It has been said that, "If you can read a recipe, you can cook." The sad truth is that many cooks today do not know enough of the basics of foods and cooking to translate recipes to cook with confidence or success, let alone creatively. My Cooking Coach is a 500 page cornucopia of cooking knowledge that provides, as its slogan states, "Cooking Knowledge at Your Fingertips!" All of this cooking knowledge comes from a revised version of The Essential Cook, by Charles Delmar, winner of the prestigious "Writings" award from the International Assn. of Culinary Professionals (IACP). This new edition has been re-named and re-formatted in "bite-sized" pieces so it can be read as a quick reference from its Glossary/Index of more than 1,100 cooking terms - an important consideration for today's cooks who don't seem to have the time or the patience to read a textbook. Of course, it can also be read "Top-Down" as a book that one reviewer described as "A really good, and informative, read. Another reviewer, award-winning restaurateur and author, Bill Neal said of the first edition, "The Essential Cook", "This is the book people who buy "Joy of Cooking" think they are going to be getting ... but they don't!""From Part One, First You Steal a Chicken: How to Plan, Select, Store, Prepare, Cook, Flavor and Serve most foods, through Part Three: How to Set a Dining Table and Other Facts of Life, with How Good Cooks Do It: Basic Cooking Methods and Techniques in between, My Cooking Coach uses clear, direct language and more than 400 informative illustrations, along with "Master Recipes," to explain the basic How-Tos and Whys of foods, ingredients and cooking. There are no conventional recipes in My Cooking Coach. Rather, the author uses what he calls "Master Recipes" that provide step-by-step instructions for cooking almost any food you can think of by any of the basic cooking methods usually used to cook that food: Dry Heat, Liquids, and Frying. "Master recipes are the themes, of which recipes are but individual variations," says author Delmar. Now, using abundant page number cross-references and more than 5,000 Bookmark/Hyperlinks, readers have the cornucopia of cooking knowledge in The Essential Cook literally "at their fingertips".
There comes a time in everyone's life when they must either eat out all of the time, starve to death, or learn how to cook. For Charles Delmar, this occurred at the not so delicate age of 34: young enough to resent the fact, old enough to accept it. And so Charlie (as he likes to be called), looked for a book that would teach him the basics of foods and cooking. All he could find, though, were books written in what he calls "Recipeze," a language he could not understand. And so he wrote his own book, "The Essential Cook: Everything You Really Know About Foods and Cooking," in plain English. Charlie must have done a really good job for his book received more than 100 positive reviews and won the prestigious Writings Award given by the International Assn. of Culinary Professionals (IACP). Twenty five years after The Essential Cook was first published, it has been revised, broken into "bite-sized" pieces, re-named "My Cooking Coach" and re-published in a first-of its-kind "Hyper Book" format that places, as its new slogan states, "Cooking Knowledge at Your Fingertips."
