52 Weeks of Recipes for Students, Missionaries, and Nervous Cooks

With easy to follow directions and great recipes, this cookbook gets my vote. It has 2-3 coordinating recipes every week to try out. I much prefer this to having recipes for every day (that would be about 1,000 recipes. And if you gave a college kid a cookbook with that many recipes, they would be, to say the least, deterred from ever departing from pop tart toasting and frozen dinners). This is not a 4 minute recipe book. These are classic goods like meatloaf, enchiladas, baked salmon, guacamole, taco soup, quesadillas, spinach salad and great desserts ranging from apple cobbler cake, cheesecake cupcakes, condensed milk fudge, and baked apples. Most of the recipes have some part you buy prepared, like cake mix, a jar of spaghetti sauce, onion soup packet, etc (think Sandra Lee's cooking show Semi-Homemade) so it's not hard. Prep time range from 5-30 minutes, plus any oven cook time. The authors even tell you where to find unfamiliar items in the grocery store that pop up in the recipes. And the good thing about having a few recipes a week (which usually include an entrée, one or two corresponding side dishes, or a dessert) is that you can pick the day you have the most time to cook to try things out.

Small and compact, this is a perfect cookbook for a starting out cook, but also good for ones that have been in the kitchen for a few years. Great classics & some adventurous recipes with clear directions and an index that defines kitchen terms and an appendix that gives the 411 on how to hard-boil eggs, bake potatoes, and making pan gravy. Highly recommended!