The Everything Quick Meals Cookbook (Everything (Cooking)) Review

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(More customer reviews)The Everything Quick Meals Cookbook is a fun and easy-to-use compendium of more than 300 delicious, nutritious recipes that are as quick to prepare (30 minutes or less!) as they are satisfying to the palate. From Parmesan Crisps; Oriental Noodle Salad; Easy Ground Beef Stroganoff; and Lumache with Leek and Sausage Sauce; to Herb Linguine with Salmon, Cream, and Pistachios; Tuna Teriyaki; Pasta with Jalapeno Butter Sauce; and Raspberry Cream Cheese Breakfast Biscuits; The Everything Quick Meals Cookbook covers meat and poultry entrees, seafood entrees, vegetable entrees and side dishes, pasta and rice dishes, pies, pudding, and cakes. Enhanced with invaluable time-saving tips, The Everything Quick Meals Cookbook is ideal for the busy cook and a most welcome addition to any family cookbook shelf.

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The Food Nanny Rescues Dinner: Easy Family Meals for Every Day of the Week Review

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(More customer reviews)I feed 6-7 people every day for dinner, sometimes more if one or two of my kids' friends are over. I think about food all day even when it's not meal time because I'm thinking about what to put together to make a cohesive meal, if I laid it out to thaw, if I have enough of it, if I have any leftovers that I can incorporate so as not to waste food. It is exhausting. I purchase absolutely any cookbook there is that will help me make meal planning, prep and cooking easier. So when I saw this book I had to have it.
The very first page was planning the weekly menu like I've been trying to do for years. This book is having Comfort Food on Monday, Italian on Tuesday, Fish & Meatless on Wednesday, Mexican Night on Thursday, Pizza Friday's, Grill Night on Saturday and Family Traditions on Sunday. I've been doing something similar but trying to make mine Meatless Monday's, [...]. But regardless of what you pick this is excellent meal planning advice. It gives yourself (and the kids and spouse) an idea of what to look forward to rather than coming home with pots and pans banging around with no idea of what to prepare.
That is what I liked about the Sandi Richard book too, The Family Dinner Fix: Cooking for the Rushed. She has similar ideas to Ms. Edmunds. I would use a calendar that you get free in the mail and write your "theme" across the top. Your themes might be different than the suggested themes in this book but either way come up with 7 themes and write them across the top of the calendar.
Now go to each chapter in this cookbook (or any other cookbook) and list a recipe that corresponds to that theme. List the page it is on and briefly write any side dishes that you would be serving with the main entree. Ms. Edmunds suggests making your menu first and then your grocery list second. I believe in making the grocery list first and then making meals from that. I try to buy what's on sale and then make meals from the sale foods rather than the other way around.
I made the white chicken chili that was listed under the Comfort Food section. It's intended to be a Monday meal but I think we had it on a Wednesday (oops!). LOL. It was very good. Also under each recipe is a conversation starter. It's a question you're to pose to the family around the dinner table to stimulate conversation. I actually purchased these from www.savingdinner.com and here they are free.
There are also bread recipes, side dishes, desserts, after school snacks, cooking tips, and other great ideas to get the family back to the dinner table. It's an awesome book. One of my better purchases. This is certainly a fantastic gift, wedding or otherwise. It would be a great gift for someone just starting to cook who needs ideas and instruction for getting a complete meal on the table.
Another good cookbook I like is Saving Dinner: The Menus, Recipes, and Shopping Lists to Bring Your Family Back to the Table by Leann Ely. It has shopping lists, menus, and great recipes to get started. It's not laid out with "theme" nights like the Food Nanny but it's good nevertheless.


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Quick and Healthy Meals from Trader Joe's Review

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(More customer reviews)i had given up cooking because i had tired of the drudgery of planning, shopping, etc. with this new book, the planning is done for me and for the first time in years, i enjoy cooking three days a week. this book contains a wonderful variety of meals which makes it easy,fun, and the recipes provide leftovers for the next day. However, their seems to be a over emphasis on carbohydrates (rice, pasta).

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Prepare delicious healthy meals in 15 minutes or less! New, easy recipes and options to help you get out of your 'what-to-eat-for-dinner' rut featuring chicken, seafood and vegetarian recipes. International cuisine featuring delicious recipes, all nutritionally analyzed including calories, fat, sodium, carbohydrates, fiber and protein for those wanting to get fit and healthy and for those who want to maintain their shape and healthy lifestyle. The recipes were developed with the help of excellent tasters as well as Jamie's Quick and Healthy Meals from Costco and Trader Joe's class participants. This is Jamie's third healthy cooking cookbook.

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The Everything Quick Meals Cookbook: Whip up easy and delicious meals for you and your family (Everything (Cooking)) Review

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(More customer reviews)This is typical of the other "Everything" books or "The Idiot's Guide", it's a comprehensive cookbook to cover 30 minute meals. As if you've not had enough of Rachael Ray and Robin Miller.
The biggest tip for any of the quick cooking books is to have a plan. Whether it's a plan of what to have for dinner or a plan how to use leftovers or a plan to make a menu. Either way it's what gets you going. So as soon as you hit the door from work you know what to start making. You're not standing gazing in the refrigerator as though you're a deer in headlights.
This is an OK cookbook, I like that it does give how many the meal serves, it includes prep times and cooking times up front. The recipes are not divided into those categories, you'll still have to scan all the recipes to figure out if you have 30 minute recipe or a 10 minute recipe (and yes there are 10 minute recipes in this book). And this cookbook is much better than the BHG "Off the Shelf" one.
If you want a cookbook divided into quick, quicker and quickest look at The Family Dinner Fix: Cooking for the Rushed, it's sorted that way.
An example of a recipe in this book is buying a rotisserie chicken from the supermarket, coming home and shredding it and then putting it over a bagged salad, adding drained mandarin oranges, golden raisins and italian salad dressing. Hummm...I don't know if that's much of a recipe? Another recipe to cook chicken thighs and then spread store bought salsa verde over them. There's are no suggestions for side dishes, accompanying dishes, etc. If I'm in such a hurry that I can't figure out to pour a jar of sauce over some cooked chicken thighs then I probably need help with the whole meal, not just one component of it.
I wasn't real impressed with this book. If it had been divided into menus or suggested side dishes then I would rate it a little higher. There are no pictures, there are 3-4 recipes crowded onto one page. It's printed on recycled paper so don't get the pages dirty or wet. Overall, it's what's expected of the Everything series books. I would spend my money on Saving Dinner: The Menus, Recipes, and Shopping Lists to Bring Your Family Back to the Table or The Food Nanny Rescues Dinner: Easy Family Meals for Every Day of the Week.
Another suggestion would be The Good-to-Go Cookbook: Take-along Food, Quick Suppers, and Satisfying Snacks for On-The-Go Families. They're in the similar vein as they cookbook but put together a little better. HTH.


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American families are busier than ever, and a nutritious dinner often falls to the bottom of the priority list. This cookbook shows them how easy it can be to prepare wholesome meals everyone will love. This second edition of an Everything? bestseller is packed with quick-cooking tips and 300 all-new, easy-to-follow recipes, including: 10-Minute Yogurt and Rice Pudding; Fast Frittata with Beans; Easy Skillet Zucchini Quiche; One-Dish Baked Chicken and Potatoes; Five-Ingredient Steak Diane; Foil-Wrapped Fish Fillets with Dill; Simple Rigatoni with Tomato Sauce; 5-Minute Chocolate ?Mousse?; Fast Chicken Fajitas, and more. With these recipes, readers will learn how to make delicious, quality meals in minutes, not hours!

