<p>GF has been teaching her BF (not my S). But one has to consider that the cookbook is for college dummies. Cooking 101 has to be really basic.</p>
<p>Merrymom: Yes, I agree about the oven. The guys seem to have no problems with stove top cooking. I only discovered that S did not know how to operate the oven when his friends (1 guy, 1 gal) came over the other day with ambitious plans to bake some chicken.</p>
<p>Joy of Cooking is the bible of cooking, in my opinion. Get one of those if you need a cookbook.</p>
<p>Pan fry is best if you don’t know how to turn on over.
Joy of cooking is too complicated. Rachel Ray(?) 30 minutes cooking is the best.</p>
<p>I find Rachel Ray’s food overly spicy, so have never looked at her cookbook. I will check it out.
I was just about to buy several copies of Joy of Cooking for kids. Thanks for the tip!</p>
<p>I don’t mean her cookbook, I mean her cooking shows. She did admit that she liked spicy food because of her heritage. You don’t have to follow the spicy part.
My kid often googles for recipes so I don’t thinking buying a cook book is a good idea, unless you like to look at the pictures. I do have tons of cookbook, not for the recipes, but for the pictures. I rarely follow any recipes to a T, I just want to get a general idea how to make certain things.</p>
<p>One of the things I forgot about that would be good for a college student–
Those bake-in-bag chicken and pork chop meals. The ones where you take the chicken, coat with the “rub”, put in the oven bag and bake. It’s easy and usually comes out pretty good. I know you can do the same thing with spices and oven bags, but the boxed meals are simpler (everything in one box).</p>
<p>Marite, so what did they make and did you get a taste? Anything you’d recommend?</p>
<p>How about cleanup? I don’t allow kids to clean up here because they always break something.</p>
<p>I got Joy of Cooking 25 years ago (maybe for a wedding gift) and it is my most used cookbook. It is good to look up a measurement conversion, a temperature or method to cook anything. I also don’t usually cook by a recipe, but as a reference
I think it is great. Especially for a learner.</p>
<p>I agree about looking online, but who wants my computer covered in food like my cookbooks?</p>
<p>Mine is fallen apart but I do notice some recipes are a lot harder to follow eventhough I have used them for years.</p>
<p>A couple of years ago my parents gave me a cd-rom called “one million recipes”. You can look up specific dishes, or even better yet, look in your fridge/pantry, put in several items that you have available, and different recipes that use those ingredients pop up! It also takes up less space than any cookbook!</p>
<p>Merrymom:</p>
<p>The chicken was out of Trader Joe’s, so I expect they did not need to do anything to it besides turning on the oven and setting the temperature (which is where I came in). They were at a loss about how to steam asparagus, so I suggested doing it in the microwave (putting a bit of water in the asparagus and covering it with plastic wrap. They used the electric rice-cooker to cook rice. They had plenty of practice making smoothies in their dorm kitchen and that came out very well. They were very good about cleanup (which, I understand, was not the case in their dorm kitchen).</p>
<p>I’ve always steamed asparagus, too. One son introduced me to cooking them under the broiler, which is really delicious and a little easier. </p>
<p>Asparagus is probably my number one favorite food.</p>
<p>GaMom - Do you have a name and author for that CD ROM?</p>
<p>Similar idea to the CD is Google’s (Beta) recipe search tool:</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.google.com/base/search?a_n0=recipes&scoring=ld&a_y0=9&a_s0=0&a_r=1[/url]”>http://www.google.com/base/search?a_n0=recipes&scoring=ld&a_y0=9&a_s0=0&a_r=1</a></p>
<p>Put a list of ingredients into the keywords section, choose main ingredient, type of cuisine, etc, and see what pops up! (You can also access this tool by googling a simple phrase such as “chicken recipe” if you lose the link 
)</p>
<p>Merrymom, it just says easy chef’s One Million Recipes, but inside I found a website, it is <a href=“http://www.acrllc.com%5B/url%5D”>www.acrllc.com</a>. I just pulled up the site, so it is still there.</p>
<p>Thanks for the links! Great ideas!</p>