BOOK REVIEW - Easy Home Cooking - Cook and Bake With Ease by Ginia Basu

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“If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world.” JRR Tolkien

A cookbook that starts with these lines would definitely have food for thought, is what I felt when I started reading the recipes. The introduction given by Ginia Basu struck a chord within me. She started cooking at the age of ten, I began writing at the age of ten.

Another similarity was that we both had special diaries that held within them our favourite recipes. What more reason did I need to go through this culinary trove?

The book has been divided into two sections.

Cookies, Cakes and Bread

Savouries

The recipes in the first section have been chosen with care. Gina Basu regales her readers with heart-warming anecdotes. Starting with the Three-Ingredient Cookie, and Healthy Whole Wheat Dark Chocolate Cookies, she goes on to talk about rarer ingredients like Patali Gur or Date Palm jaggery and Gondhoraj Lebhu which is a special kind of lime with an out-of-the word citrusy fragrance.

What is attractive about the recipes in this book are that they are simple and quick to make. Given that Ginia Basu has a full-time job, it is appreciable that she makes time for her special hobby, and what is even better, has written a cookbook to make the lives of others easier as well.

The images are evocative – the Blueberry White Chocolate Muffins and Whole-wheat Rose Muffins look delicious, and one can almost smell the citrusy aroma of the Lemon Poppy Seed Loaf Cake and the Orange Cranberry Loaf Cake.

The savouries are simpler than the desserts above, be it the Mixed Bean Salad, the Savoury Muffins, the 15-Minute Veggie Soup or the Veggie Stir Fry. 

The most complicated dish here is the mouth-watering Stuffed Chicken Roast which the author created after going through many Internet recipes and tweaking them around – a golden and crispy-skinned chicken dish that she calls “fairly simple and easy” but one which “requires some pre-planning and loads of patience”.

This is an easy book to skim through. What stays with the reader is the fact that the author has gone beyond making this a cookery book through her accounts of her personal life, and what makes cooking the highlight of her life.

There are a few tiny errors that crop up now and then, but those can be overlooked, given the deliciousness of the recipes within.

Verdict: Highly readable with easy, yet effective recipes!

 


Comments

  1. GB5/25/2021 10:37:00 AM

    Thank you so much Deepti for this lovely and encouraging review. It feels good to know that somebody enjoyed my book. Hope you will try some of the recipes.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Unknown5/25/2021 10:44:00 AM

    It was a great read. Plus, I was the lucky one who got the chance to taste them all!! May God bless you Ginia.

    ReplyDelete

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