. Here he offers almonds in place of pistacios, and if you're like me, can't get enough nuts. This is delicious with better slice of bread and vanilla scented. He even recommends jam or Berry compote as alternative to syrup or powdered sugar. Southwest Strata with turkey Sausage is great brunch or large breakfast crowd serving. Working my way through such as: Zesty Lemon Bars;Banana Spring Rolls with Two Dipping Sauces; Sun-Dredi Cherry Pinot Noir Sauce;Wild Rice and Arborio Risott with Sauteed Apple; Peppered Filets Mignons with Sherry and Raisins;BBQ Turkey and Green Chili Quesadillas. There is superb Appendix on Kitchen Equip recommendations and Wolf's Favorite Wine Lists. The photography is nice, with many of prep steps shown and explained. Great learning or enhancing home cooking offering which will fill many kitchens and homes with great food.

`Wolfgang Puck Makes It Easy' by, you guessed it, Wolfgang Puck, is easy to mistake for a fast cooking recipe book in the style of Jacques Pepin's `Fast Food My Way'. If you make that mistake, you will be very disappointed with this book. It is definitely not a Rachael Ray wannabe book. Rather, it is much more like books such as `Charlie Trotter Cooks at Home', Guy Savoy's `Simple French Recipes for the Home Cook', `Daniel's Dish' by Daniel Boulud and `Simple Pleasures by Alfred Portale. While not famous restaurant chefs, it is also similar to books by Food Network colleagues Sara Moulton and Tyler Florence. The odd thing is that although this book is not a quick cooking text, it will potentially appeal to the Rachael Ray audience for those occasions when they really want to impress dining guests with a Wolfgang Puck pizza, homemade fresh pasta, or braised lamb shanks. Wolfgang's technique for making these recipes easy (not necessarily quick or short in description) is to avoid the use of a lot of supplementary preparations. As much as possible, virtually all the steps for a dish are given within the recipe for that recipe. There are definitely some major exceptions, but in general, Wolf is taking exactly the opposite tack from Ming Tsai's second book, `Simply Ming', where every dish is described as an elaboration on some primary recipe. In Herr Puck's work virtually the only pantry recipes you really need to be concerned chicken stock, fresh pasta, and pizza dough. One thing that always impressed me about Wolfgang is his ability to stay on message, and this is the name of the game when it comes to evaluating books. In the recent new American Iron Chef episode where Wolfgang was battling Masaharu Morimoto with the theme of eggs, Morimoto was all over the map with his dishes while Wolfgang, with great help from his terrific pastry chef Sherry Yard, was dead on target with his use of eggs as the featured ingredient in his dishes. Sherry Yard is back, providing Wolfgang another assist with some of the pastry recipes in this book. As Wolfgang points out, one should not be put off by the relatively long procedure recipes, as he is doing this to avoid a lot of page turning, enabling the amateur cook to follow a recipe from top to bottom. A lot of other cookbooks, especially one from Emeril on recipes from his various restaurants, seemed to make a point of creating modular recipes with lots of intermediate preparations. Reading his book felt like sitting through an Advent church service where the liturgy required changing pages about once every three minutes. Modular recipes are great for the professional or the amateur who cooks every day for a large family, but it is a waste for the busy person who enjoys putting their hair up in the kitchen now and then. Wolfgang also comes through on his promise to avoid a lot of esoteric ingredients. This is not to say that one will have a much easier time with his recipes if you live near a megamart or gourmet