The Chew is a TV food show focusing on entertainment and on having viewers do their cooking using their own recipes. The cookbook The Chew Approved is a collection of recipes from the show, edited by Ashley Archer. Too bad Archer hasn’t used a good cookbook editor as mistakes are not uncommon in the recipes. There are missing ingredients in the instructions and in the ingredient list, and there are even ambiguous instructions. Some recipes don’t use the accepted convention of listing ingredients in order of cooking steps. Otherwise, the individual recipes are edited for uniformity, giving prep time (mostly reasonable for home cooks) and cooking time.
Each recipe is approved by one of the four hosts. They are arranged by the courses of the meal, and they vary greatly, from simple to complex and time consuming. For many recipes, the focus is on quick and easy cooking using store-bought ingredients. Recipes are nicely laid out on a page or facing pages, and the book is filled with photos of food but also of happy, laughing pictures of the hosts and viewers (these get tiresome). Each chapter is headed with a page-long, uninteresting text filled with words like amazing, superb, fabulous, and awesome. The index is good.
