Booknote: Food Men Love

Margie Lapanja, Food Men Love: All-Time Favorite Recipes From Caesar Salad to Grilled Rib-eye to Cinnamon Buns and Apple Pie. Berkeley, CA: Conari Press, 2001.  ISBN: 1-57324-512-7.


Genre: nonfiction
Subgenre: cookbooks
Format: paperback
Source: Berea branch of the Madison County (KY) Public Library

This book does the whole how to keep your man happy and satisfied with food routine. It's got the whole use food for romancing thing going, which to be honest, at times it got a bit too cutesy. Maybe that is the case for me because because I grew up with mom teaching us how to cook and telling us to learn to cook because we should not expect a woman to come do it for us. And while I am not a chef by any measure (though I have a brother who is a trained professional chef by the way), I do know my way around the kitchen and can cook a few things. For the rest, I can follow a recipe book, even if it may or not be this book. The recipes vary in terms of accessibility. Some are accessible and could be done with ingredients you can find around the house. Others can get quite complex, so your mileage can  vary.

The book is divided in chapters by themes from breakfast to appetizers, salads, and so on. Each chapter opens with some quotes, testimonials the author has collected from men asking what they love about the type of food featured in the chapter. I will say that for supposedly manly men, some of those guys have some seriously pretentious and snobbish tastes. The chapters then have a commentary from the author passage to set up each recipe. In addition, the book is sprinkled with bits of trivia and celebrity quotes about cooking, food, and/or romance. Some of the trivia I did find interesting.

In the end, I thought the book was just OK. This is not one I see myself using much, and I am glad I borrowed it. As I said, recipe accessibility and viability vary significantly, and overall, the book does get a bit too syrupy at times.

2 out of 5 stars.

This book qualifies for the following 2016 Reading Challenges: