Weeknight Wonders: Delicious, Healthy Dinners in 30 Minutes or Less – Simple, Low-Cholesterol Recipes for Eating Well without Deprivation

by Ellie Krieger

Beloved Food Network and Cooking Channel star Ellie Krieger knows the secret to healthy eating: it has to be delicious. You won't eat right if you feel deprived. WEEKNIGHT WONDERS offers 150 recipes for your favorite foods, as delicious as ever, yet magically reworked without all the fat and  cholesterol. Each recipe can be prepared with minimal fuss and simple ingredients, even after a long day at work, in 30 minutes or less. From Parmesan Chicken Breasts and Goat Cheese Frittata (plus no-guilt desserts), you can stay focused on eating well any day of the week.

Genres: Cookbooks, Cooking, Food, Nonfiction

304 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2013

About the author

New York Times best-selling author and registered dietitian ELLIE KRIEGER was the host of Food Network’s Healthy Appetite, which also aired on the Cooking Channel. She regularly contributes to CNN and USA Today, and appears often on national morning shows.

Reviews

[Ivonne Rovira · Rating 5 out of 5]

The title says it all: Weeknight Wonders: Delicious, Healthy Dinners in 30 Minutes or Lees. Isn’t that what every working cook needs? And you’ll find it here in Ellie Kriger’s excellent cookbook. And if Krieger seems a bit overzealous in her use of egg whites and a bit strict in her banishment of cream, a cook can improvise if s/he wishes.

From Savory Carrot-Cashew Soup to Open-Face “French Dip” Sandwiches to Parmesan-Crusted Chicken Breasts to Scallops with Warm Citrus Sauce to Two-Minute Mango-Coconut Sorbet, Krieger sheds calories and fat while providing recipes that don’t require out-of-the-way ingredients or dismay children or reluctant spouses. Everything’s so fresh and yummy that no one will think to ask if the recipes are low-fat or low-calorie; they’ll just ask for seconds! Highly recommended.

[Kaleigh Gibbons · Rating 4 out of 5]

Exceeded my expectations! The majority of the recipes are appetizing, and they really do only take about 30 minutes.

[Andrea · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is my absolute, tried and true, family favorite cookbook. You'll love it too!

[Lynnie · Rating 3 out of 5]

A decent collection of recipes, most of which seem that they can be completed in 30 minutes or less, but some do have prep work that might take longer depending on your speed/skill. Still, there are definitely some dishes in here I plan to try, particularly the Beef & Scallion Negimaki stir fry & the Open-Face Mediterranean Salmon Sandwiches- which look both easy & delicious. This is the first cookbook by Ellie Kreiger that I've read and I'm looking forward to perusing her other offerings.

[Nancy · Rating 4 out of 5]

I found this book at the library. I've made four things from it and all turned out just as pictured and delicious. I returned the book to the library, but bought a copy...and another of her books as well.

[Sue T · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love this cookbook! Most of the recipes are quick, easy, delicious AND they have healthy ingredients. She suggests complementary dishes for a lot of the recipes. I like that my "What to make for dinner tonight?" dilemma is solved by opening this cookbook.

[Wendy · Rating 2 out of 5]

Meh. Maybe it only takes 30 minutes to cook these dishes, but I feel like I'd spend hours going to the grocery store for all the ingredients.

[Martha · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a more inspirational cookbook than a previous selection of EK. Favorites include a Japanese shrimp and vegetable pancakes. The pizza strudel made with pizza dough and the ingredients are rolled and baked as a loaf and sliced. Great salad of sugar snap peas, watermelon, onion and feta. The recipes seemed more inventive but continue to be easy to prepare and ready in less than an hour. I give this one a thumbs up.

[Susan Rose · Rating 5 out of 5]

I adore Ellie Krieger and you should too. Her books are filled with realistic, achievable, delicious and HEALTHY recipes for food that you actually want to eat. Her pasta fagioli with zucchini had me swooning with about a half hour input of effort on my part. Good food should taste good (and if it's good for you and not too fussy that's a huge bonus). I will be sleeping with this under my pillow, it's that good.

