101 Kitchen Secrets: Cut Down on Dishes, Cost, and Time in the Kitchen

Food blogger Goldstein (The Happy Sandwich) offers a mixed-bag collection of cooking hacks that promises to save readers dishes, money, and time, but delivers advice that is alternately helpful and confusing. Some ideas will appeal to college students without full kitchens (including a microwavable recipe for mac and cheese in a mug) or young adults learning to cook on a budget (for example, the tip to stretch ground meat by adding finely chopped mushrooms), though the audience for others, such as pressing ravioli with the bottom of a wine bottle, is unclear (it’s hard to imagine the cook who makes filled pasta from scratch but is unwilling to “dirty a pasta cutter”). The advice in the time-saving section seems willing to sacrifice quality, such as a burger recipe for a crowd instructing readers to bake ground beef in a sheet pan before cutting into squares, or a “lasagna” made with frozen ravioli. Some of the better tips, such as freezing vegetable peels and parmesan rinds for broth, are hardly secrets, though they may be unfamiliar to novice cooks. Readers who value efficiency above all and who don’t mind relying on single-use products (common in the dish-avoiding section) may find value, but others should feel free to skip this. (Jan.)