Cooking Outside the Pizza Box: Easy Recipes for Today's College Student Review

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(More customer reviews)I originally bought this book for myself, and found it to be too introductory for me, so I gave it to my brother, who despite being older than me still calls me to ask things like how you mash a potato. The recipes are very easy to read, making no assumptions about previous knowledge, and they utilize store-bought pre-prepared ingredients (the author is especially fond of frozen potsticker dumplings) in a way that is helpful to college students, although I thought occasionally the scratch alternative would have been no more difficult and probably cheaper and better tasting.
What I love best about the book is the way it is organized. Recipes that require no cooking or are microwave-only are marked with big icons on the page, and while the recipes are organized by meal or food type, like most books, the book also contains multiple tables of contents that group the recipes differently--vegetarian, microwavable, appropriate for a date, seasonally, etc.--and even has one set of listings that put together recipes for a complete meal. While not particularly elaborate (as most of the recipes are pretty simple anyway) I love this feature, because matching flavors can be particularly difficult for a new cook, and for any cook a recipe book can be unhelpful in planning a meal if you don't kind of already know what you want.
The first section of the book is also really good for first-timers because it goes over the basics of setting up, cleaning, and sharing a kitchen. It provides lists of basic equipment and the basic ingredients you should always have on hand, and this list is in general pretty sensitive to the limitations of dorm sizes and mini-fridges. It even gives cleaning instructions for some of the less obvious cleaning challenges in the kitchen. I thought the list of things to discuss and agree on with roommates regarding kitchen use was particularly helpful. Lastly, the book itself is well-designed, being spiral-bound rather than a traditional paperback, so that it lays flat easily while staying open to the same page hands-free. This seems like a silly note, but I have a lot of cookbooks, some with a similar target market as this one, and I've had to waste a lot of time copying recipes down onto other paper or recipe cards just because I needed both hands and the book kept closing itself or flipping to another page.
In summary, a great book for someone who doesn't know anything about cooking. Would make a great high school graduation gift perhaps made more interesting by pairing it with some of the basic kitchen tool necessities listed in the first few chapters of the book.

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