Nifty little book!
I got it through the early reviewers program. I already love Trader Joe's, and there are a couple of stores close to where I live, but in most recipes you can use ingredients from any supermarket, which is nice.
The recipes are clear, easy to follow, with times for prep, cook, etc., though photos are mostly hit or miss. Some recipes could definitely benefit from a good photo.
I've made several vegan recipes and liked them.
Cowgirl Caviar is a hit in our house - so delicious!
Would recommend, for sure. ( )

This is a great book for anyone who loves to entertain and who enjoys shopping at Trader Joes. It gives you tips, tricks and shortcuts to wonderful tasting food using the products available at the most unusual grocery store chain in the US. ( )

Overall, I enjoyed this cookbook. It is well-illustrated, with full color photographs for most of the recipes (not all, however). I appreciated the number of vegetarian and gluten-free recipes, and there was definitely a variety of cuisines--all sorts of internationally inspired recipes, as well as unique desserts, beverages, apps, and entrees. However, and I know this is a bad thing to criticize, but I felt like a lot of the recipes relied TOO heavily on prepared TJ's items. For example, a mango-chutney chicken sounded great, but then you read the recipe and it just involves pouring a bottle of TJ's mango chutney on top of the chicken. Not exactly something I needed a cookbook to tell me how to do. You can also definitely tell what the author's favorite items are (or perhaps items TJs is trying to push?)...seemed like a quarter of the recipes featured wasabi mayonnaise. There are definitely recipes we will make, but I'm not sure I will buy other cookbooks in this series. ( )

Great looking cookbook; puts you in the mood for a party. Some of the recipes I'd like to try out and some I'd run from - but I'm picky in the worst possible way. What I really got out of this book was ideas for party planning, and a sudden urge to run down to my nearest Trader Joe's. ( )

Right off, I'll explain what makes this a "Party" cookbook instead of a regular cookbook - these recipes are rich and delicious, and very high-calorie items. This cookbook takes a lot of things that taste great on their own - grilled cheese, TJ's nearly magical Israeli cous cous, brownies - and cranks them up to 11. Beware making most of these dishes when you're home alone, like I did to test the cookbook.

Great features of the cookbook: Where possible, it includes directions for how to make the recipe vegetarian and vegan (most of the time, this just means swapping butter for oil or a similar small change). To my amazement, when I took the book to my Trader Joe's, I found every ingredient I needed, in quantities the cookbook called for. Though the book was written by an independent writer who happens to love Trader Joe's, I wouldn't be surprised if reps from TJ's looked it over before publcation to make sure the ingredients matched their stock. When a recipe is Gluten-Free, Vegetarian, Vegan or can be made ahead of time, it notes that under the ingredients list. These recipes are way beyond daily food items - they really do resemble the types of amuse bouche you see at high-end restaurants and catered affairs, and yet none of the recipes looks hard to do.

Drawbacks: No calorie or nutritional information, though it's just as well since you'd start to worry about your guests' health if you made them the Croque Monsier (p. 68) using butter, milk, an egg yolk, 1 cup of Gruyere cheese and four slices of ham. Also, the "prep time" line in each recipe is a bald-faced lie. It assumes you did all the chopping, browning, peeling and draining before your guests got there and all you need is a few minutes to throw everything into a pot during the party. We all know this never happens.

I made three of the dishes. I was going to try to make a fourth, the chicken chili (page 30), but I've trashed my kitchen and am calling an end to the experiment before I got there.

The Israeli Couscous (p 45). Let me tell you about Trader Joe's 8-ounce box of Israeli Couscous - it is already perfect. Just bring home some chicken noodle soup from your favorite deli and throw a fistfull in the soup on the stove until it thickens into a pasta dish and let your head explode while you eat it. But if you insist on following a recipe, I like this one (cook in chicken broth and add grilled red onion, sliced olives and a little butter) because it doesn't mess up the magic that's already in the box. It was delicious...if I find myself craving couscous and the deli isn't open, I'll probably make this again.

Grilled Asparagus with Cheater's Saffron Aioli (p. 92). Curiously, the book never explains why it's "Cheater's" aioli. I had to spruce this one up after I made it according to the recipe. The saffron, lemon and garlic didn't show up and it was mostly mayonnaise at first. I ended up adding a lot of Trader Joe's agave nectar, which I had in the cabinet and stirring in the optional mustard to make a salad-dressing style sauce. The mustard completely overpowered the asparagus at that point, though at least the sauce was palatable. I think asparagus was the wrong vegetable to try with the sauce, and though the recipe calls for a "whisk" it should specify that this needs to be fluffy and airy at the end so that the asparagus doesn't get soaked by all the mayo. Also, I can't figure out for the life of me why you need 1 cup of mayo for 12 ounces of asparagus.

Finally, the Guinness and Coffee Cupcakes (page 79). Don't be afraid of the Guinness - it adds an awesome caramelish, coffeeish flavor to the batter that tastes and smells nothing like beer. I can't even detect it in the cupcake at the end. My cakes came out dry, which might be because I left them in the full 25 minutes that the recipe called for and they had clearly been set for a few minutes. They should just be brownies, given the ingredients, but they did have a cakey consistency. The icing, however, was a miracle - it calls for marscapone, butter and coffee and the taste is pitch-perfect tiramisu in icing form! To get the color in the picture, use real coffee. I used the Trader Joe's instant coffee crystals because I had them on hand for another project, and they speckled the frosting like vanilla bean and gave it a fantastic espresso punch. Honestly, I think the cakes would turn out better if you kept the icing as it is but used a (gasp) duncan hines cake mix for the bottoms. They'd win contests at that point.

At least a third of the recipes in this book caught my eye and made my mouth water. This really is packed with stuff most TJ addicts would not only enjoy serving, but stuff we can all actually make without too much trouble. I'm surprised I liked it as much as I did, but it's a very well done cookbook! ( )