Cookin’ with Coolio: 5 Star Meals at a 1 Star Price by Coolio
My rating: 4/5 cats
i picked this up initially to have a laugh only, but the recipes are actually pretty good, so now it is mine. a lot of it does read as though run through a “pimp translator machine;” i don’t know that i need to “sensually bathe (in beer) my steak like an egyptian princess,” but at the end of the day, that steak looks pretty good. good enough to eat even. and the food is shot like porn, it all kind of…glistens suggestively. it is kind of conflicting. and i know shit from poundcake about coolio, but anyone that is going to make a chicken recipe with peanut butter has got my ear.
some of the measurements i have to question, though. while it is cute to have ingredients measured out in dime bags, i don’t think any recipe needs both one dime bag of salt and one dime bag of pepper. unless dime bags are much much smaller than they were when i was still a smoker. (oh my god, does anyone but me right here remember the days when you had your special card, and you would go to any juice bar in manhattan and present your card, and you would get a dime bag with your juice?? now all you can get is juice. man, i miss “new york.”)
this book made me happy because when i was in high school, everyone would pile into my house and we would get high. (hi, dad!!) and at some point in the evening, i would slink out of the room and go make food for everyone. never did burn the house down (hi, dad!) but for me, that was the best part of the evening; going through the cupboards and gathering blueberries and english muffins and whatever i could find to make a culinary masterpiece. and i would always enter proudly with my food prettily arranged on a tray, and bonnie would fall out of her chair laughing. ah, teen memories…and i hope coolio has friends that laugh when he enters with his sunglasses on and his tray full of “chicken lettuce blunts” and “soul rolls”
not much here for the foer-faces—“hot fruit sandwich,” “heavenly ghettalian garlic bread,” and a token chapter at the rear, “to show you that you can be a vegetarian, or even a vegan, and still eat like a kitchen pimp.” so—gratitude, please, for mr. coolio.
now go eat something.
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