Great Tastes: Cooking (and Eating) from Morning to Midnight

The best word to describe Great Tastes is mediocrity. Danielle and Laura Kosann created a cookbook that does little to inspire the home cook to bother with any of the recipes. The recipes are well written and easy to follow with readily available ingredients, but they are the same old, same old such as egg Benedict, lime-blueberry pancakes, onion soup, and a Moscow mule. For many of the recipes, the authors preface the title with an “easy” that you may translate as “simple and plain.” The writing is insipid, recipe headnotes are hardly worth reading, and some recipe instructions are ambiguous. There are many, many one- or two-page stories scattered throughout, and these are equally lifeless—they are fillers the reader may read once but never again (e.g. When Paleo Meets Picasso, Keeping up with Kris Jenner). Photo illustrations don’t get higher marks either: the photography is weak, not many photos are eye-catching, and there are way too many awkwardly posed photos of the authors. Book design could also be improved: for example, the full pages of large-font, block-capital texts are distracting. The index is good and nicely cross-referenced.