Cookbook Videos, Vol. 31: Easy Sliced Turkey Gourmet Dishes; Crusty Peasant Bread

Chef Alexander continues his no-nonsense guide to great cuisine in Easy Sliced Turkey Gourmet Dishes, the 31st volume in the Cookbook Videos series. Eleven appetizing dishes are prepared from scratch, including Turkey Piccata, Turkey Parma, Hawaiian Turkey, Turkey Tempura, and Turkey Romanoff. Each dish is prepared with step-by-step instructions (some of which also appear as subtitles on the bottom of the screen), and includes a handy chart of the "approximate nutritional values" of each of the offerings. There's also a wonderful plug for the library at the end of the tape: "For more information about cooking turkey, check the "Cookery" section of your local library." Inexpensive (if you're buying 12 or more titles, the unit price drops to $12 each), authoritative, and rather mouth-watering, Easy Sliced Turkey Gourmet Dishes is a good buy for public libraries. Crusty Peasant Bread features Dr. Jean Rosenbaum, Director of the American Fitness Association, taking viewers on a humorously narrated guide to making the bread that was part and parcel of his Russian grandmother's cuisine. Contrary to the cliché, Rosenbaum claims that you could actually "live on this kind of bread alone," since it's no-fat and very nutritional. Rosenbaum takes viewers through each step, and then sits back and tickles the ivories on a keyboard to help with the bread's "rising." A good program, suitable for public library collections. Easy Sliced Gourmet Turkey Dishes is highly recommended. Crusty Peasant Bread is recommended. (Easy Sliced Turkey Gourmet Dishes is available from: Alwhit Productions, 10444 Magnolia Blvd., North Hollywood, CA 91601-4110.) (Crusty Peasant Bread is available from: Video-11, P.O. Box 1429, Durango, CO 81302.)