Big Food: Amazing Ways to Cook, Store, Freeze, and Serve Everything You Buy in Bulk

I had first thought this cookbook was a "once a month cooking" type of cookbook in that you purposely buy a lot of one type of item and then start a marathon cooking session. This cookbook was not like that. It's more of a cookbook that if you were to buy 3 lbs of spinach this is what you could do with it. The first suggestion was to make a warm spinach salad with mushrooms and bacon. The recipe was included along with a homemade vinaigrette dressing. Suggestions were given on how to store the remaining spinach but you'd have to go to the back of the book to find other recipes to use up that spinach; but there are several. Now the downside of the cookbook: there are no pictures. I always think it adds to the validity of a cookbook especially to have pictures of the author, recipes, and such. The other downside is the first 30 pages of the cookbook are just verbiage. The author tells stories about her childhood, how her grandparents purchased their groceries, equipping your kitchen and whatnot. Not necessarily useful information as far as a cookbook is concerned. Also, it's a little hard to read because the ink is blue and in several places it's also printed on blue background so it's very hard to read in those sections. You need good light. Nevertheless I think this is a great cookbook. It provides a lot of useful information for those who are costco junkies! ha-ha.

We all do it - buy too much of something just because the bigger container was a better buy. This book addresses that and even has an exercise to understand your food buying habits. A lot of the book is devoted to recipes to help you use that food surplus, but the book also gives shopping advice and helps you streamline your pantry. I really like the Big Food Action Chart which helps match the food I have on hand with the recipes needing those ingredients. This is the book for anyone who hates to see those outdated supplies clogging up their pantry shelves and hates, even more, throwing such stuff away.