Jamie Oliver: Best Food Network Recipe Book

Not Your Average Food Network Celebrity Cookbook

I browsed through at least 20 different Food Network cookbooks at my local bookstore, but in the end, I kept coming back to this one. Jamie Oliver's passion for food is contagious, and you'll want to try all of his creative and flavorful recipes. His comprehensive new book, Cooking with Jamie, covers a huge range of meat, seafood, vegetable, and even a few dessert dishes, and the quality of the recipes really stand out among the deluge of Food Network celebrity cookbooks. As a side note, I am also a fan of Ina Garten's Barefoot Contessa books.

You can tell that a lot of thought went into Jamie Oliver's book, and it was not just thrown together by Food Network to market another one of their celebrity chefs. Beautiful, mouth-watering photos accompany every single recipe, which in my opinion should be a requirement for every cookbook.

Jamie Oliver's book is remarkably comprehensive and includes a review of many cooking techniques in addition to recipes, including how to make fresh pasta and how to prepare live lobster and squid. Jamie even includes step by step photos in many of his recipes, including what cross sections of steak are supposed to look like when prepared rare, medium rare, medium and well-done.

New Food Network Recipes

One of my favorite things about Jamie's Oliver's book is that there are a lot of simple but interesting vegetable recipes, including sections dedicated to asparagus, broccoli, carrots, cauliflower, leeks, peas, tomatoes, squash, cabbage, and zucchini. Vegetables can get boring quickly, and these recipes alone have already given me a ton of new ideas for quick and exciting side dishes.

There is also a section dedicated to warm salads, which are a welcome change from the usual walnut gorgonzola and tomato arugula salads you see in most Food Network cookbooks.

One of the most challenging things about cooking at home is that after a while, you run out of exciting foods and flavors to try. After picking up Jamie Oliver's book, I now have a long list of new recipes I'm eager to experiment with!

Jamie's recipes range from very basic pastas and simple chicken, beef, and fish recipes to more intermediate level recipes like roasted rack of lamb, cooking a whole fish, and rabbit. Some of the recipes can be prepared very quickly on a weeknight after work, while others require slow-cooking, sometimes overnight for extremely tender meat.

Some of my favorite Jamie Oliver recipes:

1. Roasted chicken breast with creamy butternut squash and chili peppers

2. Roasted white fish wrapped in smoked bacon with lemon mayonnaise and asparagus

3. Old school pork chops with apples and sage

4. Pappardelle with a ragu of tiny meatballs