Cheap 365 Ways to Cook Pasta (Book) (Marie Simmons) Price

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Customer Reviews of 365 Ways to Cook Pasta

First the good:

With a fair number of these recipes you can produce a hearty comfort-type entree with with mostly pantry type ingredients. Who would have thought that spaghetti with parsley butter (spaghetti, butter, garlic, parsley) can make a satisfying and elegant entree? Well I didnt. But it does. And it makes and even better first course, lunch or side dish. The same goes for Spaghetti with walnuts and parmesan (spaghetti, olive oil, garlic, walnuts, parmesan, parlsey...and add blue cheese to this one if you like). throughout this book are simple put-toghether dishes like this that you can add to your usual stable of week night dinners for variety. Other examples of these simple recipes are spaghetti with lemon butter and peas, elbows with butter, parmesan and peas, and fetticcini with tuna and peas.

On the more exotic side are a rabbit sauce for your pasta, a cavier and pasta concoction and a section an asian noodles. Quite a few of all of the dishes are on the rich (read calorie laden) side... One chapter with no cook sauces is a bit lighter. The dessert section is very sweet and very rich.
I think a lot of these recipes could be *lightened up* with alternate products... fat free half and half instead of cream, fat free milk instead of milk, egg substitute instead of eggs..low fat cheeses, etc.

On the plus side..there are many many recipes to choose from, many with things you already have at home. On the minus side, without reworking some of these...its a cholestol nightmare (no, not all of them...but a good number) It fairly easy to read. A nice font, easy directions. Suggestions to change the basic recipes... Alternate ingredient choices. very nice. Thankfully no screaming elbow macaroni cartoons running from smiling pots of boiling water.

A minus here I need to note...having had the book for so long...Its not exactly a spiral, more like a loose leaf that holds punched pages...but some of the holes have ripped like they would in your school binder. Or they just dont stay where they should any more. Essentially i have one ring holding in all the pages now. Not a good thing for all the pages. In a few years, I think I will just have pages and that will be just a big mess.

Times have changed and tastes have changed. There is an appreciation for a lighter style of cooking. Its hard to say if I would buy this when the last ring goes and pasta recipes fall all over my kitchen. I can't say that this hasnt been helpful, because any cookbook that helps me make a dinner out of what i already have, is a help. I think I will only know what I will do when the time comes because this truly was a mixed bag.

I can see this being a good book for someone who does alot of pantry cooking. Someone just starting out because the recipes are very simple (well alot of them) and most take a minimum of ingredients and prep. Or someone interested in a good volume of only pasta dishes.

A Recipe for Everyone
I picked up my copy in 1990 when I was in college and haven't stopped using it. As a college student my favorite dish was the fresh tomato, basil and ricotta sauce on ziti. Yum! When I was a nanny for a California family with California taste, recipes like the spaghetti with blue cheese and walnuts saved my fanny. And now that I'm married and cook for my extended family, one of my favorite potluck dishes is the "light and easy" Salad of Penne and Chicken with Spinach and Buttermilk Dressing. My family loves it too.

I love the spiral binding and hard cover that lay flat. The different chapters ("Asian Connection," "No-Cook Sauces") etc. make for good browsing. And I like that many additions are offered too.

Lots of times I pull out a variety of things from my fridge and cupboard and then go to this cookbook to figure out what to make. For example, if I had leftover spaghetti, some eggs, and a handful of veggies to chop up, I could bang out a delicious spaghetti frittata that I know my family would love.

This cookbook has been a staple in my kitchen for 11 years and has held up wonderfully!

Very USEFUL Cookbook
This cookbook is one of the most often used of my collection of 100+. The "Emergency Dinners" chapter is wonderful! It includes a list of 16 staples, regular stuff, like olive oil and onions and bacon. These staples are combined in various ways to make the 16 recipes in the chapter, all of them delicious and very quickly prepared, great for unexpected weeknight dinner guests. Many of the recipes in the "Italian Classics" chapter are as easy and quick to prepare as the emergency dinners, and are as good as versions I've had in Italian restaurants. In fact, every chapter includes recipes that are easy to prepare, although some require longer cooking times. The "American Classics" and "Elbows" chapters include a bunch of variations on macaroni and cheese, and may be helpful in getting kids to eat more vegetables, and some unfamiliar ingredients.