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Cookbook Review: My Perfect Pantry



I recently received My Perfect Pantry by Geoffrey Zakarian with Amy Stevenson and Margaret Zakarian. You may know him from the Food Network if you watch that channel often. I was really intrigued by the books premise of “150 easy recipes from 50 essential ingredients.”

Zakarian starts off the cookbook with foundation items to have on hand. These are various spices and such to have on hand to help your dishes have more flavor. Then he heads right into the meat of the cookbook, the pantry. He gives recipes for such common items as bbq sauce, rice, ketchup, honey, vinegar and more. There are many beautiful pictures of the food in the cookbook. I have to say, that’s a very important feature to me. I like to see what a recipe looks like before I decided to make it. There are exceptions to that, but they are rare.

There are some yummy sounding recipes in the book like Supercharged Chicken Wings, Huevos Rancheros, Veal and Bean Casserole, and even Chocolate-Dipped Candied Oranges. Those oranges look so yummy and you actually use real oranges to make them. They would be a neat thing to add to your Christmas trays. I will do my best to try and make those and post them here soon in case you all want to try them also.

Some of the recipes are a bit out of my family’s tastes, such as the aforementioned Veal and Bean Casserole. However, substitutions can be made in many things like that. I plan to make that recipe and sub out a different meat because the picture of it looked delicious. I definitely would recommend checking out this book and seeing if you might enjoy adding it to your collection. There are many tasty sounding recipes inside!

Want some more information about this cookbook? Go here.

Disclaimer: I received this book from Blogging for Books for this review. However, these opinions are my own.

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