Cook When You Can, Eat When You Want: Prep Once for Delicious Meals All Week

by Caroline Pessin

Cook just once a week for 5 days of delicious meals! This one-of-a-kind, fully-illustrated meal prep cookbook saves you time and money by offering a wide variety of easy-to-make dishes that you'll love to come home to.
Getting dinner on the table night after night is a perennial challenge, let alone meals that are creative and cost-effective. Cook When You Can, Eat When You Want is the easy-to-use, practical cookbook that provides menus to create home-cooked, sophisticated meals using common ingredients and a small investment of time once a week.
Arranged by season, this photo-filled hardcover has 16 distinct menus to create 80 balanced meals for 4, everything from salads and pizzas to pastas and casseroles. These inventive dishes use seasonal ingredients and reduce food waste, as everything you buy is consumed at the peak of freshness.
Each section A complete shopping list broken down by store aisle- The menu of the week- Meal prep that can be done in less than 2 hours when it is convenient- Last-minute cooking for that day's meal

Genres: Cookbooks, Nonfiction, Food, Cooking

256 pages, Hardcover

Published September 3, 2019

Reviews

[Jennah · Rating 1 out of 5]

Not impressed. I liked the concept of this book and looked forward to using it to reduce prep and cooking time on weekdays and help me plan to do most of my weekday meals on Sundays. Unfortunately none of the recipes turned out and a few had flavor combinations that that didn’t make sense. The book also lacked on plant based recipes and easy prep healthy meals.

[Mishqueen · Rating 1 out of 5]

+1 star: Fantastic premise! Just follow the steps exactly, and you'll have dinner every night in less time.

+1 star: Gorgeous photography! I love the flat lays for both the ingredients and the finished dishes.

+ 1 star: Sturdy book. I love the nice thick pages, lays open flat, and bright hardback cover.

+1 star: The author clearly took her time to pair recipes and processes. The whole thing is stunningly organized.

+1 star: The recipes call for fresh, healthy ingredients, IN SEASON! I'm always appreciative of seasonal considerations.

-1 star: You're not really looking at just reheating each night's dinner. There's a good 10-35 minutes of time each night even after spending the prep hours on the weekend. I can throw together a completely unplanned stir fry or curry in that kind of time, with zero weekend hours.

-1 star: You have to make all or none of the week menu. Extricating the dishes from each other is ridiculous. If you want to remove one dish or heaven forbid, only make one dish out of the week menu, you are looking at a *lot of notes and analyzation.

-1 star: The author says the ingredients are found in regular stores, not specialty ones. Negative. That is not the case unless you live in a very large city and shop at a place like Whole Foods. (I'm making some assumptions here). The sheer price of the ingredients is staggering.

-1 star: Ultimately, this is the biggest deal breaker for me, but for someone else it may be a dream come true. The actual foods created in these menus are dishes and combinations so unusual to me that I can't even imagine what they taste like, even with a lovely photo of the finished product. I thought I was an adventurous and high-brow eater. Clearly I was mistaken! I'm not going to address the unusual combinations, just the foods or terms I'm unfamiliar with or don't like:
Velouté
Cod
Watercress
Monkfish
Fennel as a main dish
Niçoise
Caper vinaigrette
Savory cheesecake
Rillettes
Mackerel
Moussouka
Blanquette
Merguez
Eggplant caviar
Tunisian spaghetti
Farfalle
Beef cheek sauce
Lardonfromage frais
Pollack
Pot-au-feu
Marrow toast
Haddock
Kuri squash
Tartiflette
Whiting fish
Gribiche sauce
Croque monsieur

[Bookjazzer2010 · Rating 2 out of 5]

Great idea, beautiful photos, healthy recipes, but the menus would never work for our family. Sad that the dishes were so unusual (for us). Maybe others would enjoy?

[Chrystopher’s Archive · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautifully put together cookbook, and the step processes - while still a little daunting - make it seem at least almost within the realm of possibilities that a slob like me could make the recipes and follow the meal plans. I have a copy sitting in my Amazon cart. Come payday I may buy it and do a self-challenge type thing. If I do I'll try to remember to update this review.

[Jenny K · Rating 2 out of 5]

I got this from the library because I like the premise, but I feel like she missed the mark. Even though she says all ingredients should be common at any grocery store, I would be able to find very few of them at my local store. Recipes include lots of ethnic foods, and lots of vegetarian dishes.
I would love it if someone would do this cookbook from a small town in mid-America so the recipes would actually be reachable for all.

