Author(s): Crescent Dragonwagon
Publisher: Workman Publishing Company
Publication Date: 1992-01-05
Pages: 416
Review: And it was just the beginning. I have loved all her books. They offer wonderful recipes, stories, and don’t need all the photos. Her works are wholistic in that her writing is a comfort to the spirit and soul while the foods feed the body.Although many of these recipes look good, I am put off by the LONG lists of ingredients, especially on the soups. I will try some of the recipes, but with my own editing of ingredients. Will admit I have not tried anything yet…I specifically ordered one of the above books… over the next 2 weeks I received a total of SEVEN (7) of the exact same book. I returned four (4) of them and used the remaining two (2) extra for Christmas presents.

Your associate on the phone was an idiot and told me that I clicked on the wrong button, but could not explain why any sane person would order the same exact book via seven different orders - all on seperate days!!

I expect credit for the 4 books I returned and a detailed explanation of the above button I allegedly clicked on.

Thank you,

Kenneth J. De VitoFun to read the anecdotes and stories from the inn that are interspersed throughout the book. I am a gourmet cook but I connot emphasize enough how much I hate to bake. Due to my disasterous history with baking I don’t even make birthday cakes and I don’t make Christmas cookies. HOWEVER, there are two things for which I will make an exception; they are both in this book. The Rabbit Hill Inn Oatmeal-Molasses Bread makes the best cinnamon toast you will ever, ever eat. (Just try not to eat the whole loaf at one sitting.) And the Raisin-Pumpernickel Bread with a Secret is just divine. The flavors are strong enough that the bread is distinctive and wonderful but not overpowering. I promise you, you will NOT be disappointed.A neighbor and I trade cookbooks. She lent me The Dairy Hollow House Soup & Bread: A Country Inn Cookbook. I loved this book so I went out and bought my own copy! While reading my new book, I immediately found a number of recipes that I wanted to try. I first baked “Raisin Pumpernickel Bread with a Secret”. It was absolutely delicious and the extra loaves were shared with neighbors and friends. One thing that I especially liked about this book is that as I was reading it, I felt such warmth, love and kindness emanating from it. This book has such personal touches, from the asides about life and experiences as an innkeeper to the interesting introductions with each of the recipes, that I felt as though the author was talking to me as another friend who obviously loved food and cooking as much as I did. Even after I put the book down, the warmth stayed with me for a long time. I recommend this book to everyone who has a passion for cooking, especially with a friend.
Price: $14.95   Buy This Book

Author(s): B. J. Hanson, Jeanne Hanson
Publisher: Adams Media
Publication Date: 2002-09-01
Pages: 304
Review: The title is not lying. So many soups! No pictures though, and that’s a little disappointing (but this whole series lacks pictures so…not unexpected.) Very handy go-to soup book.there is a lot to chose from but yet to find a soup i really enjoyed alot of basic riecpesThe Everything Soup Cookbook offers the kitchen cook “kitchen friendly” recipes for 300 different kinds of homemade soup. Nicely organized into vegetable and pasta soups; meat soups and stews; bean, grain, and nut soups; fruit soups; cold soups; and soup accompaniments, these are easy-to-prepare recipes that can be created using everyday ingredients commonly found in any kitchen pantry. From Chicken and Coconut Soup; Beef and Onions in Red Wine Soup; and Italian Cheese Soup; to Black Bean Soup with Curry; Potato and Vegetable Chowder; and Cauliflower Soup with Coriander, The Everything Soup Cookbook is a useful and welcome addition to the kitchen cookbook collection.
Price: $14.95   Buy This Book

Author(s): Cookbook Resources
Publisher: Cookbook Resources(TX)
Publication Date: 2009-03-01
Pages: 319
Review: I LOVE this cookbook! There are a wide variety of easy and delicious soup recipes that my family really enjoys. The ingredients are not complicated and the prep time is minimal. This is a keeper!
Price: $16.95   Buy This Book

Author(s): Mollie Katzen, Ann L. Henderson
Publisher: Tricycle Press
Publication Date: 1994-03-01
Pages: 96
Review: Besides providing easy-to-make and appealing recipes, this clearly-illustrated book teaches reading and counting skills. It’s a marvelous book. My granddaughter made popovers for her first dish, and everyone loved them.I love this book. It is really helpful if you are a preschool teacher. The pictures help with sequencing and literacy developement. The recipes taste good, too.My daughter, at almost eight, is about ready to graduate to a more difficult cookbook, so it seems like a good time to look back and review the book that started her kitchen explorations.

