The Convenience Cook: 125 Best Recipes for Easy Homemade Meals Using Time-Saving Foods from Boxes, Bottles, Cans and More

I like to cook and I like and give my family home-cooked meals as often as possible. Hard to do when you work and have kids with busy schedules. I need short cuts and I need to know that it will come out tasting and looking good. I live Judith Finlayson's slow cooker books so I based on those I got this one. Glad I did. We have our favorites that I make sure I always have the basics for in my pantry and freezer. So easy and yummy. I've even started making my own substitutions to create my own versions.

Looking carefully through a relatively underexposed book like this, you tend to come to the realization that a high profile author like Sandra Lee (the "Semi Homemade" series) is really just skating by on the her photogenic appearance, marketing, and some very slick production values. "The Convenience Cook" is aimed at the same market, costs considerably less, and is a much better value. Nothing against Ms. Lee, it's just the facts. This is a fine collection of functional, well designed recipes that will give the everyday cook a whole new array of dishes to bring to the nightly dinner table. It suits my needs for daily sustenance quite well: I'm still in the middle learning stages of cooking (Rachel Ray and Alton Brown are as fancy as I get) but I've tried an even dozen of these recipes. Nothing has been too imposing or difficult to implement and the results that always been at least good or even, in a few cases, excellent. This only gets four stars because most of the recipes are (again) good, but not great. Convenience ingredients will only get you so far, after all. If you grab the wrong brand of a particular convenience food ingredient at your local megamart, you know, the crappy brand, it will affect your results for the worse. For instance, the "black bean pie" dish was dramatically affected by the variety of salsa that I used. (This is where having some experience with products and labels a la Consumer Reports or Cook's Illustrated comes in handy). And I've been to four of my local megamarts and been unable to find such staples as canned sweet potatoes, for instance, or some of the prepared pesto varieties and tomato sauces recommended here (and frozen diced onions? Do they really exist anymore???). But I like "Convenience Cook" a lot and am glad I got it. While it isn't as fancy looking as some of the cook books you might give to a young college student or newly-wed dealing with their first new kitchen, it might be the second book you get for them, or yourself, to back up and supplement that overused copy of "Semi-Homemade Volume 1". You know, like the "workhorse" or "utility" vehicle that you use every day to get to work, as opposed to the overpriced Camaro that your kids asked for.

I've had this book for over a year now and many of the recipes have become "trusty standards" that I turn to again and again. An easy and wonderful spinach risotto that my three year old loves, for example, is something that I can make from this book with straightforward pantry ingredients. Most of the recipes are very easy and fairly quick to prepare. Although this book does use lots of "convenience" food, it is not unhealthy. Frozen vegetables are convenient and healthy, and lots of canned food (such as kidney beans) are healthy too, especially if rinsed to get rid of excess salt. I also find that lots of recipes are very good the first time I make them and then I add a little of this and little of that the next time I make them, and can easily turn them into something that my family LOVES. (Eg. add some tarragon to the spinach risotto, if you have some handy.) I always have some recipes from this book in my meal plan for the week, so that I don't have to buy fresh ingredients for everything I make each week. (That way I avoid having vegetables etc go bad in the fridge. I use fresh fish, vegetables etc at the beginning of the week, soon after grocery shopping, and then frozen or canned later in the week.) Even if you don't like to cook and/or are a novice cook, there will be plenty of recipes in here that you will find indispensible. Every busy household needs this cook book. Having said all that, the dessert section is not great. Too many cake mixes used, and the results are not even that good. But you can't get much more convenient than some fresh or canned fruit and a scoop of ice cream, so I don't care much about the dessert chapter not being wonderful. But if you're looking for quick and easy desserts, don't bother with this book.