[.ca] Paella!: Spectacular Rice Dishes From Spain (ISBN 0805056238)

Penelope Casas is good, but she is not at her best here:
I have two of her books, this one and the Tapas book. The Tapas book is really great. The paella book is really a bit too much. I mean, how many kinds of paella can you really eat? This is probably my own fault for buying the book- I should have figured that an entire book of paella would be overkill. But a friend of mine, whose culinary tastes I respect, suggested it, so I bought it site unseen. If you are an afficionado of paella, by all means you should get this book, but for me it's not worth it. I really like paella, but I dont' make it once a week or anything like that. I make pizza once a week, and frankly even then the "Chez Pannise" pizza cookbook I have is far too much for me. Who needs a recipe for venison, duck sausage and baby octopus paella, for crying out loud? Some do, most don't. Now, Casas' "Tapas" book is a MUST have- she's a tapas godess. Well worth the investment. But unless you are a total rice freak and can't get enough of risotto, suchi, jambalaya and paella, each of which in umpteen gazillion different forms, you'll be spendng a couple dozen greenbacks on a book that will realistically yield about four or five recipies you are likely to make with any degree of frequency.

Ole`:
What a sumptous, mouth-watering book!! I have been on an endless search for the perfect Paella for years. Several places have come close but none were as good as some made from the recipes in this book. Half the fun of eating Paella is in the making of it....what ingredients to use, how to cook them, mixing all the various components, selecting the proper wine (a white sangria is perfection itself). The accompanying information is almost as good as the recipes themselves. And the best feature of these recipes is that none is out of the range of the better-than-average cook. No tedious or long steps, no stuffing of chicken legs or boning of tiny quail - just grilling, cutting, and cooking. I prefer a Grilled Paella - or at least grilling the individual components. One must remember at all times though - Paella is, above all else, a RICE dish. That is the essence of a good Paella, the semi-crunchy red, saffron enfused grain. To those who had trouble with the temperature or cooking time I would suggest adjusting their time/temp for their own applicances. I have both a convection oven and microwave and know that most times are reduced by a third.

Nice try.:
Ms. Casas seems to have the mistaken idea that all long-grain rice is "converted". It's not. Also, I don't believe that a recipe that cooks for 10 minutes in a gas oven would take 20 in an electric, "even when (the electric is) properly calibrated". Heat is heat, unless the oven is a convection model. Maybe she ought'a calibrate her GAS oven. THE HERITAGE OF SPANISH COOKING, by Alicia Rios and Lourdes March, tells you how to cook a paella on top of the stove, and by extension, the grill, like they do in Spain and New Orleans.

Fun, good cookbook:
I bought this after eating at the home of friends who used this cookbook to prepare dinner. Although paella can be labor and time intensive, I found the directions clear and easy to follow. Suggestions for desserts & drinks etc. beneficial and easy. NOTHING in the book has turned out badly. The varieties of paella described have made it possible for me to serve the dish to vegetarians, Kosher-observant Jews (!), and your basic American carnivore. A treat.

A+ for ingredients, D- for method:
After trying a couple of paellas from this book, I have to agree with the person who criticized the recommended cooking method. Baking the seafood for 20 minutes ruins it, rendering the shrimp tough and other seafood dry and tasteless. I had much better success with stovetop cooking, adding the seafood during the last five minutes or so. Perhaps baking the paella would work better if the seafood was added later rather than earlier. Ingredient lists and proportions are right on the mark, with the resulting flavors garnering highest marks.