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A review by Sarah Hudson
Weekly Times Now
WHEN it comes to food and blokes, it seems there are two categories.
There are those - such as Gordon Ramsay and Rick Stein - who dominate the culinary world and are gastronomically superior beings.
And then there are those who have no idea and are plain useless.
Give them a chop and a pair of tongs and they may be OK, but otherwise cooking for such chaps equates to buying takeaway and reheating it in the microwave.
This book is for the second category.
Beat Heat Eat's menu includes such delights as Coke Chicken, Beer Chicken - which involves stuffing a beer can in the bird's cavity - and Boy Burgers.
Each recipe is laid out like a car manual, with illustrations of the tools required and diagrams indicating what should be done with them.
Apparently blokes who can't cook can't spell either, as chapter headings include "Qwik Fixes" and "Snaks".
The introduction starts with the premise "if you don't eat you will die", which suggests these are recipes about survival rather than kitchen prowess.
To be fair, the book is ideal for first-home leavers. And certainly there are many men out there who have reached middle age relying entirely on their better-half for a daily feed.
This book, too, is for them - and any man in your life who needs to crank his diet up a notch.
Cooking for the Culinarily Challenged
A book review by the VirginBlue in-flight Magazine guy
Beat Heat Eat
Cooking Manual by Dean Lahn -
Eat or Die!
A book review by Franz Scheurer
I unpacked this book by Dean Lahn and the Press Release fell out of it. I picked it up and the first thing I saw was a quote by Gordon Ramsay: “If it’s brown it’s cooked, if it’s black it’s fooked!” When I finished laughing I had an actual look at the book and the cover graphics reminded me of a Russian poster of the Nikita Khrushchev area: A strapping, healthy young man holding a fork (like a pitchfork) with the bold title of BEAT HEAT EAT and small subtitles, ‘Cooking Manual’ and ‘Eat or Die’. To say I was intrigued was an understatement!
At first glance this was obviously intended for the ‘mere male’ cook, every recipe illustrated for the illiterate, and hilariously funny.
Let me quote from the introduction:
“Yeah. I’ll be the first to admit that some, most, of these recipes need a little time to get your head around. That’s okay. It’s just you’ve never heard someone say it’s ok to ram a beer can up a chicken’s clacker, or simmer your dinner in Coke. Relax. Leave the cooking to the experts. Here you’re just going to fix something to eat and kick back. Nobody’s going to judge you. It’s just you, me, and the chicken”.
Right!
But on closer inspection, this book definitely has merit as it might just stop that couch potato from eating take-away and fixing something real to eat - well ‘realish’.
The illustrations accompanying each recipe are clear, concise and the short method makes perfect sense, so the magic of creating food is hardly magic in this case. But you do learn how to make a pizza base, a roast and three veg, entrées, mains and desserts; it’s all there. A word of warning: some of these methods might be a little dangerous (like turning the toaster on its side to turn it into a sandwich maker) but then this book is for ‘big boys’. Divided into Warning (definitely read this one, word for word!), Qwik Fixes, Snaks, Mains and Afters there is no excuse! Go on, Beat the ingredients, Heat them, and Eat them!
Putting left over plunger coffee (lots better than instant!) into an ice cube tray and then using a couple of cubes and a microwave oven when you feel like a coffee is left-over use ‘par excellence’ and placing a plate, topped with a can, on top of your cooking sandwich nothing short of inventive, but it’s the ‘Half Time Pie’ that really inspires me! Let me quote from the method: “in the ad break before half time, pull the puff pastry out of the freezer to defrost. When the siren goes, tear the top off the braised steak and onions and aim the contents towards one edge of the pastry. Fold the pasty over, jamming the edges together. Throw it on the baking tray and into the oven for 20 minutes on 200°C. Pull it out and watch the second half”. Now that’s almost as good as hitting a bag of chips to crush the contents, then proceeding to top chicken pieces with them, to get a crunchy chicken result! Brilliant!
As Dean Lahn says: “if you want great food, go to a restaurant - that’s what they’re there for. But if you need to make something at home to get by, this is the deal for you”.
So don’t be a piker, get this book (you will either laugh for a very long time or cook one of these recipes and . . .
