Real Simple: Meals Made Easy (Real Simple S.) [Hardcover]

Editors of Real Simple Magazine (Author)

Book Description

Series: Real Simple S.

When it comes to the challenges you face every day, getting dinner on the table is always at the top of the list. Not only do you want the meal to be healthy and taste good, but you want it to be fast and simple to prepare. As straightforward as that sounds, somehow-in the midst of a busy life- the task seems nearly impossible. In "Meals Made Easy", the first of a series of "Real Simple" cookbooks, you will find smart and doable dinnertime solutions for every night of the week, no matter how little time (or few ingredients) you have. Even better, these are dishes the whole family will love, yes, including your children. Featuring more than 75 foolproof recipes, all illustrated with large, lush photos, "Meals Made Easy", is custom-made for your life, with chapters dedicated to: dishes that can be prepared and ready in 30 minutes or less; freezer-friendly dinners to make ahead of time and eat whenever; cuisine that calls only for a cutting board, no cooking necessary; meals you can cobble together using the items in your cupboard; and recipes that require just one pot (and blessedly very little cleanup time).

Product Details

• Hardcover: 192 pages
• Publisher: Real Simple (April 11, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1933405031
• ISBN-13: 978-1933405032
• Product Dimensions: 10.2 x 1 x 10 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (50 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #112,812 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #77 in Books > Children's Books > Sports & Games > Cooking

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

89 of 91 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A cookbook I will use (and I don't use many cookbooks), April 18, 2006

By 

Joanna Daneman (Middletown, DE USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Real Simple: Meals Made Easy (Real Simple S.) (Hardcover)

I am a "been there, done that" cook. So I use very few cookbooks. If I am baking a cake, sure, I pull down "Joy of Cooking" or better yet, I am likely to make a genoise from "Mastering the Art of French Cooking." I have about 10 cookbooks, but those two plus "The New York Times Cookbook" are the only ones I refer to. Otherwise, I am making my standard fare most nights. For parties, I pull down my three or four tried-and-true recipes from my card box.

BUT...."Meals Made Easy" is a cookbook I think I will be adding to my slim pile of regulars. Wow! I found page after page of easy but elegant meals, from corn-scallop chowder (a variant on my standard crowd-pleasing corn-potato chowder), and a number of composed salads of great merit like tuna and white bean, Greek Salad. The Greek salad is not the usual romaine-and-feta-and-olive, either. This one has cherry tomatoes, pear tomatoes, cheese, pepperoncini and cucumber cubes. And there were sauces and variants on chops and steak that go from boring to glorified. And there are variations on meatballs, chops, steak strips, stir fry that are a twist on the usual but are absolutely easy. The pictures are appetizing and inspiring, which helps you decide, yes THAT'S what's for dinner.

The book is divided into the following sections:
1. One Pot Meals
2. No Shop Meals
3. 30 Minute Meals
4. No Cook Meals
5. Freezer Meals
6. Shortcut Meals
7. Reliable Sides

There are a few basics like lasagna and roast chicken. There are money saving ideas (from boning chicken breast to those no-shop meals that save a budget-busting takeout night or restaurant night.) There are no desserts. There is a section on suggested kitchen equipment, including the mandoline for fast slicing (I use a version attached to a bowl and I do agree, it speeds up salad and side dish cooking tremendously.)

I think this is a must-give for weddings and graduation-just-starting out. Anyone can enjoy this book (except the passionately vegan) and it's full of easy but beautiful ideas for fine meals whether you alone, you and yours, or with friends for entertaining. I highly recommend this book as a standard for any cookbook shelf.

Joanna Daneman

37 of 38 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Delicious food made Real Simple!, April 25, 2006

By 

Lee Mellott "Skin Care For Wrinkles" (Frederick, Maryland) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Real Simple: Meals Made Easy (Real Simple S.) (Hardcover)

Real Simple dishes up "Real Simple Meals Made Easy" to offer "think fast" solutions for dinner.

The book includes One Pot Meals (use one pan), No-Shop Meals (use items in your pantry), 30 minute meals (take 1/2 hour or less), No Cook Meals (no need to turn on the stove), Freezer Meals (make ahead and store), Shortcut Meals (premade ingredients) and Reliable Sides (compliment your main dish).

Sample meals include: Beef and Beer Stew, Chicken Cacciatore, Cheddar French Toast with Sizzled Tomatoes, Spiced Lamb Chops with Chickpea Salad, Lasagna Style Baked Ziti and many more!

Directions and ingredients are clearly spelled out in this 10" by 10" oversized hardcover. As with all Chic Simple books that I have read it is beautifully designed with lovely pictures and easy to read text. The book includes a ribbon to easily book mark your page.

There is a lot of love in this book. Recipes are tasty and for the most part really simple. Yet they have an elegance about them that makes others feel like you must have spent hours in the kitchen. The lavish yet simple photoraphs are mouth watering and indusive to spending time in the kitchen!

There are several drawbacks to the book however. The recipes do not incude nutritional information. No calorie, protein, sodium or any of those type of counts. And the second drawback is finding the recipes. If you dont feel like cooking you could go to the No Cook Recipes section. Then you would have to look at each recipe and see if you have the ingredients. A simple list of No Cook Recipes to start the section or at the beginning of the book would have been a tremendous help. You can go to the index and look under No Cook Meals or chicken for example but I feel this could have been done in a more effective manner where it was easier to locate and use.

