Frozen Assets Lite and Easy : How to Cook for a Day and Eat for a Month (Paperback)

by Deborah Taylor-Hough (Author)

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist
The lure of being able to "cook for a day and eat for a month" surely draws attention to Frozen Assets: Lite & Easy . Deborah Taylor-Hough's latest work focuses on lower-calorie cooking than her earlier volume. The author begins with a shopping list and then goes on to turn those ingredients into an inventory of freezable meals in quantities large enough to keep a family going for weeks. The busy cook responsible for feeding a large family will appreciate the sheer organization required to make these tasty meals. Mark Knoblauch
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review
"...it's a practical step-by-step guide that makes the daunting task of cooking in bulk for the freezer so understandable..." -- Penny E Stone, author of 365 Quick, Easy and Inexpensive Dinner Menus

"Anyone who can save me money, help my family eat healthier and save me 30 hours a month deserves ... attention." -- Gary Foreman, Publisher of The Dollar Stretcher

"Cooking the Frozen Assets Lite & Easy way frees up time and energy for the people we love..." -- Donna Smallin, author of 7 Simple Steps to Unclutter Your Life

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Product Details

• Paperback: 191 pages
• Publisher: Champion Press Ltd (January 15, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1891400193
• ISBN-13: 978-1891400193
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 8 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (24 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #878,185 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

185 of 185 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Great recipes and ideas, but needs editing, December 4, 2001

By	Leta Rogers (Pleasanton, CA USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Like an earlier reviewer, I found that this book really suffered from being poorly edited. However, the recipes are delicious and the fat has been sensibly trimmed from most recipes. You can easily modify recipes to take out even more fat by using techniques like using cooking spray in a nonstick skillet for sauteing onions. Everything I have made from this book has been great, although I am jotting down lots of notes in my copy of the book as I have modified things a bit to suite my own style and experience. For example, her Cheddar Chicken recipe uses a very lowfat cheese sauce which is made without starting with a roux (flour browned in butter). I found it helped to use Wondra flour mixed in a jar with some of the liquid, like you would for gravy, instead of just tossing everything in the pan. This could cause clumping. She also has a crustless quiche recipe, but I plan on cooking it in a premade pie crust, with the extra fat and calories. I think my family would prefer that.

I really like how she has organized her recipes into "mini-sessions" of 5 or 6 recipes grouped by protein type. So, for example, you might do a chicken (breast) session or a lean pork session in one afternoon or evening, rather than cooking for an entire month in one day. Slowly your freezer supply of delicious food will build up.

I really, really do like this book, and having checked many freezer cooking books out of the library, this is the only one I bought. My chief complaint, however, is that it appears to have been rushed into print, and I lay the blame for this on the publisher, not the author. (This is just my theory, no one has confirmed it.) The author is a nice lady who deserved to have had support from her publisher.

Here are the problems:

First, the shopping lists for each mini-session often list the ingredients in a different unit of measurement than they are listed in the ingredient lists in the recipes. For example, with the chicken breasts they are listed alternately by weight, number of whole chicken breasts, number of chicken breast portions (not immediately clear that these are different), and by cups of cooked and cubed meat. Chicken breasts vary considerably in their size, so buying them buy weight is more useful information for recipes where they are going to be cooked and cubed.

Second, in some cases, the preparation instructions seem to have been copied and pasted without editing--e.g., boil skinless, boneless chicken breasts and then remove the meat from the bone?

Third, the list of ingredients in the recipes are rarely listed in the order that the ingredients are used in the recipes. This is a convention that we cooks are used to, and it is disconcerting to have them listed out of order. A cook is more likely to make an error and omit and ingredient this way.

Fourth, as noted in an earlier review, there are instances where the amount of some ingredients is given incorrectly. All I can say is keep reading the reviews here, and hopefully all major blunders will eventually be listed. I keep hoping that the author will post some errata information on her web site (you can find it easily in a web search), but it has not happened yet. Debi, if you read this, pretty please give us a "known errors" page!

50 of 52 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Needs a lot of editing, July 9, 2001

By	Bonnie King (Baltimore, MD USA) - See all my reviews

Of course I like the premise of the book (cook for a day, eat for a month), but I made several recipes from it this weekend and there were a number of small, but irritating, errors. For example, before each mini-session (group of recipes) she has a shopping list, which I used to shop from. However, there were several ingridients omitted from the lists but used in the recipes, and I didn't realize it until actually going through the recipes to cook. So I didn't have everything I needed. In one recipe for Tofu Broccoli Quiche, it called for 1 TABLESPOON of dry mustard. I think that has to be a typo. When I put it in it seemed like a lot, and I should have listened to my instincts. It must be 1 TEASPOON. The entire thing tastes like mustard. Another recipe calls for 3 TABLESPOONS of chili powder, for six servings. It can't be right, but I learned from the mustard and reduced the amount. Even one tablespoon makes it pretty spicy. There are other examples of words omitted from the recipe, and such. The recipes I tried are pretty simple, and the only one I have eaten was delicious. But I will be a lot more careful when I use it next.

29 of 30 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Great Money-Saving Book, But Poor Editing!, August 23, 2003

By	Christina "azdesertratinfla" (Sweaty South Florida) - See all my reviews

I read about this book online and then checked it out from the library to see if I would actually like the recipes. I DID like the recipes (more importantly, so did my son and husband, both picky eaters) so I bought it used here at Amazon.
The book has revolutionized the way I approach dinner and cooking in general. I'm not a very organized person, but when you have five pounds of ground beef in your fridge, you learn to be. I split up the "mini-sessions" and just made the meals that sounded good to us. WARNING: Most of the recipes are onion or garlic heavy, so if you don't like either of these ingredients, this book is not for you.
There is a vegetarian session, tofu sessions, chicken, turkey, ground turkey, beef, ground beef and bean sessions. We're on our fourth "cooking day" and still have not tried all the recipes. (White Chicken Chili is my favorite!)
WARNING #2: The book, while a lifesaver, is not well-edited, as others have mentioned. Wrong measurements for ingredients, omitted ingredients from the recipes or shopping list and there is one recipes that says "bake for 1 1/2 hours" but it doesn't tell me at what temperature!
Overall, a great book, but read carefully and exercise your own culinary judgement!