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Learn to COOK - Frozen Assets: Cook for a Day, Eat for a Month
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List Price: $14.95
Our Price: $10.17
Your Save: $ 4.78 ( 32% )
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Manufacturer: Sourcebooks, Inc.
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Average Customer Rating:  
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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 641.6153
EAN: 9781891400612
ISBN: 1891400614
Label: Sourcebooks, Inc.
Manufacturer: Sourcebooks, Inc.
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 226
Publication Date: 2000-04-01
Publisher: Sourcebooks, Inc.
Studio: Sourcebooks, Inc.
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Editorial Reviews:
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The best-selling freezer-based cookbook, with more than 22,000 copies sold. This breakthrough cookbook delivers a program for readers to cook a week or month's worth of meals in just one day by using easy and affordable recipes to create a customized meal plan. Deborah Taylor-Hough, who saved $24,000 on her family's total grocery bill during a five-year period, offers up kid-tested and family-approved recipes in Frozen Assets, plus bulk-cooking tips for singles, shopping lists, recipes for two-week and 30-day meal plans, and a ten-day plan to eliminate cooking over the holidays. Cooking for the freezer allows you to plan ahead, purchase items in bulk, cut down on waste, and stop those all-too-frequent trips to the drive-thru. The hands-down authority on once-a-month cooking, Frozen Assets gives you a step-by-step plan to simplify and revolutionize the way you cook. "Finally, a realistic way to combine the cost-effectiveness of cooking from scratch with the convenience of quick and easy meals!" -Mary Hunt, author of The Financially Confident Woman "Belongs in every family's kitchen! One of the best time - and money - savers a busy family can have." -The Dollar Stretcher "Offers relief to those tired of eating restaurant fare or expensive, over-packaged convenience foods at the end of a hard day." -Library Journal
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: Adapt the advice to your family's preferenes and you've got a good start!
Comment: This book got me thinking on how to organize my shopping and meal planning to accommodate cooking less frequently. Like other reviewers, I didn't care for repeating the recipes, or using "all purpose meat mix" while using plain ground beef in others. However, I used many of these recipes as guidelines and adapted them to my family's preferences (a lot of beef alternatives and using lots of spices) and they come out great. I don't follow the suggestion to cook until something is "almost done so that it can be baked later after sitting in the freezer". I go ahead and prepare the dish, then separate it into several containers that go in the freezer, then we can grab one in the morning and go to work and it's just like popping a tv dinner in the microwave (to avoid "overcooking" as the author refers to, just lower the power on your microwave if you don't have a "reheat" option). Another thing I didn't care for was how in the beginning she talks about taking $180 to the store and is able to prepare a month's worth of meals. After reading further you discover that she means a month's worth of "dinner" meals, not breakfasts nor lunches. Our household is myself, my boyfriend, our 8-month old son, and my 18-year-old sister. I can go to the local "supercenter" and buy groceries for our whole family for a month of cooking breakfasts, lunches, and dinners for about $300 (except for baby items like formula, etc).
In summary, I recommend reading this book if you can (even if you can check it out from the libary). The concepts of once-a-month-cooking are great. There is a list of what can freeze well and what doesn't. There are some great shopping tips. Apply the concepts of the book to your own ways of cooking and I think you'll find it helpful. I bought my used copy on this site and find it was a very worthwhile investment.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Worth reading
Comment: This was an inspiring book for beginning OAMC. It has a lot of tips and tricks from people that have tried this method and cook in this way. I bought the book for the stuffed potato shells recipe, which I modified for my own taste. Which is easy to do with these recipes, if there is something that you don't love, you can easily modify the recipes, but her recipes prove how the rules of freezer cooking works, with good examples. She demonstrates how she, herself has adapted recipes to meet her family's needs, and that is what you will learn most from this book.
I did think that it was odd to duplicate (doubled or tripled) recipes, just to show how to feed more people. It made me feel like I was duped out of a chapter full of recipes. I think it is hard for individuals to eat something right out of a recipe book without considering what their family already enjoys eating, so more DIFFERENT examples, would have helped. (docked 1 star)
This book is worth reading, it has a few recipes most anyone will eat, and several that would work for non-picky eaters, but the basic concept is worth buying the book, not to mention all the neat freezing tips!