Overall lots of mouthwatering recipes, great ideas and yummy visuals - a nice complement to your kitchen!

114 of 137 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Very Good simple recipes from reliable source, April 16, 2006

By 

B. Marold "Bruce W. Marold" (Bethlehem, PA United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Real Simple: Meals Made Easy (Real Simple S.) (Hardcover)

`meals made easy' by Renee Schettler and the staff of `Real Simple' magazine is their first culinary book, which reflects the editorial philosophy of the magazine, especially since everything in the book is reprinted from the magazine's pages.

It is not surprising that this book has a strong similarity to `Martha Stewart Living', as `Real Simple' magazine came out shortly after Martha created her own company by buying her way out of her contract with Time-Life. Both magazines have a very clean look about them, strongly distinguishing themselves from the rather dowdy `Better Homes and Gardens' and `Good Housekeeping' aesthetic which seem to be stuck somewhere in the 1950's. `Real Simple', as it should be easy to guess, distinguishes itself from `Martha Stewart Living' by focusing on the interests and resources of the energetic young professional couple where both partners work and have relatively little time for elaborate techniques for window treatments or even novel new techniques for decorating Easter eggs.

The design of this book reflects everything I like about the `Real Simple' aesthetic. Layout is clean and sparse, allowing you to focus on the essentials. I am somewhat impressed by the cleverer than average cover picture, where a logical sequence is depicted by the front and back photographs. For an especially reasonable list price of under $25, I am also impressed by the book designers' including a built-in bookmark ribbon (I'm certain there is a really good technical term for these little devices, but I don't know what it is. I only know that very few cookbooks come with them, and more should include them, especially those that will find their way to the kitchen table after a quick browse in your favorite armchair to find an attractive recipe). I am also impressed by the excellent tip index in the back of the book, although I sense that the index is more useful than many of the tips (more on this below).

As I am a real stickler for books' delivering on the promise of their titles, subtitles, and other `trailer' material, I'm just a bit disappointed with this book's subtitle which promises `quick' recipes. Of the seven chapters in this book, only one promises '30 minute meals'. Another chapter does promise `shortcut meals' based on prepared ingredients, but even some of these recipes require over 90 minutes of total time, even though `hands on' time may be much less. And, many of the one pot meals unashamedly state that they take over 14 hours (baked beans) to complete. I also found the `No Shop' meals chapter to be a bit misleading. I cook dinner four to five times a week and I bake often, yet almost all these dishes had at least one ingredient I do NOT stock on a regular basis. These include goat cheese, fresh chives, pita bread, chicken cutlets, Boston lettuce, Jalapeno chilis, fresh thyme, tomatoes, and fresh basil, among others. I suspect someone who is less involved with home cooking carries even fewer of these recipes' ingredients in their pantry, if they even have a well-defined pantry to begin with.

I'm compelled to warn you of these little teases, but I still find this book an excellent source of recipes for the typical `Real Simple' reader described above. The book does well not to stay exclusively in `Rachael Ray' country, since limiting yourself to fast cooking runs afowl of Marold's first law of quick cooking, which says that the faster the procedure, the more expensive the ingredients (on average). While it does not tout this fact, the book includes many dishes, especially the single pot braises, which use very reasonably priced materials.

I also find this book a confirmation of Marold's second law of quick cooking, that you can only accomplish both speed and good results in cooking if you have a firm grasp of good cooking techniques. I suspect the `hands on' times on these recipes do not take ingredients prep time into account, or at least ingredients prep time as done by someone with poor to nonexistent knife skills. I suspect finely chopping a shallot, zesting a lemon, squeezing juice from a lemon, thinly slicing a garlic clove, pitting a cup of Kalamata olives, dealing with a teaspoon of honey, and dissecting a cauliflower head into florets can easily take all 25 hands on minutes of the roast chicken with olives and thyme recipe. And that's allowing that the fresh herbs will have been cleaned and prepped in advance and the cook will use the tip to buy chicken parts instead of dealing with a whole chicken! But that doesn't deny the fact that this looks like a darned tasty recipe which is indeed relatively easy to make.

My biggest objection to this generally excellent book is that it suffers from being just a collection of recipes rather than a truly in depth treatment of `real simple' cooking. I believe that true culinary simplicity comes at the cost of sound culinary knowledge and experience. I believe it is much better to encourage owning a great, sharp chef's knife and teaching good knife skills rather than giving tips on easy shortcuts such as cheap mandolines. The knife will do 10 times as many jobs as the mandoline, and take up less space. The book is similarly obtuse in glossing over the fine points of making an omelet and cooking en papillote (In Paper). The omelet recipe instruction is a crude cross between a French omelet and the Italian frittata. An omelet is the ultimate in elegance from simple ingredients handled with skill. Simplicity does come at a price, usually in knowledge. The steaming in paper method is even worse, in that it avoids some of the finer points of creating a paper envelope for steaming fish, thereby actually making the technique more complicated than it really is.

`Real Simple' still has much to learn from Martha Stewart's excellent culinary books, but it seems to be on the right track.