200 Healthy Recipes in 30 Minutes-or Less Review

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Snippets from Foreward Magazine (Book Review) -
Despite its title, Webb's newest cookbook is more than just a compilation of recipes: she delves into the whole process of organizing a kitchen, stocking a pantry, preparing weekly meal plans, and building shopping lists around those meal plans, including shopping monthly for staples.
Advance preparation is one of Webb's keys, and her tips for storing already-chopped onions and garlic in freezer bags, making double batches of marinades and salad dressings in advance, and freezing portions of fresh herbs and broth in ice cube trays, ready to pop into soups and stews, are great for cutting precious minutes off the nightly meal preparation.
Webb devotes one useful section of her book to what she calls "Quick Fixes." Here, she incorporates five staples -canned beans, canned broth, pasta, rice, and canned fish-into quick and easy ideas for those times when there seems to be "nothing to eat at home." She offers five recipes for each staple; tasty sounding examples are the Clear Asian Soup, Hungarian Noodles, and Salmon Niçoise.
In the last section, the author offers complete menus for myriad special occasions, including an Italian dinner featuring Chicken Rigatoni and Parmesan Zucchini, an Andalusian Supper with Shrimp Gazpacho and Roasted Vegetable Burritos, and a Dixieland dinner highlighted by Pork in Bourbon Maple Marinade. This engaging cookbook enables her to bring her techniques to an even wider audience. ~ Deborah Donovan


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American Heart Association One-Dish Meals: Over 200 All-New, All-in-One Recipes Review

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(More customer reviews)My partner and I cook real home cooked meals every night, but we don't always have tons of time to do it. Plus, since I've been working to lose weight, we've been looking for recipes with reasonable portion sizes, with more vegetables, which are lower in calories. We're only in our 30s and don't have any heart problems, but bought this cookbook for more general health-conscious reasons. We own over a hundred cookbooks, and this is our new favorite. We've had it for about four months now, and cooked a few dozen recipes from it, a number of them multiple times. Most of them have received either excellent or good reviews from both of us. Only a handful haven't worked well, and even those weren't bombs -- we think that they only needed minor tweaking to match our personal tastes better.
We're the kind of people who sit down once a week and choose recipes to cook that week before making up the grocery list. We put sticky notes on the top of the page to mark the selected recipes and then move the notes to the side to mark ones we've tried and liked well enough to note for later. Well, this book looks like a *forest* of sticky notes. Some weeks, we cook every night from this single cookbook. I love the variety of recipes, the detailed nutritional information, and the fact that most (maybe all?) of them only use one pot (a lot of other "one dish" or "one pot" cookbooks have you make pasta or rice separately). He loves the fact that he doesn't have to keep asking, "Honey, is this one on your diet?" Because everything in this book is fair game -- which is strangely not true of a lot of the other supposedly healthy cookbooks I have, once you look more closely at the recipes. We both love the results: not too fancy, just good, solid food for a weekday evening that's interesting but doesn't take too much time or effort. And the dishes never taste "diet."
This cookbook is great for people who want to make just a single dish, and maybe supplement it with a simple salad or a piece of good bread. If you (or someone in your family) won't be satisfied without separate meat, vegetable and starch courses on your plate, this isn't the cookbook for you. If you're happy with one bowl that has the vegetables, starches, beans, meat (or not), etc. all mixed together, dig in.
A fair number of the recipes use frozen vegetables and/or canned tomatoes, which is helpful for busy cooks who like to use lots of vegetables but only shop once a week and worry about the veggies going bad by the end of the week. At the same time, the recipes don't depend on using prepared foods (like mixes) as short-cuts, which is a pet peeve of mine with the fast-preparation books (the exception: an occasional can of cream of something soup). They assume you have spices in your cupboard and can get fresh herbs, but most recipes don't require hard-to-find ingredients.
The recipes do not include time estimates, which is a minus. Still, they are pretty consistent about giving good estimates for each step, so you can add up the cooking times yourself (not like a lot of books, that have steps you have to guess at, like, "simmer until just tender" and "while X is cooking, chop Y and then add it"). The recipes range widely in cooking/prep times, with some very fast (~20 minutes), many in the 30-50 minute range (including periods of simmering when you don't have to watch the pot and can be cleaning up the kitchen), and some that involve roasting for an hour or more or slow cooking for even longer.
No, there are no pictures in the book. But you get over it. The directions are clear (hooray!), and you can picture well enough what you should end up with.
Some of the dishes that we've tried so far and liked: lentils bourguignon; creamy turkey and wild rice soup; chicken ravioli Italiano; salmon and pasta with baby spinach; chicken and double mushroom stew; poblano chicken with rice; beef and barley stew; chipotle pork posole; fennel braised with red lentils; cassoulet with zesty tomato sauce... etc. If you have a hundred cookbooks, you're not going to find a lot of brand-new things that you've never seen before. However, these recipes have already been tweaked to make them healthier, so we don't have to guess about making substitutions. And they've clearly been tested more throughly than most, because they (almost always) work right the first time, which is more than I can say for most cookbooks!
All in all, this is a great find, and I highly recommend it.

