Book Review: How to Feed a Man With Love by Stasha

Book title How to Feed a Man with Love

Author Named only as Stasha - I had no idea who she was so googled her (to be honest thinking from the pictures in the book that she might be a 'glamour model' but it seems she is called Stasha Palos, an arist - and the step-daughter of Top Shop owner Philip Green!

Publisher Opus Media UK

Price/RRP Full price on Amazon is £19.95 but I got it secondhand for £4 including postage

I get the idea....but it's not the most attractive image

Where did I get it? Amazon - I saw the book when I was browsing in Selfridges' cookery book section and was really intrigued, so I looked it up on the internet when I got home and bought a second-hand copy.

The blurb on the back (sic)
Have Passion....
Passion for your Man
Passion for your Family
Passion for your Food
This book is a personal
collection of Recipes, Poetry,
Philosophy and Art
I hope you enjoy it
Love Stash x

Bit of a waste of two pages if you ask me...

Overview of book
Probably the strangest cookery book I've ever come across. I imagined it would be about how the way to a man's heart is through his stomach, and a collection of the sort of recipes my boyfriend would love, like burgers, steak etc. In some ways it is a little like that, but to say this book isn't what I was expecting is an understatement. It's a really big book - I've got the hardback which is A4 and weighs a ton! But unfortunately that's not because it is crammed with recipes. Some pages have a lot of text and others have just a few words and the recipes are interspersed with motivational phrases and little bits of 'poetry': for instance (sic), "Love Eachother. Try for one another.Care.Be kind. Laugh when you thought you didn't have laughter in you. Cry with Eachother" (etc). Another is a double page spread proclaiming "Drink Milk!". The recipes are printed in different coloured text each time, which sometimes makes the words very hard to read against the coloured background, and the last thing you want when you are following a recipe is to struggle to read it.

Quite.

First recipe in the book Teriyaki Chicken

Last recipe in the book Homemade Potato Salad

Random recipe from the middle of the book Lazy slow roast Sunday lunch lamb shanks with creamy mash potato

Can you read the text on this page? Me neither.

Quality/number of photographs There are lots of pictures, probably too many. For instance, a burger recipe has a double page spread of two photos on facing pages showing nothing but the burger - but one page is an exact mirror image of the other which I don't really get. Another page has a recipe for teriyaki chicken, but the picture on the facing page is of a bottle of teriyaki sauce - and the chicken itself gets a double page spread over the page. So four pages for one recipe- a bit unusual. Another page has a double page spread of a fuelometer with the needle pointing to empty and near the end of the book there is the same picture but with the needle pointing to full. Another page, for a reason I don't understand at all, has a photo of the Taj Mahal (the recipes on adjacent pages are Chinese and decidedly British so no clue there). A recipe for carrot cake manages to take up 8 pages - the recipe, along with a picture of a woman dressed as a bunny girl, a standalone picture of a bow tie on another page and a pair of legs in red high heels on another, and the photo of the cake itself takes up two pages. A recipe for hot chocolate sauce is superimposed over a picture of a woman's bottom in stockings and suspenders.

Some inspirational thoughts from the author

Number of pages 283 but I reckon the recipes only take up half that many

Have I made anything from this book? Pasta pomadoro and teriyaki chicken, both of which were OK but recipes I could easily find elsewhere. I won't be making anything else, as I've already given this book to the charity shop.

No idea who this chap is or why he gets a double page spread with a blank facing page

Overall impression in three words I was tempted to write "Waste of space" but instead will go with: Sexy, random, disappointing

Carrot cake recipe, modelled by a bunny girl.