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

Aviva Goldfarb (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 4, 2006

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.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"creative, healthy, unprocessed and kid-friendly without being adult-threatening…a whole new kind of happy meal."--O, the Oprah Magazine

From the Inside Flap

Everybody’s hungry? And you’re tired and out of ideas? The Scramble to the rescue!We all know the importance of families eating together, but what do you do when dinner needs to be on the table pronto and you’ve just come home from work/soccer practice/playdate chauffering exhausted? Aviva Goldfarb, founder of the successful Six O’Clock Scramble subscription email newsletter, has written a book packed with ideas and easy instructions on what to make for dinner all year round. Organized by season, and taking advantage of both simple packaged foods and fresh additions, THE SIX O’CLOCK SCRAMBLE provides a year’s worth of recipes. Everything is homemade, with a clever reliance on just enough prepared and packaged--but never fake—foods.

Inventive, flavorful and healthy are Goldfarb’s goals. THE SIX O’CLOCK SCRAMBLE INCLUDES:

--dishes that can be prepared in thirty minutes or less
--weekly menus so you only need to shop once a week
--one vegetarian main course per week
--meals that kids can actually help prepare
--fun foods for lunchboxes, after-school snacks, or weekend get-togethers
--complete nutritional information for each recipe
--dinners such as honey-glazed salmon, Asian turkey burgers and Moroccan Chicken that will please the whole family

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 336 pages
• Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin (April 4, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 031233642X
• ISBN-13: 978-0312336424
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 7.5 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (66 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #227,359 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Author - SOS! THE SIX O'CLOCK SCRAMBLE TO THE RESCUE; Earth-Friendly, Kid-Pleasing Dinners for Busy Families and
THE SIX O'CLOCK SCRAMBLE COOKBOOK

Founder - The Six O'Clock Scramble Weekly Menu Planning Service (www.TheScramble.com)

Like many busy moms, Aviva Goldfarb struggled to put a nutritious dinner on the table for her family amidst the chaos of daily life. Going back to the weekly meal planning strategy her mother used, in 2003 Aviva developed a system that helps parents take the Scramble out of the dinner hour by giving them an easy, online meal planning and grocery shopping system, along with fail-proof recipes.

The Six O'Clock Scramble (www.thescramble.com) is an online service that takes the stress out of daily dinners for busy families. Each week, members receive a suggested seasonal meal plan with five days' worth of dinner recipes, side dishes, and an organized grocery list. Aviva develops quick-to-prepare meals that are creative, healthy, unprocessed and kid-friendly without being adult-alienating. This weekly meal plan can be customized in seconds based on families' tastes, schedules and dietary needs.

Aviva's Six O'Clock Scramble Cookbook debuted in 2006 to national acclaim. Both the cookbook and online meal planning service won praise from reviewers at O Magazine, Working Mother, USA Today, Real Simple and The Washington Post, among many others.

Debuting in April 2010, Aviva's latest cookbook SOS! The Six O'Clock Scramble to the Rescue: Earth-Friendly, Kid-Pleasing Dinners for Busy Families combines her expertise in weekly dinnertime meal planning with her concern for the environment. In addition to more than 300 recipes, the book addresses how families can make their meals more environmentally-friendly, including buying seasonally; reducing one's carbon footprint with vegetable-based meals; differentiating when organic matters and offering tips for avoiding food waste.

Aviva is frequently quoted in national parenting, lifestyle and health magazines and appears regularly on television to discuss healthful recipes and meal strategies for busy families. She is an advocate for healthy families, actively working with national nonprofit organizations and with parents to improve nutrition.

Aviva is a mother of two and resides with her family in Chevy Chase, Maryland, a Washington, DC suburb.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

17 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Best cookbook ever., May 24, 2007

By 

Gretchen (Bangor, ME United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Six O'Clock Scramble: Quick, Healthy, and Delicious Dinner Recipes for Busy Families (Paperback)

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.

15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Method to the Madness, April 19, 2006

By 

J. Dellinger (Durham, NC) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Six O'Clock Scramble: Quick, Healthy, and Delicious Dinner Recipes for Busy Families (Paperback)

Aviva Goldfarb has focused on a time when craziness and chaos plague many households with children -- dinnertime on weeknights -- and she has offered a method to tame the madness. Organized in a manner that complements and reflects her highly sucessful on-line recipe service,[...], her new book offers recipes organized in a way that makes weekly meal planning, cooking, and grocery shopping easier and less time-consuming. Our family has used the on-line service for at least two years. As a result, we are healthier, our kids try many more foods than they would otherwise (even dishes with vegetables in them!), and cooking is interesting and engaging (because of the variety of recipes) and easy (because of the limited number of ingredients for most recipes and clear instructions). The book, like the on-line service, offers recipes organized by week, and grocery lists are available online. The book's menus loosely follow the seasons of a year, and include many vegetarian options along with more standard fare, as well as soups and salmon recipes more than fancy enough for the occasional dinner guest. Helpful indices included at the back of the book offer both creative and practical approaches to meal planning as well. The Category Index allows you to quickly scan scramble favorites, crowd pleasers, kids' favorites, potluck and picnic dishes, 20 minutes and under dishes, and meals that can be made a day ahead, just to name a few. Nutritional information is provided for each recipe. I have not simply read this book, I have used the recipe service, featuring many of the recipes included in this book, since the service began. I wholeheartedly recommend this book for anyone who ever thought they could not cook, for anyone who wants to cook a little healthier, and for everyone who wants to make their evenings with their kids a little calmer. The Six O'Clock Scramble -- it's not just a book, it's a way of life!

16 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Quick & easy, not always delicious, August 4, 2008

By 

A. Fischer (Sunnyvale, CA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: The Six O'Clock Scramble: Quick, Healthy, and Delicious Dinner Recipes for Busy Families (Paperback)

This cookbook is great if you're looking for fast meals you can whip together without a lot of fuss. There are probably 200+ recipes in this book so in there you'll find at least a few things you like! Having found just one or two meals we'll add to our list of favorites makes it worth buying.

Having said that though, I didn't find the meals terribly interesting or incredibly tasty. Some don't even appear all that healthy, but I suppose 'healthy' can mean different things to different people. Some recipes were pretty good, like Goddess Chicken - but how can it be bad with a bottle of delicious dressing dumped in with artichokes and sun-dried tomatoes! Other things seemed more like cookbook space fillers, such as 'taco night' (brown ground meat, serve with standard fixins'). There were a few recipes we tried that made me say, 'where's the flavor?' (like pasta with beans). And looking at the ingredients, it just wasn't in there, nothing magical happened upon cooking.

I didn't find the weekly menus all that helpful since I wasn't interested in a good number of the recipes, but overall it was worth the purchase. It's a little hard to navigate sometimes, as it's arranged by season and not by type of protein/pasta/cuisine, so I spend a little time just flipping through pages each week and picking out recipes to try that week. It won't replace my other favorite cookbooks (like my favorite from Cooking Light), but it's nice to have on hand for some quick & easy dinners.