Review: Meet Me in My Cape Cod Kitchen by Linda Maria Steele

Title: Meet Me in My Cape Cod Kitchen: Recipes for Seaside Living
Author: Linda Maria Steele
Format: egalley
Pub. Date: November 28th 2015
Source: Netgalley


Book Description:

With more than 60 delicious recipes, this book celebrates sharing good food with family and friends, inspired by the sweetness of living by the beach. Accompanied by food photography and beautiful Cape Cod landscapes, chapters focus on baked goods such as cakes, cookies, quick breads, cheesecake and biscotti, as well as appetizers, entrees, and salads and even summertime-perfect drinks. Many of the easy-to-follow recipes rely on seasonal and regional ingredients, such as Linda's Supreme Lemon Cake, Cape Cod Cranberry Loaf, Turkey and Cranberry Empanadas, Linda's Simple Lobster Salad, and Bella's Raspberry Tea. Children will enjoy helping with treats such as Nana's No-Fail Sugar Cookie Recipe, which the author makes with lobster-shaped cookie cutters. This celebration of Cape Cod focuses on gratitude for simple pleasures and includes reflections on life in a seaside community.

Review:

★★

One and a half stars.

I've got to be honest, I'm super disappointed in this one. I picked it up because I used to live in Massachusetts, and I miss the food on the coast. This didn't deliver.

The recipes are sorted by course. Chapters include topics such as "The Art of the Appetizer", "Thirst Quenchers", and "The Joy of Salad". But, there's not always much meat to them, so to speak. Cheesecake, for example, has a whole chapter, but there's only two recipes in it. So, not much of a point there.

Let's talk about the good parts of the recipes. They're pretty straight forward, with easy to follow, numbered instructions. It's approachable, and not very intimidating. That'd be good if I were new to cooking. There's also a lot of personal touches throughout the book. There's little stories and poems in between the recipes. It sets a nice tone.

Now, the not so good. The pictures are awful. They're really small, and they're not even high quality. They look like photos taken off a stock page or website. There's also a lot of clip art. I don't know why there needs to be clip art, it makes it look unprofessional and dated.

I'm also disappointed that in a Cape Cod focused cookbook, there's literally only 5 seafood recipes. And one of those is for breaded fillets.

Normally, at the end of a cookbook review, I pick the three recipes that I think sound the best to highlight. I usually have more than three, but pare it down. This is a rare time where I only found two recipes that sounded worth making.

Those recipes would be Turkey and Cranberry Empanadas and Chocolate Chip Pumpkin Cheesecake.

All in all, this is a book I was super excited for. But the weird clip art and the "meh" recipes make it come off like a book put together by a classroom or Girl Scout troop as opposed to a published one. I wouldn't recommend it.

I was given a copy of this book in exchange for my honest review.