[Charlotte Tressler · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a straightforward and accessible way to approach nutrition and the age-old question of what to make for dinner. I just wish Ellie Krieger would come out with a book for vegetarians (yes, I know there's a 36-page e-book; I prefer a print book). The meat and poultry chapters, and the majority of the seafood chapter, are completely wasted on me.

[Jessica]

Lots of recipes look good, but many rely on fresh summer produce and will be better to try in a few months. I should check this out again in CSA season.

The girls surprised me by LOVING the grilled tandoori chicken, and the Parmesan chicken was delicious, though mine did not look anything like the picture in the book.

[Shannon · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of my favorite things to do is check out recipe books from the library. It's the best way to go. But I would buy this one.

[Martha · Rating 4 out of 5]

will have to try a couple of recipes to check is I can make this quickly

[Christine · Rating 1 out of 5]

The Kindle version is virtually unreadable. The text is pale grey, on a grey background.

[Gale Penton · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very entertaining and informative

[Steven]

This cookbook is trying to strike a delicate balance: healthy, delicious, fresh and whole food oriented dinners for 4 that can be prepped and cooked in 30 minutes or less. So, far, the 30 minutes or less part is questionable, but the rest is a success.

What's novel about her presentation is that she's written the recipes so that the ingredients list does not have "hidden" prep work implicit in it -- she'll never write, for example, "1 finely-diced medium onion" - a five minute task right there - but rather "1 medium onion" and have the dicing as part of the recipe steps, usually interwoven into the other steps to take advantage of any available waiting time in the cooking. Nice. The danger here is if she wants you to dice an onion during a 3 minute cooking step and you are a 5 minute onion dicer, you run the risk of overcooking things.

I'm finding the recipes are closer to 45 minutes end to end than 30, for someone with my level of kitchen skills. (I've cooked dinner for my small family of 2 or 3 maybe 3 times a week for 30 years, so while I'm no pro, I'm not a novice.) The recipes are technically easy to execute so long as you have basic knife skills but as with all fresh and whole food-oriented cooking, there's a fair amount of washing and chopping, which takes time.

In terms of minimizing total time on food prep, you have to consider ease of shopping, it's worth talking a bit about the ingredients she uses. Ms. Krieger lives in Manhattan, as I do, and none of these things are hard to find there. But if you don't have easy access to higher-end supermarkets, about 20% of the ingredients in the book might not be easily available -- some of them are fairly seasonal, too, you have to have some awareness of what time of the year it is, too, when picking a recipe. I'd definitely recommend not trying to make these recipes spur-of-the-moment since you simply can't have all the right fruits and veggies on hand on the time but rather planning ahead for a week at a time and making a shopping run for the right fresh ingredients once or twice a week, and also saving some of the recipes for the time of year when key ingredients are in season.

But overall I think the book is a success -- it does make it easier to make healthier weeknight meals. It just doesn't hit ALL the ambitious goals it set for itself.

[Elizabeth · Rating 5 out of 5]

PROS: There is a lot of variety in this cookbook. The dishes I tried truly took 30 minutes to make. For being 30 minute meals, they were very flavorful!

CONS: Do I have any? Perhaps I can complain that I don’t like quinoa, but that’s a personal problem.

Overall: I’m really sad I have to return this book to the library. There’s so much more I want to make, like Pork Banh Mi Sandwiches, Steak Fajitas, Chicken Florentine Roll-Ups, Crispy Potato and Carrot Pancake with Chicken Sausage and Applesauce, Taco Pizzas, and Salmon with Savory Rhubarb Sauce. I guess I need to buy this cookbook. I liked the layout of the book, the pictures in the book, and the flavors she shares. But frankly, the best part of the book is that it stands behind it’s claim and truly gives you 30 minute meals.

