Customer Reviews

Twenty-Minute Menus: Time-Wise Recipes & Strategic Plans for Freshly Cooked Meals Every Day

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

This is the cook book for everyone who is too busy or too tired to plan meals and cook. All the work has been done for you. This book has everything you need to have on hand, what to buy at the store and an easy to follow work plan. Also, the recipes in this book are low in fat, with little or no salt added. I have tried almost everything in this book and have come to enjoy even some things I didn't think I was going to like. The only thing missing is the nutritional breakdown, (calories, carbohydrates, etc.) I have now bought almost every book that Marian Burros has written. This one is the best. I'm on my second copy, I wore out the first one!

I LOVE this book! This is the first cookbook I've seen that goes through the whole meal from main dish to side dish to dessert and even gives you the game plan on what to do first so all is ready at the SAME TIME! Imagine that? Coupled with the book Quick Meals for Healthy Kids and Busy Parents, it's all you need to feed your family healthy and even more important TASTY homecooked meals everyday! I definately recommend this one! Great as a gift for anyone with kids or who just don't like hanging out in the kitchen cooking all day!

There I was, 30 years old and able to make only one pasta dish and one chicken dish. My friends kindly fed me (well and often) but I could never invite them back. Then I moved to an apartment next to a newly-wed couple and they recommended *20-minute Menus*. "We can't cook either" they said, "but we can follow directions!" Yes indeed. Marian takes you step by step through entire dinners (not just one dish, but 2 or 3 dishes together, the whole meal) telling you when to start heating the broiler, when to blend the ingredients for the sauce, when to start steaming the vegetables... She even breaks down the ingredients into things you should have in your "pantry" (there is a pantry list at the beginning of the book) and things you need to get fresh for this recipe. I actually used that pantry list to stock my kitchen when I bought a second home. Usually the menus take closer to 1/2 hour to prepare (sometimes more) if you include chopping time, but the stress is low and the results are great.

In every way this book changed my life. I was suddenly able to make GOOD FOOD for my friends. I started having people over for dinner regularly. I soon branched out to... Marian Burros' 30-minute menus (*Eating Well is the Best Revenge*) and other cookbooks. But when I want a meal that is complex and tasty in the eating, yet swift and simple in the making, I come back to 20-minute menus. I've probably made 60% of the different menus and only once have I not liked the results (there was also one bad recipe in *Eating Well*). I have 2 kids now and this is the cookbook I use for regular nightly dinners. We all love it!!

Whether you're a seasoned cook looking for some easy and interesting menus, or a total beginner with aspirations to cook sophisticated food, this is the cookbook for you.

Before we bought this book, I knew five recipies. When it was my turn to cook dinner, my wife got to choose between pancakes, tacos, spaghetti, hot dogs, and a lousy stirfry. This was a source of no small amount of tension in our household, as she wanted a little more variety and taste in our diet, and I was uninterested in spending more time on cooking, and unsure of myself when it came to learning new recipies.

This cookbook was a compromise for us -- a way to hopefully add more variety while not scaring me off, and not taking forever to cook. It worked brilliantly. We have discovered 25-30 recipies in it that we absolutely love, and that I find easy to cook. The shopping lists and the instructions are easy to follow and make the cooking pretty painless. My one caveat is that I am a slooooow chef, so most of these take me 30-45 minutes to cook, but that may just be me.

Marion Burros is worth discovering. Her 20-minute menus in her earlier books, especially Keep It Simple (now out of print) got me through graduate school. The combinations are always inventive, practical, and delicious. My only reason for not giving it 5 stars is that the ingredients are not always available in the typical kitchen. I don't cook very often these days, but I already tried the ginger chicken with jalapeño and it was a big success. Highly recommended!

I am guilty as charged. I do not like to be in the kitchen a long time. WHO does? Good meals shouldn't have to take so long, right? Absolutely right...with the help of this book. I have tried many of the recipes to date and they were all great. My hubby and I tried the Maryland Crab Cakes recently and yum-yum were they delicious. Burros helps the novice cook understand the importance of planning and organization without making it too complicated to follow. Recipes are also very well-organized in this cookbook. I like how there is a Game Plan for cooks, as well as, a pantry and shopping list with each menu. The Pantry list suggestions in this book have worked very well for me in my kitchen. I would recommend this cookbook for beginners who want to cook great whole meals without having to be sequestered to the kitchen all day.

This is one of the best cookbooks I own. Although I've owned it for over 10 years, I still use it constantly. The recipes are tasty and generally quick. I particularly love the emphasis on fresh food. The game plans make it easy to put it together quickly, and several of the meals are elegant enough to serve to company. I cook for several families, and a number of these meal plans are perennial favorites.

This is a fantastic cookbook! I had lost my original and was so glad to see it here on Amazon.Com. If you are single or a couple this is the book for you for quick, easy and healthy meals especially in light of today's busy world. The variety, the flavor and the ease of preparing these meals are wonderful! My favorites are the Maryland Crab Cakes on page 78 which are "restaurant quality" crab cakes with the potato with gorgonzola sauce. I have even served this for company and everyone wanted the recipe. There are even 'veal' dishes for which you can use turkey (I don't eat veal myself) but you can't tell the difference. All in All this book is a great addition to any cookbook collection and is convenient in that you can pick up the items needed for a meal, prepare many of the ingredients in the morning before work, and easily assemble a meal at the end of a long day at work in a short period of time, then sit down and have a good, delicious meal with vegetables that is nourishing and fulfilling.

This book was recommended to me because I need to come up with some more ideas for quick meals. The book tells you to do things like buy chopped or sliced onions. Come on! How long does it take to chop up the onion? It also tells you what to do if the recipe calls for 8 oz. of onion but you can only buy 10 oz. of onion. This is not the sort of thing I have ever lost sleep over.

Most of the combinations of foods sound so hideous I wouldn't even try to make them. The few things that do sound edible are already things I know how to make and don't need a recipe for. They actually give a recipe for mesclun salad!

And you have to buy more premade things like breadsticks, whole wheat bread and pesto.

They do tell you what to buy at the store and what the game plan is for the meal. Do I really need these things? No. Not at all.

Now maybe if you don't know how to use a knife and haven't a clue how to cook things at all or how to buy the ingredients, this book might be useful. But I already know how to make lasagna (meat or no meat and pasta or no pasta). I can cook all sorts of pasta, make chicken nuggets and hamburger patties with or without onions, herbs and cheese. There is even a recipe called Potatoes smothered in everything. And they weren't kidding! I could emtpy some random things out of my fridge and put them on my potatoes and come up with a dish more appealing than that. Thie book also heavily features fish and other seafood, which we don't eat.

This book is not for me!

I tried two menus. Of the three recipes comprising these menus, one was inedible (I threw it away after one bite), one was barely okay (I ate it but threw away the leftovers), and one was just okay (I ate it, but I won't make it again). Also, the recipes are badly written--sometimes ingredients in the ingredient list are left out of the instructions. This is the worst cookbook I've ever used.