You are currently browsing the daily archive for November 24th, 2008.
Cheap. Fast. Good!
By Beverly Mills and Alicia Ross
Workman Publishing, 2005
This is my new favorite food book. Yes, there are tons of recipes in here but it’s so much fun to read that I won’t call it a cookbook. The basic premise of the author’s is that good food can be inexpensive without spending hours every night working from scratch. The authors come to the book with many years of home food preparation and years of writing a food column for various newspapers.
This is a big book (475 pages) with eleven chapters and an interesting appendix. The chapters range from “Super-Saver Soups and Stews” to “Delectable Desserts”. Beside those two subjects they also cover main dishes, sandwiches, side dishes, pasta, salads, breakfasts and sauces.
One other chapter is special to me because it covers the way I like to prepare food: batch cooking. Here’s an example of the concept: Buy a large quantity of a common food when it is on sale – like chicken. Cook the chicken all at once, cool, cut and put measured amounts (like 1 cup) in freezer bags. Then let’s say sometime in the next week or so you want to make Chicken Burritos or Chicken and Broccoli Lo Mein. You pull out your already cooked chicken and the rest of the ingredients and you have a great meal in short order.
