South by Northwest
Bob Jones
This is the complete, well organized guide to gourmet cooking --- Not! Over the years I've used the engineer's approach to menu planning: list every main dish, starch, vegetable and dessert you know how to make, and pick one from each category to form the menu. With that in mind, the only organization to this cook book is separation into those broad categories. In reality, the selection is tempered by other factors, like cabbage goes with corned beef better than asparagus. There's also the economic and seasonal considerations and perhaps the biggest influence of all --- time to prepare. I won't pretend that everything in this book fits into the category of 50 meals that can be prepared in less than an hour. But many of them do, and with a little advanced planning and use of modern inventions like crock pots, microwave ovens, and packaged/canned foods, time becomes less critical. I usually go through the mental gymnastics of menu planning while pushing a cart through the supermarket aisles---what looks good that is reasonably priced that we haven't had for a while that I have time to make that everyone likes that is not beef since we had beef last night that is -----.
--Bob Jones, Christmas 1994