Book Bingo: Shop Like a Chef

Shop Like a Chef: A Food Lover's Guide to St. Louis Neighborhoods by Chef Clara Moore and Matt Sorrell is a bit self-explanatory in the title. It features different areas of St. Louis and surrounding places to tell you where to shop for everything from foreign fruits and spices to a basic cutting board.

(picture taken from Goodreads)

My store actually received this book from a publisher and we were asked to review it. This is an honest review. I ended up buying it anyway, so my store receiving it for free didn't taint anything!

Conclusion: I don't live in St. Louis, but I go there at least a few times a year. I found Shop Like a Chef to be useful even though it wasn't about my hometown. There are features on the best places to buy a variety of basic as well as hard-to-find cooking supplies and ingredients. There are also fun recipes, glossaries of terms (for those of us who don't know what chayotes are), source websites, market and celebration features, a produce calendar for MO and IL, and more! For a 222-page paperback, this thing packs some serious punch. Between the one visit I've made since discovering the book and the many source websites I've visited, I've already gotten a lot of use out of this book.

Recommendation: If you live in Missouri or Illinois and like to cook or bake or buy gifts for someone who does, this is a fantastic resource which you'll use a lot. If you don't live in this area but enjoy cooking or taking a trip to St. Louis once in a while, this could still be a really useful book for you.

This book is my Non-Fiction choice for the 2014 Book Bingo Challenge. As with romances, I don't really write reviews on non-fiction books that you don't read like a story--such as cookbooks, travel books, regional features, and the like. If you guys are interested in reading more reviews about these kinds of books, please let me know!