Molly Baz

This book is clearly aimed at the Tik Tok generation, both in its content, tone, and layout. As a member of the Usenet generation, I am definitely not the target audience. The gratingly flippant and cutesy style is bound to rub a lot of readers the wrong way.

On the positive side, this means embedded links to short videos illustrating some of the techniques being discussed, which is often a lot more helpful than trying to describe in words or illustrate with diagrams as we've traditionally show more had to settle for. This makes even more sense considering that the author rose to fame on the basis of her excellent informative and entertaining cooking videos.

The recipes are also well formatted for the beginning cook. Ingredients are arranged by category, making them easier to procure and assemble (although my personal preference is to list them in order of use), and the steps are clearly numbered and the process described thoroughly, with plenty of annotated footnotes.

The food is "trendy modern American", heavy on the meat, with a fusion of international elements. It's clear that she knows her flavours, and does a decent job in reigning in her chefy instincts to affordable and widely available ingredients and equipment. There is little skimping on the fat though, with ratios like 1/4 cup of oil to one pound of broccolini, or 2 cups of heavy cream plus 6 oz of bacon for 1.5 lbs of spinach. The recipes are also extremely salty as written, although that's easily adjusted to taste.

If you can get past the atrocious style and obnoxious juvenile writing, there's a nice reference section at the end that includes a bunch of sauces and toppings that can be mixed and matched to liven dishes, arranged by flavour type.

Bottom line: good for her fans, or 20-somethings setting out on their own for the first time and looking to improve their cooking skills and impress their friends. For everyone else, stick to the classics.

-1 points for doing "F*ck, Marry, Kill?" with things like Turkey Club, Tuna Melt, BLT. Oy gevalt. (and who's innocence does she think she's saving by not writing out "fuck", especially since she does so elsewhere in the book.) show less

I followed Molly when she was part of Bon Appetit so I was excited when my local library had a copy of this cookbook. I tried really hard to enjoy this book but was not able to. Not sure why the book editor agreed to a variety of fonts to be used but for those with visual processing disorders, like myself, the variety of fonts and sizes made it very difficult to read. Not only that but the recipe itself is all over and not neatly organized like more traditional cookbooks. The recipe pages show more alone have 3 to 4 font types and 3 to 4 font sizes. Other pages have words going up and down or in waves over larger words in a different font. I quickly returned this book. show less

I've cooked two recipes from this so far, one was the Morty-D Pasta, loved it, and looked at enough of them to know it will stay in my kitchen, front runner, all winter to go back to.