Entertaining Made Easy

Parents are famous for inviting family over for dinner to share homemade recipes that have been passed down through generations. In this book you’ll enjoy delicious meals and these recipes are typical of the American approach that of taking ordinary everyday ingredients and with a little of love and imagination turning them into something appealing, even exciting, and certainly fun to make as well as to serve and to eat. This book is going to help you learn how to cook. Learning how to cook is the way to save money. You don’t save it by buying hamburger helpers and prepared foods you save it buying fresh foods in season or in large supply when they are fresh and usually best and you prepare them from scratch at home. Why pay for someone else’s work when if you know how to do it you can save all that money for yourself? That way cooking well doesn’t take a great deal of time and when you cook you’ll be eating far better meals than you could buy from a freezer or at a restaurant. I’m eager to share this book and I hope to have achieved most of the foregoing points in the following pages which include a variety of dishes. As I detail shortly this is a refreshing contrast to the typical quick fix recipes. I have tried also wherever possible to tell you how you can see when the chicken is done or when the fish is cooked through or when the cake is baked, how it should look or feel so that you know where and what to observe. I have not gone into the business of doubling or tripling recipes because that’s a very special technique and we like to cook for 4 or for 6 at the most. Beyond that you get into quantity cooking and that is not my field at all. I’ve made many cakes in the electric mixer and am in other words putting my cooking vocabulary to work in all directions. I hope if you are not already of the same persuasion to encourage the same attitude in you. While the truth is that it is personal preferences. For the non-cook such descriptions are of course mind boggling and meaningless but for even a moderately accomplished performer the directions are perfectly clear but an assemblage of standard cooking procedures and nothing more is needed in the way of explanation. That’s why this book is all about heading toward fabulous frontiers and good food. Finally, those romantic photographic recipes at the beginning of each heading and those pictures that so much capture the recipes thank you to Think Stock photos. It now remains for me to say be a fearless cook and try new ideas and new recipes, but always buy the freshest and finest of ingredients whatever they may be. Furnish your kitchen with the most solid and workmanlike equipment you can find. Keep your knives sharp and enjoy these recipes.