I loved it. This book changed everthing i do now. I now do dayly exercise and i eat healthly. I had a very high Cholesterol but now my doctor says i shall live long enougth to see my grandchildren since one is on the way. I hope this book will help others like it has helped me. Thank you Barbra!

Tired of cooking the same old thing for dinner each night? Or maybe you're meeting friends from more exotic places and want to expand your cooking skills? Maybe some friend you met over the Internet are stopping by and you want to impress them with your knowledge of foreign cusine? Then this is the book for you!

There's recipes from countries from Afghanistan (Ashaks and rice pudding - yum!) to Yugoslavia (Apple cream and Slovenian plum pie - double yum!) and all points inbetween. There are expanded recipes if you're doing a buffet style dinner or having a lot of guests. The recipes are clear and concise plus you won't have to hunt every exotic food store in your city to obtain the ingredients. Some recipes just do not sound too good - the herring salad (from Finland) or the fish souffle (from Iceland)just does not make my mouth water. But there are more than enough recipes to make up for it. Ever had fried green tomatoes? There's a recipe for fried green peppers in this book. Banana pudding, which I thought my mom made up, is in here - from Nepal. there's arecipe for Swedish rye bread which is quite good.

So if you're tired of racking your brains for what to cook, this book offers a lot of delicious options. Give it a try!

The Chicken and Yellow Rice from the Columbia Restaurant is/was their most popular food. It is to die for. The secret is putting the dry rice in the moist vegetables before liquid is added: The rice draws vegetable flavor into itself. That is the one I remember best, but when I owned this book, I used it a lot. 2,6,24 refers to EACH recipe being expressed for serving those numbers of people. Each recipe is from best restaurants' best food, and each can be cooked in home kitchens easily.

I was looking for a book that would give me calorie values for foods that don't have packages. Like how many calories are there in a grilled cheese sandwich? Well, you certainly won't find that in this book. It is filled with pages and pages of calorie values for foods. And 90% of them have brand names attached. 5 pages of listings for ice cream! It would take you 10 minutes to find the brand you have at home. Better to just read the back of the container. It does have some USDA listings - such as ground beef - which are very helpful, but you have to wade thru so much other stuff that it's very hard to use. Not to mention that some of the information is horribly out of date. ie: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Cereal!?!

If you want to find out which brand of ice cream has the lowest calories, I can see how this book would be useful, but given the out of date references you'd probably be lucky if you found it at the store anyway.

Most of these books list portions by size, like 1/2 cup of cantaloupe or 1 medium orange. What is a "medium" orange? What if the cantaloupe is a wedge (and thus does not fit into a measuring cup)? I searched for a book that gave calorie counts by the ounce or the gram. This book is the closest I have found. It does give calories by weight, but not by the ounce/gram. For example, for "orange", it gives a calorie count for 1 pound of oranges with the skin on. It also gives a calorie count for 8.5 ounces of segments. I would recommend this book over the other calorie counters I have found, but if you are also counting fat, you will have to supplement it with another book, as this book only gives calorie and carbohydrate counts.

This book is very disappointing because it is more a work-in-progress than a finished book (even though this is the "Totally revised and updated! 2nd Edition," according to the cover.)

Each page consists of a list of items in alphabetical order. To the right, the top column headers are:

"Measure or Quantity," "Sodium (mg)," "Fats in grams," and "Cholesteral (mg)."

Beneath the category "Fats in grams," there are three sub-categories: "Total," "Saturated" and "Unsaturated."

This is a great start. Too bad there are many, many incomplete entries, half a page and more, time and again. Items may show nothing more than the content of one category, such as sodium, with no fat content nor cholesteral shown at all. This is not because these are "zero" sodium or cholesteral items, but because the entries simply are not there.

The book is a large-sized paperback, with much of the size resulting from blank space on the pages between entries. It measures 6" wide by 9" tall and 1" thick, so it will not fit in an ordinary purse or coat pocket easily. It is not a very handy reference to carry along to lunches, dinners out, or shopping.

It also does not have a calorie count.

All in all, it just isn't very useful.

There are much better, more comprehensive and handy-sized food references available, such as The Complete Book of Food Counts by Corrinne T. Netzer.

You can buy Netzger's much better and complete reference from Amazon.com.