Christiane Jory, "The 99 Cent Only Stores Cookbook"

Everyone, I trust, is familiar with "dollar stores" (or "99 cent stores").  Frankly, I love them.  I have been shopping at the dollar stores here in Washington since their arrival about fifteen years ago. 

I have even shopped at the Japanese dollar store Daiso in Seattle, which is part of a very popular Japanese chain of dollar stores.  It had some pretty great stuff I had never seen before (I bought a vinyl bicycle cover, only a dollar!).  The dollar store here has these awesome dish towels - proper full size woven cotton dishtowels - and you'd never know they only cost a dollar.

But one thing I have never seen is fresh food in a dollar store.  So that's one thing I can say first off the bat about The 99 Cent Only Stores Cookbook.  Apparently in California, the dollar stores carry milk, eggs, produce, and wine!  This is not the case with any dollar stores I've visited in Washington.  The dollar stores here also tend to be heavy on the pre-packaged food items (pasta mixes, ramen, canned goods) and light on the staples (flour, sugar, etc).

Once you move away from the premise that each recipe requires only ingredients from the dollar store, this cookbook starts to fall apart a bit.  Although Jory is to be commended for working up such a comprehensive collection of recipes, from the simple to the complex, using only dollar store food.  But if you have to buy half the ingredients from the regular store… I think you can see where I'm going with this.

(However, I was glad to see so many recipes with canned salmon.  For some reason, the dollar stores always seem to have a ton of canned salmon.  Why, I cannot say.)

Jory's ingredients are furthermore specific to one particular line of Californian dollar stores.  I don't know about California, but here there must be at least a dozen dollar store chains.  Her reliance on brand names can therefore be a little confusing.  

For example, what is the difference between "Country eggs" and "Foremost eggs"?  I noted both specified in different recipes, but without any explanation of the difference between them.  Are they just different brands of regular old eggs, or different kinds of eggs, or what?  The same goes for most of the other ingredients.  Is "Di Buon Gusto olive oil" virgin, extra virgin, or what?  Specifying the brand name while leaving out the product specs is going to make it a little difficult for those of us who have to substitute ingredients.

I also had some qualms about some of her "helpful hints."  Some of these hints seemed to be recipe specific (like the injunction to substitute coconut milk for regular milk if you happen to be out of regular milk, but well stocked with canned coconut milk).  Others were more general.  But nothing indicates which is which, something that could be a pitfall for the less-than-experienced cook.  Substituting soy sauce for salt is all well and good for some recipes, but not others.  (And has anyone ever really run out of salt?)

The 99 Cent Only Stores Cookbook is cute, and innovative, and impressive, but perhaps not the most useful cookbook in the world.