Kitchen Remix: 75 Recipes for Making the Most of Your Ingredients; A Cookbook

Taking three key ingredients and creating three distinct dishes out of them is the premise of this new collection by Druckman (Women on Food), which features 25 of these match-ups for a total of 75 recipes. There are five overall categories: vegetables, beans/grains, meat, seafood, and dairy. Within these groups, flavor combinations range widely, from zucchini-pistachios-mint to pork belly-prune-radicchio. Each flavor trio is then expressed in three quite different preparations. To further encourage experimentation, a chart at the beginning of each of the combinations lays out similarly flavored ingredients that could be substituted, along with other ingredients that would be complimentary. Recipes are international in tone, well-illustrated and organized, with conversational headnotes outlining their underlying concepts or origins. While not “chefy,” the recipes are often somewhat involved, not necessarily weeknight fare. Also, the fact that everything is based on these rather arbitrary ingredient combinations gives it a slightly limited feel, despite all of the efforts to the contrary.