Most of the food that we cook on a daily basis tends towards the simple and the quick – not because we don’t like to cook, but because there isn’t always time to get through a really involved recipe for every meal. But that doesn’t mean that you have to compromise on flavor or on quality. Tyler’s Ultimate: Brilliant Simple Food to Make Any Time is a book that is written with that in mind, and is full of recipes that draw the most flavor out of familiar dishes. The concept is based on the fact that it doesn’t really take that much more work to have a great meal than an average one, so why not spend the few extra minutes of prep time to make every meal memorable.
The book covers all the basic courses, from appetizers through desserts, and separates them into categories with short and sometimes cute names, like “surf” and “turf”. The recipes vary widely, with flavors from different cultures in different dishes, but as a whole the recipes serve to give you a huge variety of foods and flavors to choose from (because we don’t always like to cook straight from a theme in our own kitchens). The photos are mouthwatering and the food sounds so flavorful when you’re reading through the pages that it will almost make your mouth water. Fortunately, the recipes are easy to follow along with.
This is the kind of book that you might turn to again and again for ideas, whether you’re just making dinner or want to do some entertaining, because the recipes are accessible and still offer you a lot of flavor for the amount of effort you put in. For instance, the Ultimate Chicken Wings with Curry Lime Butter aren’t any more difficult than other chicken wing recipes, but that bright, spicy sauce puts them over the edge into being something special.
What do you think?