Reviews Cooking, Food And Wine Book

Product Details

Amazon.com Review
Anyone facing an occasional dinner for one, making solo brown-bag lunches, or living alone will find Toni Lydecker's Serves One invaluable. She shows you how to make tabbouleh and ratatouille in modest amounts so you don't have to eat them for days. She even gives a recipe for pizza dough you can turn into perfect, single-size pies. Who needs soggy take-out when you can make your own potato and pesto pizza, or luxuriate on Sunday with a creamy Smoked Salmon Pizza? (You bake the dough, then add the topping; it's much better than a bagel!)

Lydecker tells how to make Mini Meatloaf and Oven-Barbecued Pork Ribs, just the right amount of Chicken Fingers, even your very own Shellfish Steamer, a kind of clambake. Many recipes cook in 5 to 20 minutes. When stews and soups take longer, they don't need tending. If any cookbook will ever wean you off frozen entrees and instant mixes so you eat as well on your own as with family or friends, Serves One can do it. --Dana Jacobi

From Library Journal
Lydecker, a food writer and editor, teaches classes on cooking for one, but her cookbook is directed at anyone who eats alone at least sometime, not just "full-time" solo cooks like recent college grads, the newly divorced, and others suddenly on their own. However, much of the information she includes will be most helpful to novices in the kitchen. The recipes are fine but somewhat ordinary. Jane Doerfer's excellent Going Solo in the Kitchen (LJ 4/15/95), with almost twice as many recipes and a readable text filled with kitchen strategies and useful suggestions, is the first choice here; larger collections should consider adding Lydecker's book as well.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From the Publisher
Rachael Ray:
"I am all about simple, delicious cooking. Toni's recipes deliver, with lots of fun and tasty dinners for one. Go ahead, you deserve it! Don't eat cold cereal again tonight. Toni's got you covered."

Laura Werlin, author and winner of James Beard Award:
"Whether we live alone or happen to be alone on a given night, cooking for one can seem like a challenge or even a burden. In Serves One, Toni makes cooking for ourselves fun and most of all, easy. Between her delicious and practical recipes and her invaluable Cook's Notes, this isn't just cooking for one. It's cooking for everyone."

Customer Reviews

There are better out there
I found I was not interested in the recipes. I have other cookbooks that I prefer to grap and explore.

Eats Alone
The book is put together well with servings for one. What I would have liked is a few more simple meals. Even though the recipes are sized for one I still find it difficult to find and cook just one piece of meat to make the dishes in the book.

Buy This Book!
Are you on your own and tired of eating cereal and calling it dinner? Can't afford another night of fast food or ordering in? Well then buy this book!! The meals in here are quick and easy to make. I have made Soothing Tortellini-Broccolini Soup, Sizzling Shrimp With Garlic and Salmon Packet With Sicilian Flavors from the book and they are all fantastic!! Also, Toni put in some suggestions you can substitute other things for in case you don't have a particular ingredient. The directions are easy to follow, which is a plus, and you don't end up with a million things to wash after :).