Chocolate: 50 Easy Recipes Hardcover – Bargain Price, January 19, 2016

Cute book. Looks great on my shelf. Book has nice recipes and pictures. The cover was peeling and falling off when I received it.

Nice sturdy book. Gave as a gift. Full color photos are nice. Was turned off when I opened the box to find a book with sticky fingerprints on it, but it cleaned off.

What we expected. Quick simple sauces for pasta. Good for a new cook.

Nice book.

Am I the only one who's never cooked with aniseed-based liqueur, porcini mushrooms, pigs' cheek (guanciale), or Grana Padano cheese? Or baked something in a bain-marie (hot water bath, apparently)? I encountered all these items before thumbing through even the first half the book!This book contains recipes such as "Broccoli Flan with Anchovy Sauce" (you have to de-salt the anchovies, with no explanation of how to do such a thing), "Triptych of Quail Eggs" (which requires caviar in addition to actual quail eggs), and "Vanilla Semifreddo" (which requires "fish glue" ???). These recipes are indeed as complicated and involved as they sound. Most of the recipes in this book (save maybe 3 or 4) are not something your budding teenage cook, or indeed anyone less than a well-experienced cook, could handle.On the other side of the spectrum, this book includes a recipe for making soft-boiled eggs and one for fried eggs. Yes, the first just involves placing the eggs in a pan with water, bringing it to a boil, and simmering for "1 to 3 minutes, depending on how soft you like them." And for fried eggs it lists the steps: heat butter in a frying pan, crack an egg into it, and cook until the white has set. Seriously, those are the directions. It doesn't even explain how to do an "over easy" egg, or other methods for more fully cooking (like covering the pan while the egg cooks).There is also a recipe for "Beef Tartare With Raw Yolk of Egg," which involves eating completely uncooked beef and a raw egg, without mentioning any of the risks of disease involved with both of those items.Besides the recipes and ingredients and potential risk of serious illness, I take serious issue with some of the information about eggs that this book delivers as fact in its introduction. It says an egg should not be eaten if it was laid more than two weeks earlier, and that uncooked eggs "should be washed to prevent them absorbing substances that might speed up their deterioration." In fact, the eggs you buy at the grocery store are likely two weeks old already (google it!), but not to worry, because eggs last much, much longer than that, especially if refrigerated (google that, too).On the second point, washing, here in the US we don't have a choice when buying supermarket eggs - they are required to be washed in a sanitizing solution. This sounds like a good idea (and it is for commercially produced eggs in the US because of how much fecal matter gets on them in our huge chicken factories and how common salmonella is in those same factories), but it actually removes the cuticle, or "bloom", that an egg gets coated with just as it exits the chicken. This bloom is a fantastic barrier against bacteria being absorbed through the hundreds of tiny pores in the eggshell. It makes sense when you think about it, because in nature a chicken wouldn't want her eggs to be susceptible to bacteria while the chick develops inside! As an egg is laid, it is clean and free of fecal contamination - that only happens after it's out of the chicken, and can be minimized (and often avoided entirely) by good husbandry practices. So if you happen to be lucky enough to have backyard chickens, or to get your eggs from someone who does, it's a better idea not to wash the eggs unless they are visually "dirty."For more information on washing and refrigerating eggs, google "Americans refrigerating eggs" to find some very enlightening facts, and to discover why it is actually illegal in Europe for commercial egg producers to do either of those things ,and yet the eggs in their grocery stores are at least as safe and clean as ours.I gave this book two stars, though, because it is very cute, shaped like an egg , and the page quality is good. It rests open fairly well (at least my copy does) at the page you want, making it easier to cook with. But overall, I wouldn't recommend it, and I'm going to try to sell my copy used on Amazon (and see if anyone buys it after reading this review!).

perfect

beautiful

Excellent book....very easy to do recipes, must have for Any self respecting egg lover. Was delivered quickly, nicely wrapped and in very good condition