Nonfiction Book Reviews

Desperation Dinners: Home-Cooked Meals for Frantic Families in 20 Minutes Flat by Beverly Mills and Alicia Ross is a good resource for quick recipes. I saw it at the library while doing check-in, and thought, “Hey, that would be helpful!” I am always leaving dinner to the last minute (although of course my goal is to have it figured out and in the crockpot in the morning, but somehow that never happens. Hmm…) Anyway, there is a dearth of recipes that I can make in a jiffy - most of my recipes take an hour or longer to make, and that’s just way too long some days.

So I checked the cookbook out, took it home, and read it through. As I said in my last cookbook review, I tend to eat “normal” stuff, so I skipped over recipes like “Curried Lamb in Pita Bowls” and “Tortellini with Raisin Butter” - if you like very different recipes outside of the normal realm of things, then you’ll adore this cookbook. In fact, that was one of my bigger complaints about it - there were a lot of “exotic” recipes, and not nearly enough “normal” recipes, LOL! Take into consideration that I’m a country girl in Idaho who does meat and potatoes for dinner when you read that complaint - I’m sure that to others, my taste in food is the “weird” one!

Putting that aside, one of the things that I really enjoyed about this cookbook was the side notes, where the authors gave helpful tips and explained how they came up with the various time savers they employ. Some of the hints were a revelation to me, like from page 131:

We always used to cook too much pasta, and the leftovers got pushed to the back of the fridge. Forgotten, they turned green - or even purple. So how much was enough to cook, but not too much? After months of guessing…we decided to nail down this mystery once and for all…Here’s what we found:

In practically every case, 2 ounces of dried pasta - regardless of shape - is a reasonable portion for most adults, provided it’s served with a typical sauce of vegetables and meat…

[They then provide specific information to different types of pasta]

Spaghetti - Two ounces dried yields 1 cup cooked spaghetti. To feed four, cook an 8-ounce box of dried spaghetti. Since you can’t fit long pasta into a measuring cup, you’ll need to go by dry weight or learn what 2 ounces looks like. To help you visualize, go get a US penny. Place it on the counter. Grab enough long pasta tightly in your fist so that the tips exactly cover that penny. That’s 2 ounces. ~Desperation Dinners, page 131

Who knew? I certainly didn’t! My husband and I are always messing that up. Making spaghetti is always an adventure at our house - are we going to have too much pasta, too much sauce, or too much meat? At least with this tip, we’ll be sure about the first one, although the second two are going to remain a mystery.

My only other complaint about the book was that a lot of the recipes depended on convenience ingredients that my husband and I don’t normally buy, like bottled, minced garlic, or frozen green, red, and yellow bell pepper stir-fry mix, etc. I know that’s because they’re trying to cram a recipe into 20 minutes, so they have to depend on those convenience items, but that makes for a more expensive grocery bill when our grocery bill is already high enough, thank you very much. So then I’d chop the garlic by hand, or clean and slice the bell peppers by hand, and of course this would add more time to the recipe. I know that’s not the authors’ fault that I’m cheap, but in case any of my readers out there are cheap too that’s something to keep in mind. Adding in that extra time, most of these recipes are going to actually clock in at 30 - 45 minutes, if not more (depending on the recipe, of course).

Overall, I think it was good enough that if I see it at the store, I’ll probably buy it (especially if it’s on sale). I also saw them advertising a new book called Cheap, Fast, Good! so I’m going to borrow that from the library and check it out. Watch for my review on that!

I give Desperation Dinners 3.75 out of 5 stars.

Havs

PS If you’re on the hunt for good quick recipes, make sure to check out a blog here at Today - Quick and Easy Cooking!

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