An Online From Kitchen Guide

Excellent in all phases: description was the selling point for me for my soup-loving gift recipient. It was all it claimed to be, shipped and received timely and in excellent condition.

Is this the be-all end-all of cordial cookbooks? No, of course not. It’s like any cookbook- the recipes must be taken with a grain of salt. I never make the recipes that use artificial flavors or oils, I only make the ones with real ingredients. I also cut out some of the sugar.

I have found the recipes to be a good guide for adaptation. I use whatever fruit I can find and then choose the closest recipe and adapt it as I see fit. My favorite is the sour cherry that I made with cherries I picked myself. I bring the cordials to parties and no one ever has more than a half a shot-glass; they’re too sweet. But when was the last time you saw anyone do a shot of store-bought schnapps? Same diff I think.

I gave this book as a gift to someone who is creative and loves to make their own liqueurs. Wow! This book has some great ideas- and great places to start. Even if you find a recipe not completely to your liking, it provides inspiration on how to modify or adapt to make the liqueur more to your personal taste. I highly recommend this book. And the orange dreamsicle liqueur……….is great on the rocks!

This is a good book, but not exactly what I was expecting. As a Small Business Consultant, I was asked to teach a class on marketing your food product for a local food incubator, which is beginning level. This is great if you want to have your mustard in a national chain, your tea or coffee on grocery store shelves, or the like. What I thought it would help with was entry level marketing to get your food into local stores, selling on the internet, and getting into a trade show. It did give guidance to higher levels of the same thing, and was very professionally done, just a bit above what I was expecting. If you already have an established product and do large scale production, this is a great book for you. For beginners, it doesn’t really take it right out of the kitchen…its sort of a couple notches past that.

Excellent author and wonderful expertise though. Definitely a keeper for my personal library.

My biggest questions are: What are the laws about the sale of food from the kitchen? Is a health inspection of the kitchen necessary? Where would I find this information for the state in which I live?

This book does not cover any of the information that I think is necessary. I enjoy preparing food and giving it away in pretty containers. I was hoping I could sell some of my gorgeous and delicious gifts with little overhead. According to the author, one should plan on laying out a rather large investment for this type of business.

FROM KITCHEN TO MARKET contains many details but omits the basic information required to get started.

I have never had a cookbook that I used so much. Every week before I go out grocery shopping, I get out this book to decide what to make for the week. Every recipe is healthy and tastes great! It’s especially great if you have a garden because it gives lots of ideas for every type of vegetable.

I’ll preface my review by saying that I am definitely not the intended audience for this book. I was forced to buy it when I took a class by the author, Lanita Jacobs-Huey, who is a professor at USC. Her class was called “Understanding Culture Through Film,” which sounded interesting. As it turns out, she devoted almost the entire class to ranting about black women’s hair.

If you are the sort of person who thinks that studying the social implications of black women’s hair is a worthy pursuit, then you should probably buy this book. For the rest of us, it’s full of academic psychobabble and deliberately overcomplicated terms for simple, unoriginal ideas. She could easily make all her points in 10 pages, and even then, they wouldn’t be very interesting. The main argument is that for black women, hair is more than “just hair,” it’s a vehicle for expression that is often highly charged with political implications (I’m sorry, but it’s hard to even summarize this book without sounding like academic psychobabble). But wait – at other times, hair is “just hair”! She never really develops the point much further than that or provides any sort of explanation for why things are the way they are, but peppers the text with meaningless words like “problematize” and “intertextual” to stretch out the length and make herself sound smart. If you find this sort of self-important drivel as obnoxious as I do, then don’t buy the book. And if you’re buying this book because you’re enrolled in any of her classes, drop the class immediately.