Plenty More

This gets high marks for bringing vegetables to the fore and coming up with some truly mouth-watering recipes. Also, there are some basic techniques such as “burning” eggplant that can become part of the cook's toolkit - to be used forever after, in many applications, not just in the particular recipe.

I can't give it five stars because it often falls into super-fussy recipes calling for a barrage of esoteric ingredients. I don't have 8 hours to cook dinner in 33 easy steps, and I don't have an artisanal goat cheese shop worthy of a Monty Python sketch in my neighborhood.

Still, some of the recipes are beautifully simple, like watermelon feta salad, and have charming notes such as, “this should be eaten on a beach.”