[Marissa Nguyen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ok so I don’t understand why this book is rated so poorly? The recipes are easy, prep directions are easy to follow and extremely efficient. Recipes are sublime, so yummy. I checked this out from the library to find a new system of cooking for my family with a baby. My husband watched our baby for an hour or two and I got everything done for the week. EASY! The recipe plans are broken up by season so you can save money by shopping by what’s in season too.

Also, to the people who are complaining about not finding ingredients in basic grocery stores: you can substitute ingredients. You don’t have to follow cookbooks word for word. If you think the recipe is bland, add spice. This is a basic cooking skill. And there’s pictures for dishes you aren’t familiar with. So I don’t understand what their problem is. I think those who rated the book poorly have 0 cooking skills or are BRAND NEW to the kitchen.

[Libby Bowe · Rating 1 out of 5]

Ugh. The concept is to shop and cook once a week and eat all week. Sounds great! However, invariably there is one or more items you don’t want to eat or maybe you want to throw in a recipe from another week. The way the prep is written out makes this essentially impossible. Recipes are all jumbled together so you can’t just pick one here or there. I couldn’t use anything from this book, which is a bummer since there were meals that really appealed to me. If you’re ok with eating things you don’t really like or you’re truly open to anything and you can get your hands on a leg of lamb this is the book for you!

[Shelley Chastagner · Rating 4 out of 5]

I can't decide between 3.5 and 4 stars. I liked the premise and the easy layout of the book. There are lots of beautiful pictures, clear directions, and seasonal ingredients that make this cookbook appealing. The recipes, however, are not palatable for my family. Asparagus veloute' soup, radish toast, smoked mackerel tagliatelle and vegetables are great for adults with refined palates but would be a waste of effort, time, and money for a lot of families. I would highly recommend borrowing a copy from your local library to see if the recipes appeal to you before purchasing.

[Erin · Rating 1 out of 5]

I like the concept but I despise the way this is written.
The prep instructions need to have headings so that you can see what you are prepping. Instead it is a full two page or more spread of instructions with no indications what you will be using the prepped ingredients for. I can't handle that. There is no way to short cut and say, "ok I know how to cook cauliflower I will just go ahead and cook some cauliflower. " Nope, you have to read the instructions word for word, that is not going to save me time.

No thank you.

[Alex Can Read · Rating 2 out of 5]

While the concept of the method is fine, the bulk of the book is broken out into inflexible menus that make for a challenge to implement in the home of a picky eater. None of the menus work for us, and the book is structured in such a way that you can't mix and match the recipes to create a menu that works for you. Not the book for me.

[Denise · Rating 1 out of 5]

Great concept but execution could have been better. The book assumes you want to cook all of the recipes each week and so, rather than give individual recipes, it has you cooking everything at once. It's not trivial to figure out the individual recipes, which I found very frustrating, as I was not interested in most recipes each week.

[Beth · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent idea and recipes!

[Heather Culley · Rating 5 out of 5]

Whole bunch of stuff I wouldn’t dream of eating. Pretty pictures though.

[Cherise Marks · Rating 3 out of 5]

Decent ideas but I don’t feel like a lot of these recipes are super family friendly like she put in the intro. Some of the recipes were things even I wasn’t sure about trying as an adult

[Michelle · Rating 2 out of 5]

I wish the recipes for the individual dishes had been included.

[Kim · Rating 2 out of 5]

The layout of this book is great - shopping lists, weekly prep lists, then daily prep lists for each week's meals. The meals themselves are way too fancy for my family's tastes.

[Christen · Rating 2 out of 5]

Recipes are hidden in the 2-hour prep plan. I did not like how many soups were in the 5-day plan.

[Tracy]

Unfortunately because of the approach (cooking multiple dishes at once) this isn't adaptable for a vegetarian diet.

[Rachelle · Rating 3 out of 5]

Cook When You Can... the premise is simple: meal prep on the weekend for 5 days' worth of dinners to quickly heat up and serve to your hungry family. Each recipe is well detailed and photographed, and a shopping list for the week's dishes is listed at the beginning of each menu. Meals are made with seasonal ingredients, and every dish is unique. Some appetizers and desserts included. Readers must remain organized to remember key ingredients per dish.

[Monique · Rating 2 out of 5]

So this is a great idea but won’t work for my crazy family. Many of the recipes are simple but too specialized to meal prep. Healthy meal ideas but not practical for me.