We tried to pick recipes that illustrated important technques, so you can build on them to make all sorts of variations. As somebody commented up thread, our main point with MC was technique - yes there are lots of recipes but the technique and understanding was our top priority.
in MCAH we still like technique but we are more recipe focussed. We also tried to make the recipes focus on less formal food - in MC we have recipes from Thomas Keller, Ferran Adria, Heston Blumenthal which are great, but are of the nature of dishes served at those high end places. That isn't really what people at home tend to cook and eat. So MCAH has chicken wings, steaks, roast chicken and other much simpler and less formal fare.
To answer a couple questions above, the page size is the same as MC - the hardcover volume is bascially the same size as MC volumes. The MCAH kitchen manual (with washable waterproof paper) is the same page size as the one for MC. The box for the boxed set now includes a place for the kitchen manual, but it isn't made of acrylic, because that proved to be too expensive.
The frozen steak is very cool dish - you cook a steak directly from its frozen state, without defrosting first. The carnitas recipe is great too, but then again, I have a built in bias - if I don't think a recipe is great, it doesn't go in the book.
Unlike with MC we ordered a lot of them up front, so we are not thinking that there will be shortages. But having shown that I am bad at forecasting before, it's not clear how much credibility that has
.So far Amazon has had the book at list price, but I suspect that it will drop lower before the book ships (MC certainly did, and almost all books do). The way Amazon ordering works, if you order early you automatically get the benefit of any price drop between the time you ordered and the time the book ships.
