Gather & Graze: 120 Favorite Recipes for Tasty Good Times: A Cookbook

We are big fans of Stephanie and have been to her restaurant in Chicago and enjoyed it immensely. I gave this cookbook as a present after seeing the recipe for goat cheesecake with beer caramel sauce (beer caramel? Sold!) but I have gotten more mileage out of it. The flavor combinations are very unique and interesting. I like the generally spicy/salty/sweet flavor profile of many of the dishes. I'm just disappointed that there are so many typos in the book. The recipe for Eggs with Tomato, Apricot and Melon Sofrito does not actually include any melon. I thought I could improvise but I had no idea what sort of melon this was supposed to incorporate. Watermelon? Cantaloupe? The recipe instructions for the beer caramel says to start with "6oz of hoppy beer" and grapefruit zest and "reduce to about 1 cup." How are you supposed to reduce a liquid that is already less than 1 cup to start with? I took an educated guess that the ingredient was supposed to be "16 oz of hoppy beer" but there is a typo, and it turned out well. But 6 oz of beer obviously would not have worked.The recipes cover a lot of cuts of meat and ingredients that you're not going to find in your local supermarket so be prepared to hunt around. I would love to try the hamachi collar recipe but I have never seen fish collars for sale anywhere. Also, many recipes call for a little bit of other recipes in the book, like harissa sauce or "crunch butter" and I dislike having to make a big batch of something just to add it to a recipe.Maybe the typos were/have been fixed in later publications.

I bought this cookbook for a friends birthday. She loves Stephanie Izard and we’ve followed some of her recipes using her Instagram stories. I was very disappointed with our first recipe we made. The hoisin and skirt steak with the blueberry pico. Her recipe in the book leaves out quite a few important details and uses the wrong ratios. She calls for dark soy sauce and 4 dates. We made the hoisin following this recipe and it was super thin while she comments it might be too thick. My friend looked up Stephanie’s Instagram and her third story contains a very different hoisin recipe that uses 12 dates and sweet soy sauce (very different texture than dark soy sauce!). We found it pretty disappointing that her published cookbook contains a sauce that fails but we were able to find the correct recipe easily on her Instagram.

Love the interesting flavors of the recipes. I am a Vietnamese-American so the inclusion of a lot of components my mom cooked with is a lovely reminder of home. Most recipes are simple without being boring!

Great to have the keys to the goat kingdom with this book, but these recipes call for ingredients that are beyond the everyday cook's kitchen staples. The author in the preface claims these are easy to make recipes, but they're pretty advanced and involved.We made the biscuits and gravy because we were lucky to have all the ingredients, and it turned out excellent. Looking forward to our next endeavour.

Amazing book by an amazing chef! Her recipes are both innovative and accessible. I've loved trying recipes from this so far.