Laurel Robertson (1)

I had this book out from the library for a month and a half before I bit the bullet and bought it. During that time, I've made bread about twice a week, maybe a little less. This book has gotten me comfortable with whole-grain bread baking, and the explanations in the "Loaf for Learning" section have helped me tweak quantities and rising times as needed, which is something I wouldn't have known how to do otherwise. I also tried a recipe from Peter Reinhart's Whole Grain Breads in the middle show more of all that. While I might give Reinhart's techniques a try again in the future, I found the methods and instructions in Laurel's Kitchen Bread Book much more accessible as a relative beginner, and would recommend this as a starting point for others interested in making their own bread. show less

Ah, Laurel's Kitchen. So much fun to read! I think the only item I made out of this cookbook was the English muffins and the recipe was quite sketchy. Kind of a go-into-the-kitchen-and-put-a-few-things-together-and-see-if-turns-out kind of recipe. I didn't care. I was having fun, getting into the mood.

A good cookbook if you like to read stories. Not the greatest cookbook for a beginning baker, but it does have some pretty good tips.

I don't own it, so I can't read the entire thing. Might be show more one to put on my list of "I need to buy this some day". show less

This was my first vegetarian book more than 20 years ago. I read it cover to cover and it's one of the better cookbooks for doing this since there's so much information and narrative all the way through it.

Having high ideals, lots of time and little money, the authors set very high standards for doing everything that you possibly can from scratch.

Whole grains, unprocessed food and lots of fresh food is clearly the priority in this book. Plus they've backed it up with a ton of detailed show more nutrional information. All other cookbooks I've read pale in comparison to the depth and breadth of information they've packed into such a tiny volume.

In the last few years I bought the "New" Laurel's. The "New" one updates a lot of the information and has done a lot of work cutting back on fat and some other problems in this first version. In spite of all the improvements, I still can't bring myself to let go of this copy, since I know it so well and think of it so fondly.

The majority of the recipes, though, are low on flavor and high on bland. The whole wheat bread was a miserable failure, probably because of my own lack of skill back then, but has turned me off bread baking ever since.

I still come back to the soup recipes over and over, though. The Vegetable Barley is still one of my favorites. show less

There aren't a lot of recipes I use from this book...except for the ones I can't do without. The gumbo recipe was one of my husband's favorites, as was black-eyed peas Virginia style.

I'd take any nutritional guidance in the book with a grain of salt, but it's still good advice.