Comfort Food

by Julia Bettelheim

There's nothing quite like Comfort Food to put a smile on your face and a feeling of contentment in your stomach. Chef Julia Bettelheim is passionate about feeding people; from the students in her university kitchen to guests and family at home. From recipes that are as simple as a sandwich to as technical as a fruit cake, she knows the importance of creating delicious meals that are full of flavour and which always have budget in mind. Her recipes include easy to make classics and mouth-watering family favourites, using easy to find products that are fresh and economical. Fun, fast, indulgent and nurturing, there's a time and a place for Comfort Food in every kitchen.

204 pages, Kindle Edition

Published February 13, 2018

Reviews

[Jasmine · Rating 4 out of 5]

Review coming soon!

[Mahathi · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the first cookbook that I am reviewing. I have read a few cookbooks after my studies but they were all in the text without images and were not interesting.

"Comfort food" book has a lot of recipes starting from soups, salads to main course and desserts. The pictures are stunning as well. All recipes are categorized and ordered to start with soups, continuing with the main course and ending with desserts. There are good options to try even for vegetarians. Some recipes have a foreword on how the author got the recipe idea, her inspiration or her thoughts on customizing the recipe for a specific taste.

I loved the soups and desserts section a lot. There are also some easy dinner recipes and all seem to be nutritious and not of diet type. I would like to try Potato pancakes and some other special dishes like Orange and coconut cupcakes, Mars Bar brownie and easy biscuits. There is a section of recipes specifically from England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales.

One thing I didn't like is that there are some ingredients in recipes which are not commonly used/ available in the USA but only at specific places. The author might have mentioned a brief about these ingredients. I had to search on Google for these. Even though the description is clear, it would have been effective if the steps are numbered or formatted in bullets.

Overall, a good cookbook with a variety of recipes and I recommend this to food lovers who like to try a variety of recipes.

My Rating: 4/5

PS: I have received this book from the author through Rachel's Random resources book tours and this is my honest opinion on the book.

[Angela Cramer · Rating 4 out of 5]

I received the cookbook as a gifted copy and in the cold of Michigan, looked forward to fixing Comfort Foods.

Just yesterday I posted a non-fiction book review and here I am posting my second.

You'd think a cookbook would be easy to review. You try several of the recipes following the directions and if they turn out, wha-la. But no. Things are not that easy peasy.

Every recipe looked and sounded delicious. Picking recipes to try was our first difficult task. The next difficult task was translating the book's recipes into Americanisms. Rather than grams, our food is packaged in pounds, even our canned food is different from what we discovered. However, since we needed to double most of the recipes it worked well in that regard.

Bettelheim states that the recipes can be used by beginners, but as we discovered, this is not necessarily a true statement. One of the recipes we tried does not tell you when cheese should be added to the dish. Now, it is entirely possible New Zealand and UK children are taught things in the kitchen we are not, but I can only go by what the recipe stated. Unfortunately, we found this to be true in several of the recipes as if there was a step, not necessarily missing but knowledge we lacked.

Of course we found desserts to be the most favorable, but the Irish stew has been requested a second time as have the sausage rolls.