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Vegan on the Cheap: Great Recipes and Simple Strategies that Save You Time and Money Review

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(More customer reviews)The recipes in this book really are inexpensive to make. The book starts with about 28 pages of advice on ways to save money on food, and the rest of the book is devoted to recipes. I have tried the following so far, and thought they were great:
Cheezee sauce (excellent!)
Comfort loaf (Best vegan 'meatloaf' I've ever had)
Baked ziti (Delicious; I was amazed at how well the tofu worked in this dish)
Mexican rice and bean bake (Today's dinner - also outstanding)
The one caveat I have about the book is that some of the directions appear to be incomplete. This is okay for experienced cooks that can just figure out how to make it work. But someone with less experience and know-how could possibly end up wasting money by trying recipes that won't work.
For example, the Cheezee sauce recipe tells you to combine some ingredients in a saucepan. Then it says, "Turn the heat on medium and whisk in the soy milk. Cook, stirring, until the sauce thickens, about 1 minute." This makes it sound like you are supposed to just turn on the heat and have the pot on the stove for 1 minute. What you have to do is bring the mixture to boiling and then cook it for about 1 minute longer. So, the author forgot to mention the part about bringing the mixture to boiling. If you've never made a sauce this way before, you might throw it out if you follow the directions, because it's not useful in that watery state.
In the Mexican rice and bean bake, the recipe involves partially cooking some rice on the stovetop, and then putting it in the oven to cook the rest of the way. I think that there is something missing from the directions there as well, because I cooked and baked as directed, and had to double my baking time to cook the rice completely. (And, no, there is nothing wrong with my oven.) I presume that it was supposed to be cooked a little longer on the stovetop first, but again, the directions just indicated that you were to return the stovetop mixture to boiling, and then dump it in the pan to go into the oven. I suspect you were supposed to boil it for a little while on the stovetop first.
The food tastes great. She really does a lot with inexpensive ingredients. (One of the things I liked about this cookbook was that she only asks you to have a few non-standard ingredients on hand, unlike most vegan cookbooks, which expect that you are secretly running an international grocery store in your kitchen.) But considering I tried 4 recipes so far, and 2 of them had inaccurate directions, I'm a little concerned about the rest of the book. I'll just have to remember to be more vigilant when making these recipes.
I think this is particularly important for this book, because I am sure that this book was geared, in part, to the 'starving students' and other new vegans who want to eat vegan on a budget. In general, younger people have less cooking experience and therefore will be less likely to know how to 'fix' these recipes. Also, I have a few of Robertson's other cookbooks, and haven't ever come across this problem so far. So, I'm disappointed for that reason, too.
But, man, that Mexican rice and bean bake is REALLY good.

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You don't have to blow your budget to eat great meatless and dairy-free meals every day.
With Vegan on the Cheap, you can enjoy delicious vegan meals every day of the week. Veteran food writer and vegan authority Robin Robertson provides 150 mouth-watering, exciting recipes that cost just 50 cents to $2 per serving-hefty savings to go with hearty vegan meals.
This book presents great options for savory soups and stews, satisfying salads, hearty noodle dishes, first-class casseroles, favorites for the slow cooker, and meatless and dairy-free recipes for classics like pizza, burgers, and sandwiches. Plus, there's even a chapter for desserts to satisfy every sweet tooth. Throughout the book, smart tips and creative ideas help you save money by cooking in bulk, prepping meals in advance, and finding tasty ways to reuse leftovers.
Includes 150 money-saving recipes for delicious vegan meals like Walnut-Dusted Fettuccine with Caramelized Vegetables and Fresh Pear Galette

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The McDougall Program: 12 Days to Dynamic Health (Plume) Review

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(More customer reviews)This will be a short review. Simply put, this book laid the foundation seven years ago for my vegetarianism. I have found few if any sources in academic libraries to dispute McDougall's views on diet and health. I was 23 when I began using this book as the basis for my diet and recipes. Today, in 2000, I enjoy these recipes regularly (I do add some salt back, and take a cue from Andrew Weil's "Spontaneous Healing" with regard to olive oil) and review this information from time to time to gauge my progress. While so many of my contemporaries are swelling like ticks from their childhood diets, my one adult decision to become vegetarian has resulted in a slim body, constant comments from my friends about my youthful appearance, and a cleaner planet due to all the cows and pigs and chickens I did not consume. I cannot say that this book changed my life; my decision to change gave the consequence of searching for such a book. I believe anyone with the will to become a new person will find much inspiration and practical advice in "The McDougall Program." I'm ordering it for my mom today.