Pretend Soup is a charmer — a very straightforward cookbook you can use with even the youngest kids. Katzen includes some baking - popovers, “surprise” muffins with berries tucked inside, etc. - well as side dishes like glazed carrots and sauteed zucchini. There are some “no cook” recipes as well, like smoothies, fruit dip, homemade soda pop, and fruit kabobs.

Recipes include a grown-up section with standard recipe format, including ingredient lists and measurements, and a kid section with very simple instructions and step-by-step drawings showing what to do. Nota bene — READ THE GROWN-UP SECTION BEFORE YOU START! My husband learned this the hard way — the kid instructions aren’t complete.

Everything tastes pretty good, and it’s all made with real ingredients, no processed foods or canned frosting or some of the other nonsense you’ll find in other kid cookbooks. If anything, it errs on the side of being a little TOO virtuous — my daughter wanted to make the carrot pennies and zucchini coins, but she wasn’t interested in eating them! It’s also all vegetarian, if that matters to you. There are plenty of helpful tips on kitchen safety, and on how to relax and let the kids do it themselves, even if they make a mess. Parents will enjoy the quotes from Katzen’s panel of young testers at the start of each recipe.

It’s a great way for very young kids to learn how to have fun in the kitchen. Take the “preschoolers” in the title seriously — mid-elementary students who can read on their own might find it babyish. I got Pretend Soup and Salad People for my four-year-old niece for Christmas, along with a child’s pink apron and chef’s hat. They were a hit! She really likes to help in the kitchen and I looked at a lot of childrens’ cooking books before deciding on these. Other books required the child to be a reader already or had lots of recipes for desserts and sweets and such. These books seemed to have healthier recipes in them than some of the others on the market.

The layout for these books is this: each recipe is four pages long. The first two pages are for the adult involved to read. The second two pages are simply drawn step-by-step visual instructions for the child to follow. Mollie Katzen does the artwork in these books and it’s very charming.

M. Katzen has another book for children, Honest Prezels, which I think is for a little older crowd…maybe eight or so…I look forward to getting that one for my niece when she’s ready for it.Pretend Soup (and Katzen’s other book for preschoolers, Salad People) is a book of recipes designed to be “read” and made by little ones (with help from their grown-ups). The recipes, which include selections appropriate for any meal of the day, are nutritious, straightforward, and toddler-proof: nothing will collapse or taste awful if your little one stirs too long or not long enough. The ingredients are vegetarian and include a nice array of fruits and veggies. The main improvement I’d suggest is using whole grain flour, since the recipes assume white (start out with 1/2 whole wheat pastry and 1/2 white, if you’d like; you can also substitute spelt flour with good result).

The reason I love this book is that I am a working mother with a long commute, and I detest having to spend even 20-30 minutes of my evening making dinner while my tired husband tries to keep our son distracted. It seems a waste of family time. Pretend Soup turns cooking into a lovely chance to spend time with my little guy, and he snacks on the ingredients as we go which keeps him from starving and is really healthy. It isn’t haute cuisine, and since I love to cook really good food I’m a bit wistful, but the results are tasty enough to satisfy myself and my husband. I’m still working on smoothly incorporating this, and rounding it out with grown-up salads and other options, but I can’t say how glad I am for this strategy.

Also, I’ve noticed it is hard for working parents to find time to teach our kids basic life skills (like cooking). Pretend Soup & the follow-up Salad People are a good step in that direction!
Price: $17.95   Buy This Book

Author(s): Leslie Kaul, Bob Spiegel, Peter Siegel, Carla Ruben, Robin Vitetta-miller
Publisher: Hyperion
Publication Date: 1999-11-10
Pages: 272
Review: I love this cookbook. I have made about 10 soups from it bc after eating the Moroccan butternut squash I ended up making it about 5 times over. I need to move on bc I know there are so many more amazing recipes to make!I decided this winter that I was going to learn to make spectacular soup. I always wanted to be one of those women who could just pop over with some chicken noodle soup for a sick friend or family member. My mom makes great soup just by fiddling around with this and that, but I’ve never learned the art. Therefore, my soups were always bland since my msg allergy prevents me from throwing in a bouillon cube and calling it a day.

