Writers of Color 50 Books Challenge

Amazon info here. 

I have been putting this review off.  I love Chinese food and I wanted to read a cookbook by someone of Chinese heritage, especially for homestyle Chinese cooking.  I love homestyle Chinese cooking.  I have several recipes or two from friends and there is a neighborhood restaurant that does a few homestyle dishes. 

I had heard that this book was good, but doable, and not banquet style fancy food.  It is written by Kylie Kwong, an Australian with Chinese heritage. 

Unfortunately, I just didn't enjoy the recipes in this book.  It is huge (actually much too large and heavy to be a comfortable cookbook and is awkward to use) and full of very glossy finished recipes.  That can be motivational, but I mostly wound up frustrated, because while the food looked good, I found the results to be rather boring and bland.  There aren't very many recipes, actually, and one particular method of cooking (a sort of sweet ginger sauce) was shown in pork, beef, chicken, tofu, and so on.  It would have been nice if instead of wasting all those pages on a repeat of the same recipe, if she'd shown something different and simply said: substitute pork, beef, etc.  I felt that for such a large book (it's huge and weighs a ton) it should have had more recipes.  Many of the meat types just have a couple methods of cooking them. 

It's not a bad book.  The recipes are just...bland.  Boring.  Things I could get off the internet at About.com Chinese Cooking.  Er.  I feel terrible saying that.  But it's true, at least for me, that there wasn't anything in this book that I felt was especially noteworthy or tasty.  The writing wasn't especially good, either, and I feel very bad for saying that. 

It got good reviews at Amazon, so some people do like it.  It didn't work for me.  What it did make me realize, though, is that most of the books that were recommended to me about Chinese food were written by non-Chinese folks.  I ended up scouring Amazon some more and have acquired Breath of the Wok and a few others.  It was more effort than I expected to find Chinese cookbooks written by people of Chinese descent.