43 of 43 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Flavorful and fast. I'm very pleased!, March 12, 2011
This review is from: Cooking Light Fresh Food Fast: Weeknight Meals: Over 280 Incredible Supper Solutions (Paperback)
My husband has food sensitivities, so we cook at home every night. I just stumbled across this cookbook at the bookfair at my son's school. It's FANTASTIC.
The good:
* TONS of photos. Every single recipe has at least one photo.
* The recipes give you complete meals. They'll show you how to serve an item, and they give you any needed additional recipes for sides.
* Every recipe has nutrition information.
* Most of the recipes can be easily adapted for allergen-free cooking. My husband is senstive to gluten, corn, dairy, honey, legumes, and some nuts. That's a long list, and I am still able to use most of the recipes in this book with minimal alteration.
* All the recipes are fast to make: very fast. I can complete most of them start to plate in under 30 minutes.
* They taste good. We've been very pleased. On flavor alone, my favorite cookbook is Jamie Oliver's "Food Revolution" book, and these recipes don't compete with those. However, I usually end up cooking out of this one because it's so fast and easy, and the recipes still taste pretty good. They are much better than the Rachael Ray recipes.
* The recipes are healthy but filling, and they still include some comfort-food type dishes.
* The organization is the best I've ever seen in a cookbook. Everything is divided into sections by main course: sandwiches, soups, poulty, etc. Recipes for sides or sauces are on the same page as the main dish, so you don't have to flip pages while cooking. But if you want to get creative and just look for a mustard sauce, there is a "Sauces" section in the index at the back. You do not have to remember that such-n-such mustard sauce went with such-n-such fish dish. You can just look it up.
The not so good:
* Some of the recipes use premade/prepackaged ingredients that are not always easily replaced with fresh, whole foods.
* The serving sizes are off/skimpy, in my opinion. I assume this is because they are trying to promote healthier serving sizes, but I've been caught a couple of times with less food than I expected to have. Most of the recipes seem to serve 3-4, in my opinion.
I would definitely recommend this cookbook, and I plan to buy the other "Fresh Food Fast" cookbook from Cooking Light as well.
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28 of 29 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Great and simple for a novice cook., October 6, 2010
This review is from: Cooking Light Fresh Food Fast: Weeknight Meals: Over 280 Incredible Supper Solutions (Paperback)
I love this cookbook! It's the first book I got where I actually read the ingredients and the directions and felt that I could actually do them. Granted, what they say takes 15minutes, is really more than 15mins unless you're Rachael Ray or something. Also, not all recipes are only 5 ingredients. It'll teach you to make a sauce that needs an 'X' amount of ingredients, then, count that whole sauce as 1 ingredient for the main dish. I think it's cheating, but overall, I still love the book and I can fool people into thinking that I actually know how to cook!
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22 of 23 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Must HAVE!, June 17, 2010
This review is from: Cooking Light Fresh Food Fast: Weeknight Meals: Over 280 Incredible Supper Solutions (Paperback)
This book should win an award there are so many great recipes in here that even a child can make its so easy! and super LOW in calories I will revisit this review when i try all the ones i have bookmarked which is alot of them.
Features i love:
Pictures for every recipe and if there is a side dish, salsa, or something extra in the picture there is a recipe for that too...Lots of soup, salad, meatless, beef, chicken and dessert recipes.
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