BEAT HEAT EAT

“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, Dean Lahn, Wakefield Press, 2009, $19.95, paperback, 86 pages, www.beatheateat.com