Recently, Taste of Home put out a comprehensive cookbook, Taste of Home Best Loved Recipes. If you like cooking your way through cookbooks, this might be the last cookbook you’ll need for a while because it has 1,485 recipes in it! It is a hard-bound collection commemorating 20 years of the best submitted recipes, each with a personal story of what it has meant to those who submitted it and their families.
You’ll find Saturday Night Appetizers, Weeknight Dinners, Secret Family Recipes, Potluck Favorites and much more. Chapters also include some of the most cherished magazine features including: Mom Made it Best, Our Favorite Contributor’s Meals, Mealtime Express, Cooking for One or Two, Grand Prize Winners, and others.
Features:
- Prep/Cook Times
- Top 100 favorite recipes marked with an icon
- Everyday ingredients
- Easy-to-follow directions
- How-to photos and cooking tips
- Personal stories
- Ribbon marker
As you can imagine, I found it quite difficult to pick out just a few recipes to try from this cookbook. I have tried two so far, but rest assured you will see others pop up from time to time after this review.
The first recipe I decided upon occurred when seeing it’s image in the cookbook. The chocolate banana cream cake! I’ve had banana bread in all kinds of ways and flavor varieties, but never have I have banana in cake form. With the chocolate frosting and banana pudding filling, how could it possibly be bad? Sure enough it was absolutely delicious. I couldn’t stop eating it! The only problem I had was frosting the silly thing. Admittedly, I am not the best cake decorator, but when I attempted to pipe fun accents of frosting around the top edge of the cake, it slid right off due to the slick pudding on top! It was incredibly frustrating. Next time I make it (you better believe I am going to make it many times again), I will leave a small border around the edges without the pudding so that the frosting will sit on the cake itself instead.
Next I tried the cubed steaks parmigiana. Honestly, I don’t think I had ever had, or ever heard of cubed steaks until this recipe. But evidently, it is tenderized meat that is great for making chicken fried steak and steak parm! It was a bit fragile while dipping, but I managed just fine and it came out great. It really was like chicken parm but with beef instead, which is nice because I tend to cook a lot of chicken and need to change it up sometimes.
As far as the rest of the cookbook goes, there are plenty of other recipes that I’ve been eying with pleasure already. I especially enjoy the list of meal plan ideas. The only thing I would change about this cookbook is the index in the back – it is divided into recipes lists by year. Personally I don’t want to sift through each years section in the index to find what I am looking for. It would be much easier to have them all mixed together. I just now realized that the index is in fact listed together by category AND also separately by year. I’m blind.
Disclosure: I received a complimentary copy of Taste of Home Best Loved Recipes from FSB Associates. I was not compensated for this post. Thoughts and opinions are my own.
