Customer Reviews

200 Healthy Recipes in 30 Minutes-or Less!

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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

Sometimes it seems healthy cooking just doesn't fit into the modern hectic schedule: it's far quicker to grab something high-carb and high-fat off the shelf when on the run. In reality, easy-to-make healthy dishes can be prepared almost as quickly, as Robyn Webb's 200 Healthy Recipes In 30 Minutes - Or Less demonstrates. From mustard-infused French Burgers to easy Chicken Nugget finger foods and salads, dietician Webb packs in dishes which lend to quick preparation while remaining healthy. The introduction on how to stock a kitchen for maximum 'fast food' cooking is particularly notable.

These are just OK recipes for adults but kids are never going to eat this stuff. Salmon in tomato sauce, shells agli olio, cod and shrimp soup. Yuck. The recipes are speedy but not very tasty.

These recipes, at least the ones I've tried, have been easy to make, use common ingredients, and taste really good! I highly recommend it!

This is a fine cooking resource for folks who are both busy and health conscious. As the title implies, there are 200 recipes in all.

If you read the recipes closely, you'll soon discover that the author fibbed just a tad on the "30 minute or less" claim. Taking the recipe on page 136 as an example we find a recipe for "Good Ol' Pork Barbeque" which the author says can be prepared in 15 minutes! I found that one to be a real head-scratcher until I realized that her main ingredient is COOKED pork tenderloin. Well, it takes me 9 hours to properly cook an 8-pound pork butt (I never use tenderloin, not enough flavor) so the fast recipe theme is thus out the window. Even a 1 1/2-pound tenderloin (recommended by the author) would take an hour or so to bake properly in the oven.

Webb's "Speedy Steak" (page 131) calls for similar pre-preparation, one ingredient being 1 1/2-pounds of boneless, skinless chicken breasts or lean sirloin steaks, cooked and sliced into strips. This recipe purports a 20-minute cooking time but that is clearly not the case if you start from scratch. There are not a lot of recipes like these but the inevitable need to cut up vegetables, pound out chicken filets, etc., clearly call for prep time which does not appear to be a facet of Webb's time formulas.

My other chief comment is that, because these are "healthy" recipes, the most flavorful cuts of meat and the inclusion of low-sodium ingredients tend to combine to knock down the end flavor of many of these dishes. Of course this is to be expected with such recipes but sometimes newer cooks are unaware of this actuality.

Other than those two issues, this is a useful cookbook for the folks which it targets. There are no photos of the dishes but I did not find this to be especially hurtful of the overall work since the detailed instructions are clearly written.

The text is 268 pages in length and the integral recipe chapters are:

-- Appetizers
-- Soups
-- Salads
-- Pasta
-- Rice & Grains
-- Seafood
-- Poultry
-- Lean Beef, Lamb, & Pork
-- Grilled Meats
-- Vegetables
-- Desserts

There are also useful and relevant discusssions on Menus and Food Storage. A nicely-organized index will quickly get you to the recipe which you need to find.

In summary, I would recommend this cookbook for those folks to whom I have previously alluded, as well as to persons who have family members who are afflicted with sugar diabetes.

After years of searching, I have finally found the BEST cookbook for quick, healthy, AND yummy recipes!

Roby Webb, MS, and associate editor of Diabetes Forecast, shows us that food can be healthy, good, quick and an inspiration for cooks and guests to have fun. It's a comprehensive book that includes nutrition analyses, what's in the cupboard, meal planning, kitchen organization, what to buy, meal prep and time-saving ideas. I found a great Shrimp Gazpacho and Herbed Crab Sandwich to add to my summer repertoire.