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Simple Mexican Cooking Cookbook Review - 96 pages - $12.95 USD




Are you looking for an easy to use, straight forward, no nonsense Mexican recipe book? One that has a lot of color photos? Then take a look at this one from trusted Better Homes and Gardens. This is a quality book about Mexican cooking that originally came out with the title Today's Easy Mexican Cooking. This cookbook is on the small size with 96 pages. It contains 75 authentic Mexican recipes presented in an easy to understand manner. A great feature of this book is that it has a lot of photographs. Nearly every recipes has a large colour photo to show you exactly what the finished plate will look like. As you can imagine, this is a huge help in selecting the recipes you're interested in.

The main organization of the book is that the recipes are divided into the following categories: This turns out to be handy for quickly pointing you to the correct part of the book for the type of Mexican food you're interested in making. Also, the section of the book is clearly marked on every page across the top.

Here's a sampling of the types of recipes you'll make with this book: Now let's take a look at the specific information you'll find in this book for a typical recipe:
  1. Recipe title
  2. Background information on the recipe

  3. Just a short sentence or two about the origins of the meal, or whether it's served at breakfast, lunch, or dinner time.
  4. Time required to make the recipe

  5. This amount of time could include preparation time, cooking time, and even rising time all when applicable - time listed separately.
  6. List of ingredients

  7. This is indented and printed using bold text to make it easy to read at a glance.
  8. Preparation steps

  9. These are clearly marked with a long gray bar - preparation information is quite detailed as required.
  10. Nutrition Information - Nutrition Facts

  11. These days, more and more people are paying attention to and reading the nutrition facts printed on the packaging of all the food we buy. While many recipes and recipe books don't currently include this data, this book has per serving information on calories, protein, carbohydrates, fat content, cholesterol, fiber, and sodium. Not often included, this is valuable and information for dietary conscious individuals.
Many of the recipes are accompanied by large, detailed, color photos of the finished entree. All the photos have a descriptive caption so it's clear to you exactly which recipe it is.

As you browse through the book, every so often you find a black box with some useful tip or other information to assist you in preparing Mexican food dishes. These tips run the gamut from peeling and handling chile peppers, to warming tortillas properly, to interesting snips like the role of corn in Mexican cooking.

At the front of the book is a section describing the basic foods used in Mexican cooking. This section is an interesting introduction to many of the distinct ingredients that can be unique to popular Mexican dishes. You get a half dozen pages of Mexican food ingredients including a full description / definition of the items, pronunciation, what it's used for, how it tastes, etc. Many of the items have color photos for easy identification. There's a page on Mexican cheeses, explaining the uses for a variety of cheese, with pronunciation and tips on where to buy. Over a dozen different types of chile peppers are described. Color photographs are included so you can easily identify them, and they talk about how hot or mild each pepper will tend to be and what Mexican dishes you can typically use the hot chile peppers in.