Review: Some useful, some not
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 10 12, 2012
Collection of sandwich recipes, sent to the publisher by readers of their earlier cookbooks.I picked up this book free during an Amazon giveaway. Some of the recipes have potential but haven't been thought through, such as the Sunday Morning Sandwiches that call for slicing a large circular egg mixture into wedges - ill suited to placing on a round bun. Cooking the pork for Pulled Pork Sandwiches for 1-1/2 hours after shredding would drain the meat of all flavor. The ingredient lists and directions are mostly clear, although there were minor goofs in some of the directions. (For instance, by not instructing the cook to bake the rolls in Italian Sausage Sandwiches while preparing the sausages, the sausages will wind up sitting in the pan and getting cold while the buns are prepared. An experienced cook will recognize this problem ahead of time and adjust the directions herself; none of the Gooseberry Patch cookbooks are suitable for beginning cooks. Given that limitation, I'm not sure there is a point in including some standard recipes, such as the Reuben Sandwich, which the experienced cook will already know.) Several recipes gave various fillings the Monte Cristo treatment - not a terrible idea but I'm not sure it actually adds anything. I'm also not sure what the point is of including a BBQ sauce recipe, given the enormous number of sauce recipes available elsewhere and the low cost and high variety of commercial BBQ sauces. Some of the recipes should come out fine, such as the Layered Italian Sandwiches which is very similar to one of my personal favorite recipes that I obtained from an Italian restaurant decades ago. Shredded Chicken Sandwiches reappear here from the RV Cookbook, and should work much better in a conventional kitchen. BBQ Meat Loaf Sandwiches should appeal to those who like meat loaf sandwiches. As always, there were a number of recipes that didn't sound like tasty combinations to me - crab, mushrooms, caraway, and Swiss? A Poor Boy with roast beef as the only meat? I've had a BLT with avocado (the California BLT) and the avocado flavor is completely lost. This was better than most of the Gooseberry Patch cookbooks I've seen but still only 50% useful at best. I was delighted and astounded to see that this book FINALLY includes an active table of contents that interfaces perfectly with the Kindle navigation menu. This increases its usefulness 100-fold and I can't imagine why the publishers haven't added it to earlier books as well.