Culinary Concepts: 100 Recipes and Tips for the Home Chef Book

I love the tone of this book--especially sensible and wry, and great, I would think, for beginner cooks or anyone who needs a little nudge into regular, undramatic home cooking. There's plenty of offhand wisdom dispensed on all sorts of topics--onions, eggs, cookware, etc.

The weak link is the recipes, which all seem a bit more dowdy than they have to be. It's good they're simple, to match the tone of the book, but they're largely uninspiring. But this may be due to the fact that I'm beyond basic cooking levels.