This series of Food Network DVDs comes in a simple cardboard envelope and it seems like you could simply pick it up and use it as a shopping guide while you're in the store. It's a nice idea, but it doesn't work for a few reasons. For one, you may not realize that you need some specialized equipment to make some of the recipes. Some of them require food processors or mixers, which are fairly common, but the pea whipped potatoes calls for a potato ricer, which is a little uncommon in the average kitchen. The cooks in the demos will sometimes suggest alternatives, so it isn't such a big deal. When you're picking up something called "Elegant Entertaining," chances are you're prepared for a few unusual requests from your kitchen equipment. Also, cooking times and ingredient amounts are not listed on the back of the DVD, so there goes that hope for convenience.

This is a basically a collection of six short cooking demonstrations. The recipes included are Loin of Pork with Fennel, Frisee Salad with Blue Cheese Port Wine Vinaigrette, Banana Chocolate Hazelnut Crepes, Pea Whipped Potatoes, Ina's Chive Biscuits, and Spiked Cider Cocktail. There are advantages to seeing a recipe being executed by the professionals. The hosts here also give you a few little insights and tricks to keep you from messing up key parts. For example, with the Pea Whipped Mashed Potatoes recipe, Michael Chiarello advises leaving just boiled potatoes in the oven for a while just to get rid of excess moisture. It's not something I would have thought of, but then I'm not much of a cook.

This is, however, no America's Test Kitchen, and I had a little trouble following one recipe that I did try. Using the printed recipe and a laptop with the DVD playing, I ran into some confusion while trying to make the Banana Chocolate Hazelnut Crepes. The recipe cards suggested making an extra separate batch of sauce for spreading on top of the crepes. It was no disaster, but the DVD demo skipped over this step, so I wasn't prepared for it. It would have been nice to have some extra sauce, as it seemed the filling barely produced enough to cover the bananas. And as everything seems to cool down at a phenomenally fast rate when it comes to crepes, it was a little too late to make up for it.

As for the taste, the Banana Chocolate Hazelnut Crepes were fairly good. The filling had a strong citrus taste, but the chocolate spread balanced it out if it was too much for anyone. I'll confess, I couldn't find all the "fancy" ingredients for this recipe at the low-budget shopping establishment I visited (ends in an "al-mart"). So I took the demo's suggestion and added orange juice to substitute for the tangerine juice, and I left out the raspberries. I will say that the crepes came out a little better than the last recipe I had tried; perhaps the unsalted butter or the whole milk made the difference here. So I got to learn a few things from this cooking adventure, and isn't that what it's all about?

This is a really short DVD. The total playing time is only 26 minutes. It's also priced fairly low, so you could almost consider it an impulse buy. It does, however, feel more like just a collection of short snippets from Food Network's shows more than it feels like a cooking guide. For those lacking in culinary skills, it might be better to just invest in a quality cookbook, but this still may make a nice quick gift.