First Time Cook or Urban Cookbook

First-Time Cook

Author: Sophie Grigson

Setting up home for the first time and feel lost in the kitchen? The First-time Cook is a one-stop guide which shows you not only how to cook delicious food but also how to understand ingredients and cooking techniques so you can feel completely confident on your own. The book assumes no prior knowledge and takes you through the basics of shopping and cooking equipment. Sophie Grigson then covers each essential cooking technique and food in turn, moving step-by-step through the basics with lots of incredibly useful advice on the possible pitfalls and showing variations and alternatives once you have mastered the essentials.

Interesting book: Economia

Urban Cookbook

Author: King Adz

Street food, street art, and street style: creative recipes for the graffiti generation.

Publishers Weekly

Graphic designer Adz's eye-catching but haphazard compilation-a beautiful mess of photography, collage, art, interviews and recipes-is more likely to cause furrowed brows than feasting. Adz takes readers on a whirlwind tour of five cities known for their style (New York, Paris, Berlin, Amsterdam and London), interviewing local artists working in a variety of media (toy design, music, film, photography, illustration) to get their thoughts on creativity and the city. Each featured location is augmented with Adz's "Hit List," in which he lists his favorite shops, clubs, restaurants and musical artists to listen to while walking the city. Ironically, it's when Adz shifts to recipes (50 "street food" gems from each city) that the book loses momentum. A dazzling mish-mash of styles and points of view gives way to pedestrian dishes like beef stroganoff, spaghetti and meatballs, omelettes, meat loaf and vegetable pasta. For the most part, these recipes offer little insight into their home city's culture; it's barely worth pointing out that most of these dishes are not prepared, sold or eaten in the streets. Though it fails spectacularly as a cookbook, Adz's volume succeeds as a visual travelogue of street art and cutting edge design.
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