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Dinner Survival: The Most Uncomplicated, Approachable Way to Get Dinner to Fit Your Life Review

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(More customer reviews)I really liked Sandi Richards' first book The Family Dinner Fix: Cooking for the Rushed and just knew that I had to have this one when it came out.
This book has 10 weeks of menus for 5 nights of the week. It only includes 5 evenings of meals because it is expected that one night you will dine out and perhaps another you will eat leftovers or have pizza. The meals are divided into color coded meals of green, blue, red, and yellow. What this symbolizes is the time it takes to prepare each meal so you decide when night you're having which color.
The red and yellow coded meals are designed to be ready in under 30 minutes with the red requiring less cutting and chopping. The green and blue coded meals are designed to have dinner ready in under 60 minutes, it allows for doing something else while dinner is cooking. The green means less cutting and chopping. So while dinner is cooking you could be helping the kids with homework, starting laundry, etc.
Each week has at least one of every color so you mix and match as your evening plans dictate. There are fabulous pictures and nutritional information with each recipe. Food exchanges are also included for those who need that info. Additional serving suggestions are provided to complete the dinner meal such as the addition of rolls, salad, side steamed vegetables, etc. This would be a great gift for someone who is new to cooking and dinner preparation. It really is an uncomplicated approach.
Grocery lists are also included so make sure and check out her website, www.cookingfortherushed.com it's a great supplement to the book. I would also suggest Getting Ya Through the Summer (cooking for the Rushed) if you can still find it.
I set my timer and made the Pecan-Crusted Salmon, sweet potato fries and broccoli per her timeline. This is a yellow coded 25 minute meal so I set the timer and started. It took me 31 minutes from start to finish. I think my delay was in reading and re-reading just to make sure I didn't miss a step. That is just my newness and inexperience with the recipe. I think her timelines are definitely within reason.
Her biggest suggestion is to have a menu prepared for the whole week ahead of time. So as you as you get home you know to start water boiling or turn the oven on, etc. Then you go change clothes while the water is boiling, oven is preheating vs. starting it after you've changed when you're more likely to say "let's just order pizza."
I highly recommend this book for those who need a jumpstart with dinner and getting meals in order. Family meals should be a priority and not an afterthought. Fast food is not a healthy, nutritious meal...this cookbook is. If you like this genre of cookbooks I would suggest The Food Nanny Rescues Dinner: Easy Family Meals for Every Day of the Week as well as The Candy Bar Cookbook.
For the publishers, the front cover of this cookbook does not do Ms. Richards justice. It looks too similar to her first cookbook and when I initially saw it I thought it was her first one, The Family Dinner Fix. This cover should not have included her picture and exact same pose as her first book. Regardless of that this one is a keeper.

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The 4-Ingredient Diabetes Cookbook Review

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(More customer reviews)We first checked this book out from our public library to test it and now we can't live without it!
The recipes are delicious and real-life friendly. We do not have diabetes in our household, but want to put healthy nutritious foods on the table.
In my view, any recipe that passes diabetic guidelines will keep the appetite satisfied and fuel our bodies appropriately. But most importantly to us, these recipies appeal to our senses in making mealtime a pleasure with foods we want to enjoy again and again.
Recommended!

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Making delicious meals doesn't have to be complicated, time-consuming, or expensive. You can create satisfying dishes using just four ingredients, or even less! Make the most of your time and money. You'll be amazed at how much you can prepare with just a few simple ingredients. With over 150 quick, easy-to-prepare recipes, The 4-Ingredient Diabetes Cookbook has recipes for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and everything in between.

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The Six O'Clock Scramble: Quick, Healthy, and Delicious Dinner Recipes for Busy Families Review

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(More customer reviews)I bought this when I returned to work when my daughter was 10 months old. I initially bought it for the downloadable shopping lists, but instead of going by week, I go by seasons, flip through to find 2-3 recipes that jump out at me, and buy the ingredients for those. The next week, I pick up where I left off. The meals have simple ingredients, interesting flavors, and are easy to prepare. 2 minor things: the meals are 30 minutes to prepare, but may take longer to cook, so keep an eye on that. Also, some of the recommended dish sizes are on the small side, so I sometimes size up (9x13 instead of 8x11, for instance) to make sure that it fits well without bubbling over.

