Loved watching his show on PBS for years as a child.

We never did make anything out of the cookbook though, as it seemed we needed to buy so many specific hard to find ingredients or tools at the time to make something.

We lived in a small town in the middle of cornfields in the 80s....it wasn't like we could just run out to whole foods or something.

( )

Jeff Smith was one of the few early cooking show hosts I cared for. He was passionate about food, wanted everyone to understand the cultural significance of particular dishes, and cooked up some good stuff without pretension. I decided to revisit this first Frugal Gourmet cookbook to see if it still warranted taking up space on my crowded cookbook shelf, and I'm afraid it's a goner. There are a handful of dishes that I've adapted from this book and kept in my cooking rotation, but I find several drawbacks to most of its recipes. They rely heavily on frozen and canned products, which I now rarely use. They are also very lightly seasoned with spices and herbs, and I tend to go for the more aromatic. Neither of these drawbacks can't be overcome: you can substitute fresh for packaged and goose up the seasoning. But I'm afraid I've mentally relegated this cookbook to the era of Fanny Farmer. ( )

There was no one that could weave a story about food quite like The Frug. I watched his program religiously, until the legal allegations took him off the air and out of the limelight. Jeff Smith was truly adept at revealing the meaning behind foods and meals, and I loved (and still love) that side of his entertaining and engaging cookbooks.

Smith had the entertainment sense of Martha Stewart, but without the holier than thou sensibility or the pretension. When you read this book you get a sense that a dinner at his house was a relaxed pleasure for he and the guests.

And the thing is, you DO read this book. It's not a reference book of recipes so much as an adventure in food. The only cookbook that I have read that delivered this same sort of storytelling and engagement was the first addition of the Betty Crocker Cookbook. ( )

Jeff Smith was a force of nature. He used to come storming into the kitchen at Brasil (my first restaurant in Seattle) sniffing around and lifting lids. It was lovely, really. He was a charming man, mostly, although he could be notably difficult and demanding.

His cookbooks are mostly disposable, but he introduced thousands to a sense of world cuisine that was really quite new to most home cooks.

His sex scandal was inevitable in retrospect, but I'm doubtful that it should have destroyed his career the way it did. ( )

For many years, Jeff Smith was my go-to cooking idol. I read his cookbooks, and through them, I learned much of what I know about how to cook. Even as a young child (about 8-9), I would spend hours, poring over this cookbook, imagining all the delicious dishes I could cook, if only I was older. I'm happy to report that now that I am old enough, the recipes are turning out just how I imagined them, those many years ago. :) ( )