The first plan I tried was one month plan D. I was concerned about portion sizes and flavor of the recipes. We are alomost finished with the first month's food. Everything was delicious, you never know with recipes, there were some dishes that I made notes to (add more chicken, needs more gravy) but other than that, they were all great dishes. We have a family of 6 and some of the meals are only for 4, that was not a problem at my house, we added a bread or extra fruit or vegatable and we ALWAYS had leftovers (usually only one portion). Finally I feel like my family is eating appropriate portion sizes. This really has saved me a huge amount of time and money. I figured with the one month plan each dinner cost my family about $2.23 per person. Well rounded healthy food. We have purchased the ziploc steam n bags and in 4 minutes we have fresh steamed vegetables to go with our entre. My husband has had no problems jumping in and preparing the dinner for the evening, since all you are really doing is putting it in pan and reheating. I love this book, I have been telling everyone about how great it is. If you dont have an extra freezer there are two week plans, that I can say will fit in your regular freezer (I took the last two weeks out of the deep freeze and moved them inside, just to see). Also, if a someone has a baby or a friend needs a helping hand, you have a meal all ready for them in the freezer. A nice feature...at the end of the book, there are family dinner discussion topics for the communication to get rolling at the table. No more "what did you do today?" more like "talk about one thing you started today and one thing you finished" My only complaint, the book is soft back with paper pages, this makes it hard to keep clean when you are doing cooking day since you are flipping back and forth. I put mine is a binder with sheet protectors, a small investment, but all the pages turn easy and wipe clean.Read full review
I have cooked all three of the 2 week plans in this book. My friend and I get together every few weeks to do a 2 week plan, and then we just split the meals in half. We both have small families for now (2 and 3), so this works out great since most of the recipies are 4-6 servings. Honestly, I love this book! It has changed my life for the better! The idea is great, and I LOVE the fact that'dinner's in the freezer'! However, in every plan so far, there have been errors. Most of the errors are not too bad -like telling you to buy only one taco sesoning packet when you relly need two or telling you to chop an insane amount of mushrooms only to find out that you don't even need that much, but there are a couple mistakes that are really big - like one recipe was almost entirely omited, and in one plan they have you buy a steak, but you don't even need it (not that having an extra steak around is all that bad. :-) In spite of all the errors I have found in this book, I'm still giving it an "excellent" because if you can find the mistakes and correct them, this really is a great way of cooking! UPDATE: I originally got this book from the library, and the library copy must have been an older version because the same errors are not in the book I just bought.It must be a revised version. (Although be careful because they do have the same cover, and there are still some minor errors in this copy too.)Read full review
The book is great for young families with no time & not much money. It's easy to adapt to your kind of meals and if you do this with your friends and make a day of it, it's great fun. I bought this book to help teach a new kind of bible study and it's going to work out fine because each of the ladies will bring an item of food already prepared and we'll make a "date night" get away free dinner. This is a dinner that just goes either in the oven or crock pot and lets you get ready for you night out with your husband with no hassels! Enjoy!
I have done one of the two week menus so far and love that I have dinner ready when I need it. I will be working up to the actual one month cooking menu, but it was wonderful to have it all planned out with the total amount I needed for the whole cooking session. I made up my own meal for one of the ones my family wouldn't like so much and it still worked out great! We have also eaten out or eaten the sale items I have purchased in between and stretched it a little further. I hope you enjoy this book as much as I have so far! I plan on continuing with it.
I bought and have used one of these cookbooks 10 years ago. I bought this edition for a friend who kept borrowing mine! I wish it were spiral-bound.
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