Review: OVER THE YEARS I HAVE MADE MANY DIETRY CONCESSIONS AND LIMITED MUCH - HOTDOGS IS NOT ONE OF THEM AND NEVER WILL BE.
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 06 21, 2012
Other that the possibility of cheeseburgers, hotdogs are at the top of my list of favorite foods.  I am quite sure I had my first one at home; cooked by my mother, but the first one I can consciously remember eating was in 1948 at the old Bush Stadium in St. Louis, Mo. (My parents were fanatical Cardinal fans).  It was literally love at first bite.  Since that time I have eaten hotdogs in every geographical location of American - 39 of the lower 48 states and Alaska.  I have eaten them in at least four other countries.  Even the worse one I ever ate was actually good and I came back for seconds...well, actually in my case, it was thirds.  In addition to this, I have been cooking these things myself for years and years.Well, if the book being reviewed here has taught me anything, it is the fact that you can indeed teach an old dog new tricks...love puns almost as much as hotdog buns.Matt Thompson has given me much to think about with his offering of 25 delectable recipes for this most common of foods.  I have to admit that some of his culinary tricks were new to me and have enriched my enjoyment of something I already enjoyed greatly.  Of the 25 offerings here I did not find one that did not appeal to me.  We have actually tried several of them and have yet to have a failure.There were little thing such as marinating hotdogs that I had not thought of or tricks such as wrapping a potato curly cut potato around the dog.  While I had, in the past, tried many to most of the toppings, I had never thought of some of the innovative combinations of these toppings...Blue Cheese?  You bet...wonderful, wonderful, wonderful!Now this is a book on how to prepare hotdogs... that is hotdogs with buns.  The author goes through the various methods of cooking the hotdog itself; grilling, frying, broiling, baking, deep frying, etc. and then goes through the various methods of preparing the bun from steaming to grilling to frying.  The recipes are given in easy to understand steps which leave no doubt in the reader's mind as how to get the job done and done right.  The author has a wonderful informal and humorous way with words which makes the actually reading of the recipe book a delight.As for format, this is one of the best that I have ordered for my Kindle, and I have ordered many.  You can easily navigate from the index to the recipe and back again with a quick click of the button and use of the nice little curser. The author has also included a nice little and amusing history of the hotdog along with a list of abbreviations, food equivalents and a liquid conversion table.There is really a bit of something in this work for any and all hotdog fans.  If you don't like one recipe - well, there are plenty of others.  In addition I found that this book encouraged me to expand my hotdog making even further and do more experimentation.  Who know what I might come up with?If you, like me, love hotdogs, then this is the book for you.  It is also handy to have around even if you do not like them (gasp!) because chances are pretty good that you have family members or friends that do.Now before family, friends and people unknown jump all over me...I am fully aware that this is NOT a book dealing with health foods.  I make many concessions when it comes to food I like and as I grow older that list of concessions grows longer.  But he folks, there are limits; limits I have no intention of passing and hotdogs are one of those.Don BlankenshipThe Ozarks