Rating:  Summary: A very solid guide to saving both time and money Review: Frozen Assets Lite & Easy: Cook For A Day, Eat For A Month by culinary expert Deborah Taylor-Hough is more than just another cookbook; it is a very solid guide to saving both time and money by creating a meal plan and then cooking once a week to create seven or more delicious meals. An eye for health and low-fat meal plans hallmarks this particular cookbook collection, as well as the spirit of blending practical need and limited resources with mouth-watering creations. From Spiced Chicken Sandwiches; Turkey Potato Pie; and Old-Fashioned Beef Stew; to Linguini with Vegetables; Enchilada Casserole; and Veggie Bean Chili, Frozen Assets Lite & Easy is a wonderful complement to any kitchen cookbook shelf.
Rating:  Summary: A very solid guide to saving both time and money Review: Frozen Assets Lite & Easy: Cook For A Day, Eat For A Month by culinary expert Deborah Taylor-Hough is more than just another cookbook; it is a very solid guide to saving both time and money by creating a meal plan and then cooking once a week to create seven or more delicious meals. An eye for health and low-fat meal plans hallmarks this particular cookbook collection, as well as the spirit of blending practical need and limited resources with mouth-watering creations. From Spiced Chicken Sandwiches; Turkey Potato Pie; and Old-Fashioned Beef Stew; to Linguini with Vegetables; Enchilada Casserole; and Veggie Bean Chili, Frozen Assets Lite & Easy is a wonderful complement to any kitchen cookbook shelf.
Rating:  Summary: Very Doable! Review: I absolutely devoured Debi's latest offering, Frozen Assets, Lite and Easy. I love how Debi broke down the overwhelming task of freezer cooking into easy-to-do mini-sessions. This is something anyone could fit in to their already busy schedules without having to take a day off to accomplish it. The recipes are wonderful and true to her promise; they are all Lite and Easy! Nutritional information and important how-to's make this my absolute favorite freezer cookbook of all time.Leanne Ely, author of Healthy Foods: An Irreverent Guide to Understanding Nutrition and Feeding Your Family Well (Champion Press)
Rating:  Summary: Great book and time saver Review: I don't always use the book the way it is designed. Some nights I'll cook 2 double-size meals and freeze the rest. Works great! My freezer is stocked with healthy food. I freeze alot of the recipes in single serving containers so I can take them to work for lunch.
Rating:  Summary: Great Money-Saving Book, But Poor Editing! Review: 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!
Rating:  Summary: mush soup Review: I was impressed when reading through this book, especially with the tips in the begininning. Then I picked one recipe to make for a supper swap. I was making this for 6 families! I shopped and cooked and 3 hours later all the meals were in the freezer. Then I baked one for my family for supper. The recipe (chicken broccoli noodle bake) called for way too much water, which made it soupy. Then I baked it for the recommeded time and when we were eating it we realized that the egg noodles had gotten too soft and made a mushy mess in the bottom of the baking dish. So it was now a mushy soup with chunks of chicken and broccoli. Both my husband and I felt sick after eating it. Now I have 6 meals of this in my freezer that I don't dare bring to the supper swap and I'm back at square one!!! Let's try editing before going to press next time, Deborah!
Rating:  Summary: Great for Veteran freezer cooks! Review: If you have been freezer cooking for awhile or are completely new to it you will enjoy this book because it has a different spin on freezer cooking than the classics. I started with Once-a-Month-cooking and at the time it seemed revolutionary, but, though I loved it was a hard days work. Then came Jill Bond and she was really talking bulk cooking! When Deborah's first book came out I was excited because it fit in with my low-on-cash, short-on-time lifestyle.
This book is terrific because it provides a healthy alternative that is still pretty inexpensive. The meals are more than casserole and there are lots of options that are more appealing for the warmer weather when you don't want to heat up the kitchen.
My favorites are the Cheese and Chicken Shells (not for everyone however) Chicken Enchiladas (taste great made with homemade whole-wheat tortilla, if you do that), Crab rice Chowder (gourmet), Bean Casserole and everyone LOVES Spaghetti Pie. There are lots of good recipes in this book.
The drawbacks of this book is that after a few initial sessions I felt that I was more likely to choose some favorites than to use her already laid out sessions...that is okay, but, not as easy as using the shopping lists and plans. Worth trying if you are serious about Freezer Cooking, but I would start with Frozen Assest first.
Rating:  Summary: Great recipes and ideas, but needs editing Review: 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! --This text refers to the Paperback edition
Rating:  Summary: Love this cookbook! Review: Love this cookbook! Everything's been great and the method is a life saver. Last night I tried the Chicken Tortellini Soup from Frozen Assets Lite and Easy. It was wonderful! I think we found a new family favorite.
Rating:  Summary: Needs a lot of editing Review: 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.
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