The Outcome: Cooking For One: Now You're Cookin'

So, I've now tried five new recipes from Cooking For One: Now You're Cookin'. I tried to cook them as close to possible to the recipes, so here's the outcome.

The Verdict is:

Where it belongs

Pretty objectively terrible - I don't even want to fob it off on someone else, since it's just straight up a bad cookbook. The "best" recipe was the Tomato and Cucumber Salad, which was tasty but pretty rudimentary. The Cod Curry was fine but nothing special, but then things started to go steeply downhill from there. The Exotic Potato Pudding was edible but utterly bizarre - pineapple and potato are not natural bedfellows and I don't even think this recipe knew if was a dessert or an entree. Things took a turn for the terrible with the Spinach Risotto - microwaving it for half and hour doesn't get you a nice risotto, it gets you burnt rice, a puddle of water in the bottom of the nuker, and the potential for an electrical fire.

The Fillet of Pork with Banana was the culmination of all the worst aspects of this cookbook. It was a weird, slightly-off flavour combination. Banana and peanut butter go together, so do pork and apples, but not all at once, and not like this. Cooking the pork in the microwave was both weird and wrong - the cooking times in the recipe didn't cook it all the way through so I had to actually modify the recipe for my own wellbeing. Plus, cooking meat in the microwave means that it comes out tough and tasteless, even if you don't get trichinosis.

After kitchen testing these recipes, I think I've figured out why I found this cookbook in the $1 bargain bin in the bookstore.