The Good With the Bad

So is this book great, good, or garbage? EW hired professional recipe tester Eileen Weiss to find out. While the six recipes we tried worked technically (nothing exploded or curdled), the results varied widely on the taste scale. The Tuscan Pork Loin — a combination of pork, sage, prosciutto, and marsala wine — succeeded as an interesting and hearty dish. But the book's line drawing of the dish showed the pork rolled into a tube shape. Since the recipe never mentioned rolling the meat, we had ours flat and it tasted great. The flavorful Scalloped Potatoes, while good hot, were even better at room temperature, when they tasted more like a noncreamy potato salad. The Cool Cucumber Soup, though, was tangy and bitter, probably from all the chopped raw garlic called for. (The recipe neglected to mention how to prepare the cucumbers — we left ours unpeeled for color, but who knows?) The Salmon Mousse was too citrusy and overpowered by dill. And Broccoli Pesto — an unappetizing clump of dry broccoli mush — lacked any raison d'être as far as we were concerned. The Chocolate Biscotti tasted dry and flavorless. The bottom line: Only two out of the six recipes produced dishes we'd want to eat again.