Cooking with Herbs

Alley, Lynn. Cooking with Herbs: 50 Simple Recipes for Fresh Flavor. Photography by Dhanraj Emanuel. Kansas City, MO: Andrews McMeel, 2013.

I love using fresh herbs in my dishes, and Lynn Alley has written a cookbook that provides tips for growing and using herbs as well as recipes utilizing them. Perhaps the most valuable part of the book is the portion dealing with growing and caring for your herbs. She covers everything from soils to growing them in containers. The recipes include soups, salads, main dishes, breads, condiments, and desserts. She also includes a couple of pages on using herbs in making tea. While a few of the dishes are pictured, it is a minority. The book could have used more individually labeled photos of herbs for those new to herbs who may not be familiar with what each looks like. The dishes did not seem to cover a wide range of foods. For example, most of the soups were bean-based. There also seemed to be a large number of pasta or polenta based main dishes. I find that is relatively easy for most people to incorporate fresh herbs in those dishes with little or no assistance of a cookbook or recipe. This book is probably most useful to those who have little or no experience with incorporating fresh herbs in their cooking. This review is based on an advance electronic galley provided by the publisher through NetGalley.