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The Six O'Clock Scramble cookbook is a companion to Aviva's wonderful email-based newsletter service that provides busy moms with easy and nutritious meals for their families.The Scramble is a weekly e-mail newsletter that features: Five flavorful and healthy, tried-and-true dinner recipes with side dish suggestions, emailed to you each week. Easy-to-prepare dinners in 30 minutes (or less), most with fewer than 10 ingredients. Delicious, easy recipes like Asian Turkey Burgers, Tortellini Tossed with Fresh Mozzarella, honey glazed salmon and red beans and rice burritos. Includes an organized grocery list so you can print and shop. Perfect for working or full-time parents, or anyone who wants to make easy, delicious home-cooked meals. From O, The Oprah magazine:Aviva Goldfarb had one of those ideas - incredibly obvious, yet nobody had thought of it - that immediately make the pieces of your brain fit together with a neat click. A wife, mother, self-published cookbook author, and organizational ace, Goldfarb realized that for most people 6 P.M. was too late to start wondering what to cook for dinner. So she started the Six O'Clock Scramble (thescramble.com), a weekly e-mail newsletter with five days' worth of dinner recipes, plus grocery lists. The meals (grilled teriyaki chicken tenderloins one night, baked huevos rancheros another) take about a half hour to prepare and are creative, healthy, unprocessed and kid-friendly without being adult-alienating. A subscription costs $5 a month - a small price to pay for a whole new kind of happy meal. Goldfarb herself is happy, having graduated from the self-publishing business: Next fall St. Martin's Press will release The Six O'Clock Scramble Cookbook.

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The 5:30 Challenge: 5 Ingredients, 30 Minutes, Dinner on the Table Review

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(More customer reviews)I checked this out from the library and ended up ordering a copy from Amazon two days later. I've made four or five of the meals so far. All have been tasty, and the prep time is amazingly short; that "30 minutes" includes cooking time, so usually I can get the sides whipped together and the kitchen cleaned up before it's time to eat.
I love books that give you a shopping list, side dish suggestions and a "game plan" of instructions; it's the next best thing to somebody else doing the work for you. The limit of 5 ingredients is a fun gimmick, and for the most part those ingredients are "real" food, not cream o' mushroom in a can.
Some portions were a little small for our family, which includes 2 healthy teenagers. And relying on pre-packaged convenience foods can get pricey--I will probably continue to cook raw potatoes, boil ordinary rice, and chop whole onions. But as the authors point out, it's nice to know we don't have to.
Final comment: the lasagna recipe alone is worth the price of the book.


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7-Day Menu Planner For Dummies Review

