Cooking Light Fresh Food Fast: Over 280 Incredibly Flavorful 5-Ingredient 15-Minute Recipes

by Cooking Light

With over 280 incredibly delicious flavorful 5-ingredient, 150 minute recipes at your fingertips, you'll discover how simple it is to serve a healthful home-cooked meal on a busy weeknight. Our Test Kitchens experts have paired easy side dishes and desserts with superfast entrées to create over 160 mouthwatering menus.

Organized by easy-to-use food categories, including Soups, Sandwiches, Salads, Meatless Main Dishes, Fish and Shellfish, Meats, and Poultry, Cooking Light Fresh Food Fast offers recipes that are great for you and taste great, too!

With short ingredient lists, straightforward procedures, fresh ingredients, and delicious results, the recipes and meals in this cookbook will be the most requested, often-repeated solutions in your weeknight repertoire.

Genres: Cookbooks, Cooking, Food, Reference, Nonfiction

368 pages, Paperback

First published March 3, 2009

About the author

Cooking Light is an American food and lifestyle magazine founded in 1987. Each month, the magazine includes approximately 100 original recipes as well as editorial content covering food trends, fitness tips, and other culinary and health-related news.

Reviews

[Princess]

The photos are gorgeous. The food looks delicious. However, I felt a bit mislead. The title includes the words "5 ingredient, 15 minutes recipes." However, the author means that some recipes contain five ingredients, some other ones only take 15 minutes to prepare and some recipes do both. In addition, to get the time down to 15 minutes or under, most of the recipes include ingredients such as "refrigerated prechopped celery, onion, and bell pepper mix" or "refrigerated cubed peeled sweet potato." Many of the recipes also do not take into account cooking time for chicken, instead just calling for cooked chicken. This is a bit frustrating and misleading because if I'm going to make a meal from scratch, I'm going to be chopping vegetables and cooking meat for it.

I am glad I borrowed this book from the library. I only found 3-4 recipes I was interested in trying. Hopefully they'll turn out well.

[Jacquline Ard]

I've been looking for a recipe book that contains a happy medium between quick and healthy foods. I have a history of making the same Spartans meals, mainly salads and smoothies, or tossing random leftovers together (not always healthy nor complimentary in taste). I'm a pressure cooker type of person.

I looked at some other reviews because I also noticed that many recipes seemed to have more than 5 ingredients. The fifth page does explain that "Each healthy recipe meets at least one of these two criteria: It requires five ingredents or less (excluding water, cooking spray, salt, pepper, and optional ingredients. And many fit the bill for both."

I guess that was the fine print that others missed.

Another point to mention is that it doesn't have any breakfast recipes unless one prefers savory. There were some recipes for mixed drinks with alcohol and some dessert, but most dishes were more for lunch or dinner. It's possible that some of these recipes would take more time like 30 minutes instead of 15. Personally, I am slow with overthinking and somewhat clumsy so I would definitely take 30-40 minutes.

I haven't actually tried any of these recipes, so far, since I have been surviving off holiday leftovers and lettuce with cucumber salads until I go grocery shopping tomorrow. I actually like how so many ingredients are "fancy." It's not the same boring stuff found in other healthy recipe books.

What may be problematic for some is the use of canned ingredients, store-bought salad dressings, low-fat and sugar-free products, and the recommendation of specific brands. It doesn't happen with every recipe, fresher alternatives would probably need a web search or two, and there are some fresh salad dressing recipes. It doesn't bother me.

It's like a give and take: minimal time and effort vs. 100% fresh, organic, virginal ingredients.

The back of the book has "8 Super Shortcuts" that probably result in that 15 minute time that is expected -- gathering and prepping. I am definitely going to use "The 15-Minute Pantry" list for convenience. After studying the recipes, I have reason to believe that I am going to enjoy using this book.

[Lisa Burke]

Loved this cookbook!! If you like clean eating this book is for you. So many easy, great recipes. Can’t wait to get started cooking in it.

[Mary]

Great recipes. Many have photos.

[Amy]

Fabulous! Lots of great (easy) recipes with lots of great pictures! I xeroxed a number of them. All of the pages list a recipe for a main dish at the top of the page and then a recipe for a suggestion to "serve with" at the bottom. The serve with is sometimes a side, dessert or drink.

Also, this is great for people who watch what they eat as each recipe provides the grams/mg, etc. for fat, chol, iron, protein, etc. Excellent!

[Tawnie]

I wanted to like this cookbook. It has nice full color pages with fairly simple recipes. Sadly, the use of fresh in the title of this book is a huge misnomer. The recipes use many prepackaged ingredients, such as caned soup, frozen vegetables, and other pre-processed foods. As someone who enjoys cooking and using fresh ingredients, I had to do a lot of adjusting to the recipe. I found that I was using them for more of a starting out point, so I decided it wasn't the recipe book for me.

[ஐ Katya (Book Queen)ஐ]

Not a single recipe in this cookbook would I cook for myself or my family. I scanned the list of 280 recipes and was done reading this in under 5 minutes. Example of recipes: Fig, Carrot, and Ginger Rice Pilaf; Grape, Blue Cheese and Walnut Pizza; Mini Lamb Pitas with Minted Pea Humus and Goat cheese and Roasted Pepper Panini. This is only good for fancy folks trying to impress, not your average american family on budget with kids.

[Vanessa]

There's a variety of interesting, light recipes with bright photos accompanying each. My only problem was that to make the recipes shorter and quicker, some pre-chopped veggies and other prepared foods are required. You could easily substitute your own versions of these ingredients. Another great cookbook from Cooking Light.

[Stephanie]

This is one of my go-to cookbooks for weeknights. I've made about 30 of the recipes with a few that I go back to again and again - Roasted Vegetable Pizza, Cumin-Spiced Chicken with Chunky Tomato Sauce, Chili-Lime Corn on the Cob. These are fast and easy and I usually have most of the ingredients on hand. Cooking Light rarely misses, in my opinion.

[Alison]

I got about 10 recipes to try from this book, which is pretty good, I think. It has beautiful photographs...gotta love it when a book makes you drool. I really enjoyed the side info on fruits and veggies.

[Barb Bailey]

I think this is a great cookbook. I copied at least 20 new recipes out of this cookbook! I took it on loan from the library and took days poring over it! Hopefully the recipes I've choosen to try will be as delishous as they sound!

[AnnE]

I am not usually into fast cooking cookbooks. I don't mind the time as long as it tastes good. I have been surprised and impressed with this book, everything I have made so far has been rreally good. A Keeper.

[Kae Larsen]

There are some good recipes in this book. The problem is that nearly every one of them are not FRESH food. Unless you consider 'fresh out of the bottle' 'fresh out of the can' 'fresh out of the package'. Crazy title for this one!

[KC]

Love this cookbook! Most of the recipes sound quick, easy, healthy, and very flavorful--something you really need/want if you're trying to cut calories. Just purchased this book and plan to try several recipes this coming week.

[Renae]

Tons of fantastic recipes in here and all are super simple using very few ingredients.

[Julie]

A photo for every recipe, and a side dish suggested for most. We like everything we've tried and I'm trying to fight the urge to buy it for now.

[Kristin]

Great recipes for those on the go. I seriously did not know how to bake a potato in the microwave and this book taught me how. Great pictures.

[Shannan]

Great book, lots of tasty looking, fast, healthy recipes.

[Shirley]

Wow this is a wonderful edition. I bookmarked so many recipes I will be cooking for months.

new edition actually has 280 recipes and a different cover.

[Denise]

Great fish and seafood section.