When my family got sick, I decided to try my luck at soup making again, this time with my Daily Soup Cookbook chicken noodle soup recipe (a variation on their chicken matzoh ball soup). Wow, was it ever great - without making any adjustments to the recipe! I went through the trouble of making my own stock (using the Daily Soup recipe with a wonderful technique I learned for broth making from “The Perfect Recipe” by Pam Anderson, which involves sautéing the chicken pieces with onion before simmering them) and then turning that stock into soup. My whole family was making yummy sounds, and they didn’t stop when I tried two more recipes, the Beef Barley soup (a variation on their Chicken Barley) and the Winter Minestrone soup. Finally, I had soup that was as good as my mom made!

I made the broth and the soup in the same day, so it was quite time consuming. I would highly recommend making the broth on one day and the soup on another. I don’t think the soup would be quite as delicious without homemade broth, but I still think it would be lots better than my previous homemade attempts.

I highly recommend this book to anyone who wants to learn how to make really great soup.

(review by Mrs. Scott)

I love this book and have given it as a gift. Although I knew my way around the kitchen, thanks to The Daily Soup, now I know my way around soup. The book is readable and fun, taking any mysteries out of soup-making and encouraging improvisation. I also like its variety with some simple soups (like Tomato Basil–made surprisingly–without basil) and some more unusual (like Moroccan Chicken Curry with Couscous).We’ve loved almost every soup we’ve tried. Now that we’ve learned how to make substitutions (like Swanson’s broth as opposed to homemade, etc.), many recipes are very simple AND just as tasty. If you truly love soup, this cookbook is for you.I had sworn not to add any additional cookbooks to my collection. I came across this one and broke my own rule to myself and have been glad that I did. This is a perfect cookbook. I’ve found that for my lifestyle, soups is the way to go, and none of the recipes has been a dud. Quite the opposite. I have decided to go through the entire book and do every recipe in the book.

Many of the recipes call for the use of thyme leaves, an herb that I had not used much. I am now very comfortable with it and appreciate the flavor that it brings to these recipes.

Tried so far with great success: The cream-less asparagus soup ( buy frozen asparagus, don’t try to peel and chop 2 lbs. of fresh asparagus…takes too long), Cuban black bean ( I had three cans of black beans and one can of chick peas from a close-out sale …so I left out the salt that the recipe calls for and substituted the already prepared beans. Note: there is a minor flaw in the recipe. First, it has been proven since the book was written that you can add salt to the beans, the beans won’t toughen from the salt. But tomatoes or other acids do toughen beans and I wouldn’t add any tomatoes, canned, fresh or otherwise until I was certain my beans were cooked and tender), French onion soup (really good. I roasted my onions in the oven per the instructions).
Price: $18.95   Buy This Book

Author(s): Marjorie Druker, Clara Silverstein
Publisher: Thomas Nelson
Publication Date: 2007-09-11
Pages: 256
Review: Bought this book from a local bookstore as a ‘bargain’ book, reduced price. Never heard of the place before, but reading through the recipes, they looked pretty good, so I thought why not? Realized right away it was indeed a bargain. So much bang for the buck! I especially love the organization of this book - 4 chapters devoted to seasonal eating, one for chowders, one for cheese, one for chicken and one for seafood. There are many more chapters (including ones dedicated to accompaniments like sandwiches and salads), but these are among my favorites. Now that it’s summer, we are sipping on some of her fantastic cold soups…the Cucumber/Avocado/Lime soup is absolutely divine! Super simple to make, no cooking, perfect for a hot summer day and man what a flavor! I would certainly have paid full price for this book, it’s the best all around soup cookbook I’ve seen or own. If you are a soup lover, you will not be disappointed. There are over 100 recipes in this book, most of which are fast becoming staples in my kitchen…but even if you can only find just one recipe you like (rather impossible I think though) makes this whole book worth buying. It’s really that good! Luckily for me, I read some 5-star reviews of this cookbook that prompted me to buy it, and I haven’t been disappointed. Yeah, I also thought that calling for bouillion cubes in a stock recipe was really odd, but I’ve got ten other cookbooks with good stock recipes (the bones from a couple of roasted chickens, an onion, a bay leaf, a few sprigs of thyme and a lazy Saturday afternoon in my opinion is all you really need for a delicious stock). I’m a real soupmaking junkie, have many, many soup cookbooks and love trying not-so-usual soup recipes. I’ve only tried a few so far from this book, but I’ve marked another dozen or more to try soon because they look and sound amazing. Many of them have just small amounts of some fairly subtle ingredients (they love sherry) that convinces me the authors of these recipes have a very refined palate, an excellent sense of proportion and a great feel for which flavors blend harmoniously. One recipe that immediately became my all-time favorite is the Pumpkin Soup with Sherried Cranberries. I made it with butternut squash vs. fresh pumpkin (it also calls for a bit of canned pumpkin), but otherwise I didn’t change a thing and the results were divine. Usually, recipes require a bit of fiddling to finetune the proportions, but not this one. It was so great, in fact, that I made a triple batch and froze/vac-sealed quart-sized blocks for Christmas gifts for everyone at the office. Everyone’s still raving about the results. Looking forward to making another recipe from the book this weekend.For the last several years, I have been collecting soup recipes. What better way to add good taste and nutrition to one’s diet! For that reason, I looked forward to Marjorie Druker’s soup cookbook. Her soup recipes seem reasonable, but I decided not to pursue these after reading her recipes for stock. Why would one go to the effort and expense of making stock from scratch and then add 4 chicken bouillon cubes for chicken stock, 4 beef bouillon cubes for beef stock, or 4 - 6 vegetable bouilon cubes for vegetable stock? It makes no sense to me.

