Our Verdict: RecipeTin Eats Dinner

Kirstin: I have thoroughly enjoyed cooking from this book. It covers so much ground and covers it exceptionally well. There is literally something for everyone. The recipes are packed with flavour, the breadth of cuisine fabulous and all the dishes worked really well with easy to understand explanations. Bonus points for this book are the boxes with notes under most of the recipes which are filled with excellent cooking tips or alternatives. And the photography is astounding, some of the best from this year’s cookbooks.



But I do have two grumble points. One is that this book does not work on a kindle.You can read the book, sure but it’s impossible to highlight any recipes or perform a search as the pages were produced (as far as I can tell) as PDFs. This is a real shame and meant I ended up breaking my rule of trying to not add to my cookbook mountain. My other grumble is the index which classifies its contents into chicken, fish, rice, slow-cooked etc, but does not include an alphabetical list of the recipes. So searching for recipes can be problematic. Not insurmountable, just a little tricky. All that said, I would definitely recommend this book.



Maureen: I agree. It’s been a great month. This is the kind of cookbook that I would press into the hands of someone who’s just starting out in cooking. (For that reason, I’ll probably pass it on to Andrew, 24, who seems to have caught the cooking bug. Hooray!) It’s got a nice variety of dishes, which are straightforward to prepare and don’t require any obscure ingredients. If in doubt, you can check out her website, where often she had a video of the dish.



We didn’t have one dud recipe. Saying that, there were a few things that could be filed under, “It was fine. It fed us,” but they can’t all be winners. Kirstin also is right about the index– there’s one index listing all the recipes in the chapters, the other groups them together by ingredient, but there is no alphabetical index. If we’ve spent a lifetime of searching for things in an alphabetical index, why change now?



But truly, it was a good month. (Speaking personally, the photos of her very cute golden retriever were great, too.)