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A national bestseller in hardcover, The McDougall Program is Dr. McDougall's most comprehensive and practical health book to date, including recipes, medical advice, histories, and details of the revolutionary 12-day McDougall nutrition program that has helped thousands lose weight.

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Alive in 5: Raw Gourmet Meals in Five Minutes Review

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(More customer reviews)I think the title of this book is quite misleading. I'm giving it two stars because I think the author is representing it as something it's not: "gourmet food".
While the recipes are not complicated, most of them are far TOO simple. Over and over, I kept asking myself, "for THIS I need a recipe book??" For example, "Cucumber Pizza", which sounds intriguing, is nothing more than chopped olives on slices of cucumber. "Scrambled Eggs", which sounds like something you wouldn't find in any ordinary raw food recipe book is -- are you ready for this? -- 3 ripe avocados mashed in a bowl, add salt and pepper! The "salad" recipes are the most basic of salads ... if you can chop some vegetables and lettuce into a bowl, add some lemon juice, olive oil and your favorite seasonings, you already know how to make most of the salads in this book.
There are several different nut milk recipes, each with a fancy, delicious-sounding name, but they're all the exact same recipe ... only the kind of nut you use is different.
Many of the recipes call for the pulp left over from making nut milk, and some of the soup recipes require nut milk. So unless you've taken the time to make nut milk, and have saved a supply of the pulp, you're out of luck.
One problem I have with many raw food recipe books is the inordinate amount of nuts, seeds and avocados called for. One recipe in this book calls for 5 avocados to make a dish that serves 3 people (just about all the recipes in the book make 3 servings). A taco recipe calls for 2 cups of soaked sunflower seeds in the pate', plus an avocado in the filling, and another cup of sunflower seeds to make the "sour cream" topping ... serves 3. I don't like gorging on fats, even if they are the healthy kind.
Some recipes call for coconuts, which is a no-go for me, because I don't want to have to deal with cracking coconuts and scraping out the flesh, etc. One recipe (that makes 3 servings) calls for 3 young coconuts.
I'm a big proponent of raw foods, and have a large collection of raw food recipe books. For "quick and simple" recipes, I especially like Raw Food Made Easy for 1 or 2 People, by Jennifer Cornbleet. Raw Foods for Busy People by Jordan Maerin is another favorite. But I cannot recommend Alive in 5, for all the reasons mentioned above. Perhaps if it were titled more honestly, something like "Dishes You Really Don't Need a Recipe Book For", I wouldn't have been so disappointed with it. I'm not saying there aren't some tasty combinations of foods in this book, but many of them are just TOO simple. To call it "Gourmet Meals" is misleading.

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Here is a great resource for anyone looking for easy alternatives to complex raw recipes that require lots of time and expensive equipment to prepare. Acclaimed raw chef Angela Elliott shows how to whip up mouth-watering lasagne, spaghetti marinara, stuffed mushrooms, broccoli in cheese sauce, apple pie, decadent whipped cream and strawberries, chocolate shake, and more--all in about five minutes, with easy-to-find ingredients and just a blender or food processor. She shares her personal wellness journey and her playful enthusiasm to make the book an enjoyable and inspiring guide to delicious living.

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The New American Heart Association Cookbook, 7th Edition Review

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(More customer reviews)Last February 1999 I was hospitalized for several weeks with a heart problem. After I was discharged I knew I had to do something about my weight. I purchased the New American Heart Association Cookbook and changed my eating habits. Using the recipes from this cookbook, along with an excellent walking program, I have lost almost 50 pounds between the end of February 1999 and August 1999. There are way too many good recipes for me to list, but several of my favorites are: Chicken Fajitas (I use the low-fat tortilla wrappers that you can find in any store), Crispy Baked Chicken, Asian Grilled Chicken and Vegetarian Chili. The best recommendation I can make for this book is to tell you that my doctor now tells me that I have a very healthy heart and I sincerely believe that I owe it to my walking program and the excellent recipes from The New American Heart Association Cookbook.

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