Customer Reviews

Betty Crocker Easy Family Dinners: Simple Recipes and Fun Ideas to Turn Meal Time to Quality Time

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Trust Betty Crocker to come up with a book combining cooking with family time!

Long overdue (I don't know WHY no one has thought of this before!), this book gives great recipes that take little time and stress along with ideas for family together time. The ideas are fun and do-able with little preparation or supplies. Get your kids cooking in the kitchen with you, or just keep them busy while you cook. It's all here and you can do the activities w/out much forethought.

This is great for people wanting to spend less time in the kitchen, but still feed their families good meals and more time talking to their kids and spouses.

I recommend this highly!!!!!!!!!!! Let your kids pick out the meals and activities, do family "theme" nights. A great book!

As the previous person commented this cookbook is not bobbie flay or emeril. It's not suppose to be. It's for busy families with kids. It has suggestions for quick and easy dinners that the kids can help prepare. It's not gourmet, it's not suppose to be. It does have cute suggestions with activities to do with the kids. I loved it. It does use packaged foods and prepared ingredients but so what? Who doesn't nowadays? Worth it.

I and the kids made the Bacon Cheeseburger Pizza together. The recipe called for slicing a French Loaf in half horizontally. I cooked the ground beef with onion in a skillet and then drained off all the fat. I stirred in a jar of pizza sauce. The mixture is then spread over the bread. The kids sprinkled with diced tomatoes, cooked bacon bits, and shredded cheese. It took about 15 minutes in the oven to heat through. After it came out of the oven we topped with shredded lettuce. The "together time" suggestion was to play your favorite CD and dance around the kitchen with the kids while preparing dinner. Another suggestion was to let the kids measure the ingredients out themselves.

How I usually save more time is often when I'm frying ground beef already (as in the recipe above) I'll fry up a 5 lb roll with a couple of chopped onions. The above recipe called for one pound but then I used the Reynolds Handi-Vac vacuum bags four pint size baggies and froze the rest of the cooked ground beef in one pound portions. Next time I need cooked ground beef it's already cooked and saves at least 10-15 minutes needed to cook it. Dinner is on the table that much quicker.

I found this ro be something of a disappointment as almost all of the recipes use highly processed foods of some sort and I feel that there is very little attention to dietary requirements. The sodium content, particularly, of many meals I found alarming and would not make many of the meals for my young kids, especially not on an every night basis. Having said that, there are a couple of recipes - the chicken pot pie in particular stands out - that are quite nutritious, especially if you take chef's privilege and use more fresh veg/less salt! 3 stars for those few recipes.

Overall, an okay purchase as a used item but I wouldn't recommend paying full price for it.

I enjoy reading cookbooks, and I'm always on the lookout for easy recipes (I enjoy cooking, usually, but I'm not a fanatic about it), and Betty Crocker books usually include a number of no-nonsense dishes that don't involve arcane ingredients. But this one is pretty much a disappointment. The subtitle is "Simple Recipes and Fun Ideas to Turn Mealtime into Quality Time," and the idea seems to be to increase "together time" by decreasing time at the stove, and by involving the kids in the food prep. Well, all my kids are grown and long gone, and I don't need to color lunch bags, personalize the pizza, jumping in the leaf piles, or telling stories about objects in the kitchen. There are themes, too: "Asian Night" includes egg rolls (buy them frozen at the store -- whoopee) and "Cantonese Chicken Chop Suey" (just chicken breasts, rice, and frozen stir-fry veggies). The rest of the book goes on like that -- ordinary dishes, old short-cuts, and lots of warm fuzzies. I'll pass.

If you like mixing processed food together and believe the results match those like Bobby Flay, then forget about it. This is a book for people who have trouble boiling an egg. Buy some ramen noodles, some kraft macaroni and cheese, and some Tombstone pizza and save your money instead of buying this trash. If you really want to cook, buy Marcella Hazan, Anthony Bourdain, or even Emeril. BAM! Bam, Bam, Bam! this book in the fireplace!

PS 2 stars since it was a Christmas present; it's the thought that counts. That's what I cherish about this gift.