A pretty good book.
Customer Rating:
Summary: A bit plain, repetitive and lacking in efficiency.
Comment: Some people may like having a the same meat mix for their sauce, meatballs, meatloaf, etc; however I find it to be a bit plain. The same dishes are repeated over and over in different meal plans and many meals are cooked to prepare it, and then cooked for another hour the day it is served. I prefer Don't Panic-Dinner's in the Freezer for it's variety, easy to prepare meals and efficiency.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Surprisingly good
Comment: I was dubious when I first looked at Deborah Taylor-Hough's "Frozen Assets: How to Ccook for a Day and Eat for a Month." I have a great love of good food (and cooking), and the idea of eating frozen dinners hardly appealed to me. Instead, what I discovered was a new philosophy of shopping, cooking, and eating that slimmed our grocery bills, turned out to be surprisingly adaptable, and still managed to satisfy our taste buds!
Frozen Assets isn't so much a cookbook as a method and a philosophy. It's aimed at people with slim budgets and/or a lack of time on their hands. Although it isn't the only use for this cookbook, the basic theory is called "once a month cooking" (or OAMC). The idea is that you plan your meals for a month, then spend one full day cooking a bunch of freezable main dishes. Then, for the rest of the month, you have only to thaw things, make a few side dishes, and eat.
This isn't nearly as difficult or outlandish as it sounds. Deborah achieves this largely by creating several very adaptable meal components - such as a ground meat mix and a spaghetti sauce - that can be combined and re-combined in a number of ways to make a delicious variety of dishes. She also has a wide range of hints to help you fit this bounty into your little refrigerator freezer (although having a full-size freezer wouldn't hurt).
I admit, I didn't expect to love the food in this cookbook. It's simple stuff, and often uses simple inexpensive ingredients - which in some people's hands can lead to some truly awful food. But in this author's hands it leads to delicious meals! The baked ziti is one of our favorites. It makes a full 13×9-inch pan full of ziti with sauce and a small amount of meat and cheese - plus enough for two frozen batches of the same size. The lentils ranchero primarily consists of lentil (with a small amount of ground meat, lots of ketchup, and some onion soup mix) - but somehow it comes out tasting like it's all yummy hamburger! (It's black magic, I'm telling you.)
One of our complaints about this cookbook won't apply to everyone and is easy to fix - many of these recipes are most definitely not diet food (the author has young, growing children, after all!). However, this is offset by the fact that these recipes are incredibly easy to adapt. Want to reduce the calories of the ziti? Substitute broccoli for some of the pasta and use less cheese. Want to reduce the fattiness of the wonderful breakfast casserole? Add an extra apple, use Egg Beaters instead of eggs, and take out half of the sausage. These are remarkably flexible recipes, and their simplicity lends itself very well to adaptation of almost any kind.
Because of the format (meal plans including recipes), a number of recipes get repeated in several places. I would have preferred to have that space taken up by more recipes. There are a couple of minor snafus here and there - a recipe or two that list an ingredient in the ingredient list and then forget to mention it in the preparation instructions, things like that. But again, since the recipes are so simple it's usually pretty easy to figure out what to do.
The cookbook isn't perfect, and I do wish there had been more recipes provided, but it's still surprisingly helpful and adaptable. The lists of grocery tips are bound to lower your food bill at least a little, and if you're a busy mom or dad with lots of little mouths to feed, you'll love not having to cook every night - yet being able to provide a nutritious home-cooked meal.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Love it!
Comment: I don't always follow the once a month cooking way, but the recipes are great and easy. Most items are nice and cheap, well tolerated by little picky eaters! I also ordered the Lite version too, and enjoy half of the recipes in it (blah..tofu recipes??yuck). Great tips and easy to mix around if your family doesn't like a recipe or two. Occasionally I find myself getting items on the shopping list but can't figure out what they went to- guess its the mental craziness of cooking with preschoolers around.
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