ISBN: 978 1 86254 758 2
Published by Wakefield Press
1 The Parade West
Kent Town SA 5067
RRP: 19.95
Beat Heat Eat
A review by Sally Hammond
sallyhammond.com.au
“If you want great food, go to a restaurant – that’s what they’re there for,” says author Dean Lahn. “But if you need to make something at home to get by, this is for you.”
Lahn would willingly admit he is not a chef, and this book is about as far removed from a traditional cookbook as a car manual is from a glossy auto magazine. Yet it gets the message across in an unthreatening way for non-cooks like him with easy – mega-easy – steps, copious diagrams and down to earth ingredients and concepts.
So beginners (aka blokes) can now bake a fruit cake using three ingredients, one bowl and a cake tin – all helpfully drawn so there is no confusion about terminology. If they want to dazzle the kids there is a microwave fudge – three ingredients again – or, to impress a woman, there are ‘Girl Burgers’. Elsewhere there are ‘boy’ burgers too, of course, because this really is guy-territory.
There’s much more in Beat Heat Eat – including an eclectic mix of recipes such as pizza, coke chicken, and an improbably easy ‘half time ‘ meat pie. No prizes for guessing when you eat that!
Basic, basic, basic it is – ‘if you don’t eat, you will die’ we are told at the outset. I’ll bet this is the only cookbook (well, OK they call it a cooking ‘manual’) where there is a page (with diagrams) devoted to what to do when something you are cooking catches fire!
Beat Heat Eat
A book review by WowBagger
(from MacTalk)
To say I was surprised to be given a book to review for MacTalk would be a little of an understatement. For starters, it’s a book, sure there are “tech” books out there that I’m sure a lot of readers are interested in but it’s a far cry from an iPod accessory or a new Mac laptop in terms of what normally rocks up in the mailbox for me to pawn over. The second most strange element, and probably the one that is going to have your mind slowly dripping from the walls after it explodes, is that it’s a cook book! Or as the cover so delicately describes it, a “cooking manual”. Still haven’t figured out how this relates to MacTalk and it’s readers? Well I think it best that we defer that explanation to the author, Mr. Dean Lahn.
“My mission was to find a way of feeding myself with the convenience of a drive thru. As a regular block I thought there must be many others who, like me, find themselves in the same situation.”
Yes Sir you have most definitely, you Sir have found the Mac, Nerd, Technorati of the world and given them a magnificent document of fantastical stories and diagrams that allow us to do that most basic of necessities, provide! And most importantly provide with minimal ingredients and effort! You Sir are a man to be worshiped and revered.
Now that I’ve blown the required amount of smoke up the author’s arse let’s actually talk about what makes this such a wonderful journey in to a world less visited by my fellow peers. The book is divided into four sections denoting the various courses that one might partake; “Snaks”, “Mains” & “Afters”. You’ll also find a very handy section at the beginning of the book entitled “Qwik Fixes” that is more about getting you acquainted with your unfamiliar culinary surroundings and how you might clean certain items post use and like the rest of the book it’s full of wonderfully useful information.
The recipes themselves vary from the stupidly easy, turning your toaster on it’s side to turn it into a griller for example, to what I’d classify as “semi-challenging” involving maybe six or seven ingredients and about five steps to follow. That said the average recipe is four steps long and has about three ingredients and a prep time of around ten minutes so we’re not exactly talking gourmet rocket science here. The instructions are listed in a way they’re so simple your four year old could probably follow them so really if you can’t I shudder to think how you function as a human being.
Each recipe is accompanied by a very aesthetically pleasing diagram generally detailing how you throw the ingredients in a bowl and beat them but occasionally introducing slightly more complex scenarios such as beer cans and chickens. Yes you read that right. You’ll also find a section at the bottom of each page to document your “Mods” that you’ve discovered and wish to record.
Accompanying the book is a website, of the same name, beateatheat.com, that allows users to submit their “Mods” to the online world as well as add new and excitingly simple recipes for others to try out. The website is very slick, and considering the author is also a graphic designer from good old Adelaide you’d expect nothing less.
Perhaps I was sent Beat, Heat, Eat to review because I’ve got a soft spot for the kitchen, what having hosted a short lived online cooking show and all, but to be honest I think the majority of you out there will appreciate just how simple and fun it can be to make some pretty decent grub!
Beat Heat Eat is available from all good book stores at an RRP of AUD$19.95
ISBN: 9781862547582
Available for purchase directly from the publisher: Wakefield Press