Simply Salad: The Complete Series Book

This book is both satisfyingly broad (pickles! bacon! crackers! pasta! jam! limoncello di crema!) and disappointingly shallow. with a title like "jam it, pickle it" I expected quite a few more jam and pickle recipes. three jam recipes (and one "curd") and four pickle recipes is a bit of a let-down. what's here sounds fabulous -- I'm off to secure several pounds of fresh olives this fall for my own cured olives, and I'll try many of the liqueur recipes -- and the photography is stunning and will, I'm sure, inspire many a reluctant jam-pickle-curer.

the big drawback of this book is that it embraces an out-of-the-grocery-store philosophy and yet skips many of the important lessons (there's no talk about eating the the seasons, for instance, nor can a budding home preserver have a clue how to deal with large quantities of, say, fruit off a backyard tree, or an *entire* salmon, despite the rather oddly titled chapter, "hunt it") and suggests using many grocery store ingredients, like canned tomatoes (even though canning one's own tomatoes is, in my opinion, preserving 101). the book is inspirational and cute and crafty. a bible of preservation methods it is not. most definitely belongs as a coffee table complement to a very robust preserving library.