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(More customer reviews)Being a woman "of a certain age" and married for 20+ years, I have been cooking for a long time. I admit, I am far from gourmet: I don't specialty shop; I don't watch the TV cooking shows or reality shows starring angry chefs and their desperate-to-please minions; glossy gourmet food and recipe magazines make me nervous.
I do have skills. I have one small shelf of cookbooks in my kitchen. I can cover the basics, having more or less successfully fed and nourished a healthy family of five for some time now. Culled from a 25-year-old, well-worn copy of the cooking classic: BETTY CROCKER'S COOKBOOK (1987), family magazines and, in more recent years, recipe searches on AllRecipes.com for the iPhone and iPad, I have compiled my very own cookbook: a mish-mash of photocopies, hand-written classics and typed recipes, all carefully preserved in plastic page protectors and haphazardly "filed" in a white, plastic-coated (easy wipe!), 3-ring binder.
However, having said all of that:
Even with my vast and very practical culinary knowledge and experience, I love, Love, LOVE Susan Nicholson's 7-DAY MENU PLANNER FOR DUMMIES! An instant new-NEW classic, this book should be a treasured kitchen bible for every man, woman or young adult trying to prepare and serve nutritious, delicious, affordable and do-able meals for a family, couple or even healthy meals for one.
Susan Nicholson is a registered dietitian and creator of the 7-Day Menu Planner newspaper column, featured in major newspapers and in online syndication, too. She is a culinary professional and a talented writer with a lot of experience and a great sense of humor, which makes 7-Day Menu Planner for Dummies more than just another cookbook.
7-Day Menu Planner for Dummies gives you a year's worth of weekly dinner idea and recipes that "take about 30 minutes to prepare, contain an average of 30 percent calories from fat, and use common ingredients to save time and money." It is a well-organized and simple roadmap for menu planning, offering great recipes, practical instruction and tips, and a very consistent weekly plan of coordinated dinners: Family Night; Kid's Night (not just for children!); Express Meal; Budget Night; Heat and Eat; Meatless Night; and Easy Entertaining. I love the fact that the week's meals are coordinated to use ingredients in common and a central philosophy of reduce, re-use, recycle and re-format throughout the week's plan. (Trust me, *not* repetitious, you will not get bored!)
7-Day Menu Planner for Dummies makes planning and preparing meals less of a chore and more simple, easy, quick, healthy and delicious. Whether you are an old pro in the kitchen or a culinary "noob" (as my kids say), make room on your cookbook shelf for a new classic!
-- Sherri Caldwell, Humor Columnist & Reviewer at RebelHousewife.com
Co-Author, The Rebel Housewife Rules: To Heck With Domestic Bliss!

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Flavorful, nutritious meals that can be prepared quickly, easily, and economically
7-Day Menu Planner For Dummies is the perfect book for any family looking for a structured, nutritional approach to daily meal planning. It contains over a year's worth of weekly dinner ideas and recipes that take an average of thirty minutes to prepare, contain an average of thirty percent calories from fat, and use common ingredients to save time and money.
Features budget-friendly family meals that are both quick and healthy
Dinner for each week of the night is associated with a theme—for example: Family Sunday, Kids Monday, Express Tuesday, Budget Wednesday, Heat and Eat Thursday, Meatless Friday, and Easy Entertaining Saturday

In this time of budget, time, and health consciousness, 7-Day Menu Planner For Dummies gives families just what they need to easily plan the right meals!

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101 Meals for Busy People: Simple, Practical, and Delicious Recipes for People With Busy Lives Review

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(More customer reviews)Obviously I haven't had time to do all the recipes yet (that would take months!), but so far I've been really happy with the recipes in this book. Not only are most of them very quick (although some of the longer ones will take you 25-30 minutes), but me and my family also found pretty much all of them to be really tasty so far (my personal favorite is the "creamy ranch skillet potatoes"...definitely check that one out).
There are a few recipes in the book that I don't think I'm going to try, just because they don't sound appealing to me, but that's to be expected with any recipe book, of course. Regardless, me and my wife have been using this book a lot lately, and it's been a real time-saver. Definitely recommended for busy people (and families).


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Finally! You can cook professional, delicious, gourmet-quality meals...without spending hours in your kitchen! "101 Meals for Busy People" will teach you how to make a wide range of meals that are healthy, delicious, and can be made in 15-30 minutes MAXIMUM!The recipes include Chinese food, Italian food, Greek food, Indian food, and more, so you'll have a wide range of meals to choose from.The book is also designed with practicality in mind; preparation and cook times are clearly printed at the beginning of every recipe, so you can plan your prep time perfectly.And to top things off, there are over 25 bonus recipes hidden in the back of the book, covering vegetarian dishes, breakfasts, and desserts.So if you've been looking for a way to add gourmet-quality meals to your life, without spending hours in the kitchen, then "101 Meals for Busy People" is the perfect book for you.Get your copy today!

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