You can read my whole review and see the recipes I made to do this review here: http://lawstudentscookbook.wordpress....

[Diana Gotsch · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed playing with this cookbook. The photos were attractive. The instructions were clear and easy to follow. Some of the combinations were a little unusual but intriguing. Most used fresh ingredients. Of the six recipes I tried three will be copied over to my personal files. They were indeed able to be prepare Quickly. Although They do require a little more work than most fast recipes.

The Sweet and Savory Carrot salad with Oranges and Dates was excellent. Also very good was the Open Faced French Dip sandwich. The Peach Chicken was good enough to make again. The other three, A meatless pasta, a broccoli side dish and a Pear dessert were ho-hum. O.K. but not really worth the extra work.

Very nice cookbook

[Laura · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a solid book that delivers on what the title promises. The meals are easy, relatively family friendly and pretty quick to cook. Nothing is going to blow your socks off, but these are good standbys and they are healthy (yeah, full nutrition information!!!).

My only problem with the book (and this may be unique to me) - the cooking is active time. That can be a little tough with 3 young kids running around underfoot while you're trying to cook. But if you have a window during naptime, you could easily prep these then re-heat them later.

Definitely worth checking out for the meat, chicken and desert sections. The pumpkin mini-cakes are amazing!

[Megan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Love the variety. Love that she includes nutrition facts and what are the recipes are excellent/good sources of (ie the steak au poivre salad is an excellent source of protein).

I also really like that she doesn't shy away from fat, steak, potatoes, etc., and that they're included in controlled doses instead of avoiding them.

I'm really looking forward to making her shrimp pad thai salad, shotgun wedding soup (she calls it shotgun "because it is so quick to the altar" for the marriage between meatballs and veg), beef negimaki stirfry, this could go on forever...

[Adrienne · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a beautiful cookbook with yummy recipes. It's worth buying for the salads alone. This past weekend, I made an Ancho Chicken Salad with jicama, oranges & avocados which was divine and also a salad that had sugar snap peas, tomatoes, onions, watermelon, mint and feta cheese. It sounded crazy, but turned out to be refreshing and delicious.

Also made a tenderloin steak with a caper-parsley sauce. Yum.

[Naomi · Rating 4 out of 5]

Yummers...another cookbook to purchase! This author offered a great selection of easy to prep, but unique meals. To boot, she offered a selection of wonderful salad selections, as a start, a side of even a meal. The dishes weren't too heavy and didn't utilize commercial products making them even healthier.

This is def. an author that I will be seeking out other cookbooks by her.

[Christiana · Rating 4 out of 5]

We made the whole grain penne with chicken, mushrooms, and spinach. It was good and definitely a wonder, but it was a lot more work for a weeknight than I usually put forth. With one person and chopping and one person cooking, this still took about 45 minutes. I would try more of these when I had the time, but I'm not sure I could keep these up for during the week.

[Deborah Lyman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ellie's recipes are enticing, healthy and really simple to follow. Rather than listing the amounts at the start, she incorporates them right into the directions to keep the cook moving through the process. It makes much sense to write a recipe this way.

I will definitely be trying some of her delicious sounding meals.

[Kat]

I probably will not be cooking much from here because for the majority of recipes that sounded good either 1) I have never seen the ingredients in my local grocery store or 2) there was no picture to go with it

[Julie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Can't wait to try a few new recipes.

[Lisa · Rating 3 out of 5]

i found some recipes that i would like to make but i think i was expecting too much there were too many flavor combos that were too different and of things that i do not normally eat

[Trish · Rating 3 out of 5]

There are some good ideas in here. I just wish there were more pictures.

[Sarah · Rating 3 out of 5]

not much new for me, other than a great shrimp pancakes recipe, but I always like her books and see where this would have broad appeal.

[Kristen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Everything I made was delicious and quick and easy to make. My 7 yr old son loved the meals too. I just wish there were more dinners included as I'm not one to make 3 meals a day very often.