I am not a culinary purist, but bouillon cube stock recipes are what I would call oxymoronic.

New England Soup Factory Cookbook: More Than 100 Recipes from the Nation’s Best Purveyor of Fine Soup

We visited New England to see the leaves in October. While shopping in a quaint town, my friend and I discovered that we had both picked up the same soup cookbook. We both bought it. It was truly a wonderful find. I have probably made 10 of the soups so far and my family asks which one I’m going to make next and when! I follow the recipes exactly with one exception — instead of cream, I puree non-fat cottage cheese. My guess is, it doesn’t change the flavor because everything has tasted great with it. The hand blender is a must for many of the recipes. I ran to the drugstore and got one for $14.98 and it works really well.

Oh! And the recipes make a lot but none of it has been wasted. And my Mom and married daughter are very good about bringing back my tupperware — if they don’t, they don’t get the next soup! My husband is quite happy because he has always loved soup.I have never written a review before, but after reading a negative review that specifically mentioned the chicken n rice flu chaser soup, i was compelled! I wish I didn’t have to make it again, but my husband and I finished our big pot last wkend and I need more! Someone mentioned the unusual mix flavors ended up tasting weird (lemon, cinammon, garlic, etc) , I’d say “complex” in all the right ways. Sweet, tart, spicy and hot. So much better than your average chicken soup. Going to the market this afternoon to get started on pot #2!
Price: $24.99   Buy This Book

Author(s): Reader’s Digest
Publisher: Readers Digest
Publication Date: 2007-11-08
Pages: 544
Review: This is a good book for soups. It has a little commentary above each soup which enhances interest. Also helpful is the number of servings.I have never seen such a good collection of soup, stew and chowder recipes all in one place. They are simple enough thay almost anyone could make them, and the ones I’ve tried so far have gone over very well with my family. There is a huge variety, so no matter what you like, you’ll find it in this book.After reading the reviews here on Amazon I decided to seek out this book. I very much enjoy a good bowl of soup and I had high hopes that this cookbook would expand my horizons in home-made soup making without breaking the bank or sending me to an exotic foods market. This book has absolutely met my expectations.

The cover states that there are over 900 recipes contained within. This is not just soup recipes, but it also includes recipes for side dishes such as breads and salads. The collection in this section is not huge but there are a lot of good ideas in there.

The chapters break up the book into several logical sections: Stocks/Broths, Cold Soup, Chicken and Turkey, Meat, Chilies, Fish/Seafood, Chowder and Cheese, Vegetable, Beans/Lentils, Noodles/Rice/Barley, and of course the side dishes. There are some overlaps amongst the chapters, but this is to be expected.

Each recipe is short, to the point and simple. Most recipes to not require things that would not normally be in the house, though a few have such fun ingredients as venison and rabbit, which might require a little more effort to obtain. The directions are clear and leave nothing to the imagination.

So, how do the recipes turn out when followed? Every soup I have tried from this book has been a big hit with my family, to the point that I am asked to make double pots of soup so that my wife does not need to cook for a couple of days.

Soup is the ultimate winter-time comfort food. Homemade soup is better tasting and better for you than the canned variety, and with this book you can find recipes to make your favorite soup with minimal fuss and effort. If you are at all interested in making good soups and you buy only one book on the subject, consider making that one book this one.Great soup cookbook, tons of recipes that are easy and dont require alot of exotic ingredients. Only down point is there aren’t alot of pictures.Wonderful soups that are healthy and tasteful. Nothing spells love better home made soup on cold day.
Price: $24.95   Buy This Book