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The Spice Kitchen: Everyday Cooking with Organic Spices

DESCRIPTION
Organics and spice make everything nice.....
'The Spice Kitchen' offers more than one hundred delicious recipes for using herbs and spices to add vibrant flavors to your food at breakfast, lunch, dinner, and any time in between. From Spiced Yogurt and Granola Parfaits, to Strawberry Salad with Cinnamon-Balsamic Vinaigrette, Spiced Guacamole, Tarragon Chicken Potpie, Clove Spiced Caramel Corn, and more, this exciting cookbook is full of inventive recipes, information, and tips for using herbs and spices. Best of all, the recipes are easy and fuss free--a must for busy home cooks who want to spend less time in the kitchen and more time at the family table. And with dozens of full-color photographs and illustrations, 'The Spice Kitchen' is as beautiful as it is practical.

'The Spice Kitchen' changes everything, using herbs and spices to add special twists to favorite family recipes, from macaroni and cheese, to burgers, chicken salad, deviled eggs, and much more. It's the only all-purpose cookbook for spicing up everyday meals. Not just exotic extras, spices from around the world make it easier--and much more fun--to turn out delicious and healthy food. The simple but flavorful recipes and ideas in 'The Spice Kitchen' will make old family favorites new again--and bring everyone to the table.

REVIEW
'The Spice Kitchen' is a good introduction to the use of spice for those who have been timid of doing so. An apt description from the back cover is that this book is "a fresh new way to make everyday foods more delicious...."
Hence, most of the recipes consist of an already-familiar dish that has been jazzed up with the addition of one or few spices. I find this to be a good approach for those who are inexperienced in using spices. The chance of success is high, compared to something like a complex Indian curry. It also allows the novice to clearly taste the effect of the spice.
Some dishes that illustrate this approach include:
~ Curried Deviled Eggs with cumin, coriander and turmeric.
~ Popcorn spiced with Creole seasoning.
~ Caramel corn with cloves.
~ Cheeseburgers with ancho chile and lemon zest.
~ Potato salad with fennel seed and dill weed.

While there are a few recipes that include a more complex blend of spices (Jamaica Jerk Chicken, Tandoori Chicken Skewers with Curry Butter sauce), most recipes are fairly simple. For this reason, cooks already experienced with the use of spices will probably find this book a bit lacking.

The ultimate goal of this book was to provide ways to spice up simple daily home cooking, and it meets that goal. The book is also visually appealing and well-written. Combined with a rack of spices, it would make a good gift for less experienced cooks.
Joe MacBu (amazon.com)

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Sara Engram and Katie Luber are the cofounders of The Seasoned Palate, Inc., based in Baltimore, Maryland. Their company specializes in packaging organic spices in one-teaspoon packets for convenience and freshness. Their tsp spices line is sold in more than three hundred retail stores in the United States, Canada, and Europe, and their Smart Spice brand is sold in supermarkets throughout the United States.