The Food You Want to Eat: 100 Smart, Simple Recipes
The Food You Want to Eat: 100 Smart, Simple Recipes
Queer Eye for the Straight Guy’s food-and-wine connoisseur, Ted Allen, presents a quick-reference cookbook—giving you the food you really want to cook and eat, and the know-how to pull it off with ease."With most cookbooks, you could plow through 134 pages of complicated hors d’oeuvres, salads, and the author’s philosophical musings about food before you get to the stuff you actually want to eat. Not here. I’m going to save you the trouble and get to the point right up front.” These first sentences of the book sum up what Ted Allen’s The Food You Want to Eat is all about—the tempting, delicious, satisfying fare you really want on your dinner table tonight, without the fuss and the formalities. Chapters include:
•I Know What You Want to Eat: the essentials of steak, chicken both fried and roasted, warm caramel brownie sundaes, and a luscious mac and cheese that will have you thinking outside the box—way outside.
•Happy Hour: for the kind of parties real people actually throw; no engraved invitations or seating charts, just easy, delicious recipes like crostini, a simple tuna tartare that kicks, the crowd-pleasing spicy Cajun “pigs” in much nicer “blankets” than you’re used to, four incredible pizzas (one for each season), and of course ten perfect cocktails.
•The Cookout: fulfilling everyone’s desire for great barbecued ribs, plus the more adventurous (but even easier) rosemary grilled leg of lamb, and Ted’s secret to the ultimate hamburger.
•Poultry: whether baked, braised, or sautéed, chicken is often what’s for weeknight dinner, and here’s everything from soy-and-honey-glazed roast chicken to “around the world on a chicken breast” with superb ways to liven up those boneless, skinless, tasteless cutlets. Plus a simple (really!) duck, and a turkey that doesn’t demand the traditional Thanksgiving heroics.
Ted also delves into chapters on an array of fantastic salads that are a far cry from rabbit food; pastas featuring Italian classics like a great ziti with sausage and your basic pasta with red sauce, as well as easy Asian adventures such as cold soba noodles with sesame-peanut sauce; seafood for everyone who’s afraid to cook fish; meats that range from an amazing marinated grilled pork tenderloin and killer chili to a classic pot roast and osso buco; vegetable recipes that will make you love broccoli in a whole new way; and desserts for after dinner—and breakfasts for after after dinner.
This is the debut cookbook from one of the most engaging, most entertaining people ever to wield a spatula, filled with the incredibly simple, delicious real-life recipes for The Food You Want to Eat. In a word, mmmm.
Product Details
Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com Review
Ted Allen, the food-and-wine expert from Bravo's Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, has written a cookbook for those seeking a solid dish repertoire for everyday cooking and entertaining alike. The Food You Want to Eat offers 100 recipes for the likes of Old School Caesar Salad; Crispy Oven-Fried Crabcakes; Paella with Seafood, Chicken and Chorizo; and Mustardy Barbecued Spareribs. These favorites that live up to the book's title, but Allen also provides some repertoire-stretching dishes like Pan-Roasted Salmon with Tomato Vinaigrette and Thai Green Chicken Curry with Vegetables. In his role as cooking tutor, and in asides like The Essentials of Steak, Allen also helps readers to understand how dishes work, and therefore how to cook more easily. A whole chapter that imparts cookout smarts, plus a short selection of easy-to-do meal-finales, which includes Chocolate-Glazed Almond Butter Cake, Warm Spiced Apple Tart, and New Age Floats, round out this useful, photo-illustrated collection. --Arthur Boehm
From Booklist
Best known for his role as the food guru on cable TV's Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, -Allen takes the full spotlight in this book, which takes cooks and eaters back to the days before counting calories, carbohydrates, and cholesterol became a national obsession. Allen chats amiably about food and techniques, occasionally making wry asides, as he does about "the politics of poultry production": "I like to joke that I'll only eat chickens that are organically farmed by differently abled Unitarian lesbians of color." His recipes are for comfort foods and old favorites, many updated with a modern twist: spinach salad with bacon and figs. Solid sections on salads, pastas, meat, poultry, and seafood are included, as is a chapter, "Happy Hour," covering both food and cocktails. The dessert section is rather disappointing, but Allen makes up for it by suggesting a wine for each dish. Photos of Allen, often hands deep in the ingredients, are scattered throughout the book. He's obviously having fun, and wishes the same for his reader-cooks. Stephanie Zvirin
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
About the Author
Ted Allen is the food-and-wine specialist on the Emmy Award–winning hit show Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, and one of the authors of the New York Times bestselling book of the same name. Ted also is a journalist and a contributing editor to Esquire, where he was a finalist for a National Magazine Award in 2001. Originally from Ohio, he cut his culinary teeth as a dining critic and editor at Chicago magazine. He lives in New York City.
Customer Reviews
Easy read, a few good recipes
Not sure that this book contains the food I want to eat (I only saw one recipe with bacon, and it was a salad). Still, easy to read.
Good information for an experienced novice cook (not quite novice, but not at whatever the next level is in the continuum of novice to chef).
Lots of ingredients (that you may not have) to buy if you follow all of the recipes.
God, this book is awful... but I do love Ted.
So, my husband picked this up for me when he happened upon Ted Allen signing them at our local cookware store. Very sweet, but I wish the book had matched the intention. I love Ted Allen, but I can't imagine he is happy with this book. For a beginner, I suppose it would be helpful (but then any cookbook would), but for any vaguely experienced home chef, it offers nothing original nor creative, which is something Ted prides himself on. Production value aside (enough people have commented on the horrible photography), there's just nothing new here.
Best cookbook I own
I discovered this book while waiting for my car to be washed. The local full service has a select few titles and I picked this up. My wife and I own 38 cookbooks and have/do subscribe to 3 cooking magazines. We have three close friends who also cook and with whom we go out to eat often. During hurricane Ike I decided to try a recipe from this book and all of us were amazed by the complexity of exquisite flavors derived from a basically straight forward recipe.
We have not gone out to eat for a month as I have made it my mission to try every recipe in this book. So far I have tried 48 of the more than 100 recipes with our same core group of friends and have not been disappointed by any of them. Every recipe is worth the effort. If you want, start with the lamb burgers followed by the spatchcocked chicken as we did. Or simply close your eyes and pick. This is by far the best cookbook I have ever owned.
If you want pictures, buy a magazine. If you want a textbook, buy the CIA's cookbook. If you really want great flavors married together in ways you have likely never done at home, buy this book. Sure, somethings are not explained well; there is no revealing of the total prep/cook time, and some of the recipes are involved, but my friends have each bought this book now and agree that we have not had a bad meal yet. And I'm writing this review before I send a copy of it to my brother.
This cookbook is manageable and well designed. My wife and I also own Cooking Illustrated's Best Recipes. Many of Ted Allen's techniques are consistent with what they have tested and found to be the best. This book is truly a masterpiece and you will not be dissappointed.
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