Rachael Ray 365: No Repeats--A Year of Deliciously Different Dinners (A 30-Minute Meal Cookbook) (Paperback)

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Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Food Network darling Ray wants home cooks to become more "instinctual," and this assortment of quick meals is expansive enough to encourage even novices to wing it. The author hopes readers cook their way through the entire book; to that end, she organizes the recipes not by course or main ingredient (though there are indexes), but by number. The organization takes some getting used to. Helpful but occasionally jarring "tidbits" pop up everywhere, and many "recipes" make more than one dish, so cooking just one requires a fair amount of reading. For example, number 16 encompasses "Oregon-Style Pork Chops with Pinot Noir and Cranberries; Oregon Hash with Wild Mushrooms, Greens, Beets, Hazelnuts, and Blue Cheese; [and] Charred Whole-Grain Bread with Butter and Chives." Readers making just the hash must read around the instructions for the other two dishes. Still, the recipes are great. They vary in technique and ethnicity, and many give instructions on expanding the dish (after making Spicy Shrimp and Penne with Puttanesca Sauce, for example, "now try" omitting the olives and capers, swapping linguine for the penne, reducing the number of shrimp, and adding lump crab meat and mussels to make Frutti di Mare and Linguine). As Ray would say, "Yummo." (Nov.)
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Product Description

Even your favorite dinner can lose its appeal when it’s in constant rotation, so mix it up! With her largest collection of recipes yet, Food Network’s indefatigable cook Rachael Ray guarantees you’ll be able to put something fresh and exciting on your dinner table every night for a full year... without a single repeat!

Based on the original 30-Minute Meal cooking classes that started it all, these recipes prove that you don’t have to reinvent the wheel every night. Rachael offers dozens of recipes that, once mastered, can become entirely new dishes with just a few ingredient swaps. Learn how to make a Southwestern Pasta Bake and you’ll be able to make a Smoky Chipotle Chili Con Queso Mac the next time. Try your hand at Spring Chicken with Leeks and Peas and you’re all set to turn out a rib-sticking Rice and Chicken Stoup that looks and tastes like an entirely different dish.

As a best-selling cookbook author and host of three top-rated Food Network shows, Rachael Ray believes that both cooking and eating should be fun. Drawing from her own favorite dishes as well as those of her family, friends, and celebrities, she covers the flavor spectrum from Asian to Italian and dozens of delicious stops in between. Best of all, these flavor-packed dishes will satisfy your every craving and renew your taste for cooking. With so many delicious entrees to choose from you’ll never have an excuse for being in a cooking rut again.

How about a brand-new 30-minute dinner every night for an entire year?

Tired of making the same old same old, week after week after week?

With Rachael’s most varied and comprehensive collection of 30-minute recipes ever, you’ll have everyone at your table saying “Yummo!” all year long.

It’s amazing what a half hour can do for your tastebuds … 365 days a year!

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Product Details

• Paperback: 352 pages
• Publisher: Clarkson Potter; 1 edition (November 1, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1400082544
• ISBN-13: 978-1400082544
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 7.3 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (344 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,171 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

354 of 390 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Delish!, November 4, 2005

By	Xina143 (Culpeper, VA USA) - See all my reviews

Love this book! I have all of Ray's previous books, and I often watch her show when I am cooking my own family dinner. We are huge fans of her Cooking Round the Clock book and her Cooking Rocks (for kids) books. On average, I use recipes from those books at least twice a week.

Her first book that I purchased was her 30 Minute Get Togethers and the first couple menus that I used were NOT 30 minute meals for me. However over the years I have learned to adapt. I have gotten quicker at chopping veggies and will use already prepared things if necessary. Ok, on to the new book.

This is her biggest book by far. I got it the day it came out and spent at least two hours pouring over the recipes and marking ones I want to try. For the most part I was thinking I would be anal here. I would start with recipe number one and go from there, making every single recipe and not skipping a one. But I husband really wanted to try #37-Warm Lemon Chicken Sandwich with Arugula and Pears. Not something I would normally make, but it sounded intriguing. WONDERFUL! Even my picky eaters (I have two) gobbled it up. We then went on to #38-Grilled Flank Steak Sandwich again we were not disappointed.

If you are looking for a cookbook that offers quick, but unique and tasty meals, this is the one.

80 of 86 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Huge Variety, November 17, 2005

By	Cooking Enthusiast (Virginia) - See all my reviews

I agree that this is Rachael's best and most diverse collection of recipes to date. I actually did a rough count of the recipes by the protein or main ingredient. This is approximately how the recipes stack up: 53 meatless (many do contain cheese, however), 11 lamb, 4 egg, 8 ground turkey, 21 ground beef, 80 chicken, 21 beef (steaks, London broil, etc.), 5 ground pork, 16 pork (chops, tenderloin), 9 turkey (cutlets), 10 ground chicken, 29 fish (halibut, cod, swordfish, salmon, tuna), 11 veal (ground, cutlets, etc.), 30 shellfish (shrimp, crab, mussels, scallops, calamari), and 48 sausage, etc. (ham, prosciutto, chorizo, Italian sausage, breakfast sausage, bacon, salami, pancetta, etc). According to the listings in the front of the book, there are 48 pasta dishes, 33 soups and 20 burgers. I may have miscounted a few, but I think these numbers are fairly close. Perhaps some reviewers got the impression that the ingredients were repetitive because of the technique Rachael sometimes (but not always) uses of providing a master recipe with variations by swapping out ingredients. For instance, there is a master macaroni and cheese with broccoli recipe, followed by macaroni and smoked gouda with cauliflower, Tex-Mex mac and cheddar (with ground beef) and a chipotle mac and cheddar with chorizo and tomato.

While many of the recipes are Italian or Italian influenced, reflecting Rachael's heritage, with Tex-Mex following closely behind, there are also Spanish, Cuban, Indian, Chinese, Thai, Japanese, French, Cajun, Greek, German, and Carribbean influenced recipes as well. There is also plenty of "American" fare as well, although there are fewer traditional "comfort food" dishes in this book than there are in some of her other collections. The subtitle of the book is a hint at that. It truly is "a year of deliciously different dinners." And, after several years of watching Rachael's show regularly and making many, many of her recipes, I find that I can come close to the 30 minute mark in completing the meals, especially after the first time making a particular recipe.

As for pictures, if you are familiar with buying cookbooks, you realize that you trade off photographs for affordability. If this book were full of glossy photos of the food, it would probably have a list price of at least $40. I don't know of anywhere else you can find such a large and diverse collection of recipes for so little money.

101 of 112 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Okay, not great, December 19, 2005

By	gothic cowgirl (NorCal) - See all my reviews

I bought this cookbook with no prior knowledge of Rachel Ray or her other cookbooks. The idea of 365 30-minute meals is appealing, but unfortunately, many of the recipes included take far more than 30 minutes if you include prep time. This is a useful cookbook for families as the yields are fairly large and it covers a variety of flavors. However, the flavors aren't always great; they are often combined in unappetizing mixtures that just don't work. The method of substituting ingredients to change up a dish is not terribly useful either. Most often, you will have to change half the recipe to get a new dish. The worst part, though, is the lack of a useful index. It's extremely difficult to find your way around the book. Just try looking for a "chicken" dish. If you don't know the title, chances are you won't find it fast.