CBR11 Bingo: Collection
A friend got me Jessica Seinfeld’s Food Swings for Christmas. It made me seriously question our friendship at the time. My friend is very much into celebrity-adjacent, Real Housewives-type stuff; I very much am not. I decided to try out a couple of recipes this past month before giving it away, and I have to take back every uncharitable thought I had about this gift.
Jessica Seinfeld must have been anticipating people like me, because she even writes a section in the book about her lack of qualifications in terms of culinary school or authorship. I tend to read the entire cookbook back to front before I attempt any of the recipes, and there in the back half of the book was a two-page rebuttal of all my uninformed criticisms.
And it turns out, she is a really good cook! Or, at least, somebody helping with this book is. We’ve made cakes, cupcakes, meatballs, pork chops, pasta dishes, salads, chicken entrees and more.
We have a recipe rating system in our house: a ‘1’ means we love it and will make it again, a ‘2’ means we’ll eat it if it’s around but it’s not a favorite, and ‘3’ means we shall never speak of it again. So far we’ve had only 1 (or 1.5 for a slightly contentious dish) for the recipes we have tried. This has somehow become my go-to book.
And this contrasts with My Greek Table, based on a show of the same name. This book was also a gift. We cook a lot of Greek food in our home so I was excited to get this book to have some new ideas or twists on our old favorites.
I don’t know what has happened in my kitchen, but everything we have made from this book has been tossed in to the compost pile. My husband and I are both scientists- we know how to follow recipes! That is basically all a bench experiment is- measuring out different things to mix together and heat! And yet we have been repeatedly failing with this book.
My father-in-law makes a roast vegetable dish that I could eat every day. Somehow a similar dish in this book just tasted like hot trash water and couldn’t be salvaged. Everything we’ve made from this book has earned a rating of 3 and I can’t see us trying anything else from it.