REVIEW: Jamie Oliver's Cookbook "15 Minutes for Lunch"

2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44

If you are a gourmet and the notorious chop with pickles and potatoes is not enough for you, then it's time to learn the mastery of home cooking. The best source of knowledge is cookbooks. This article is about one of them.

Bookstore shelves are littered with cookbooks. The Internet is full of recipes for healthy and not very healthy food. Sometimes it can be difficult to choose something. And having chosen, we are sometimes disappointed. It's good if it's just a recipe printed from the internet. And if you spent money on a book, then money can be considered lost.

Personally, it took me several years to learn how to buy good cookbooks. And, frankly, only a few authors now flaunt on my shelves. Among them is the Englishman Jamie Oliver. Almost every book of his is a masterpiece. I have eight of them, including the newfangled “My Italy”, “Dinner in 30 Minutes” and “Save with Jamie”.

general description

The idea of the book (according to Jamie himself) is simple, healthy, delicious, super-fast and nutritionally correct meals for every day. For busy people, which are the majority.

Sounds like a dream!

But, unfortunately, I have to disappoint you.

The recipes in the book meet all criteria except one - super fast. You have to forget about 15 minutes. Even if you are a very advanced cookbook and kitchen tool user.

The author himself honestly writes that 15 minutes is taking into account the fact that ALL ingredients are washed, peeled and chopped. And there are a lot of ingredients in every dinner.

In fact, the name "Lunch in 15 minutes" does not correspond to reality, not only in terms of cooking time. Lunch in this case means a real full meal, consisting of a salad and a hot dish (especially when translated from English). Sometimes vegetables are simply mixed with meat or chicken.

In addition, there are many healthy breakfast ideas in the book, where you will find recipes for smoothies, cottage cheese with additives, sandwiches and eggs in various variations.

I would call this book Delicious and Healthy Food for Every Day.

Now about the advantages of the book

As always, Jamie has many useful ingredients … This allows you not to doubt the usefulness of the dishes, as well as their variety. The more different foods we eat each day, the better for our health. But often fantasy fails us! And nothing else just creeps into my head except as a salad-potato-sausage (or just a potato-sausage).
Extraordinary variety of dishes themselves with only Jamie's inherent manner of combining ingredients. It would never have occurred to me to mix the zucchini with chili and mint in a salad! But as it turns out, this is just a great combination, which is now one of my favorites.
The beginning of the book details the kitchen tools you need. A list of everything that he uses to prepare exactly the dishes from the book. There is nothing special in the list of kitchen utensils, except, perhaps, a bamboo two-story steamer. I personally decided not to spend money and bypass those dishes for which it is needed.
Detailed list of "bins of the Motherland", that is, those stocks that, in theory, should always be in your home. So, Jamie believes, it will be much easier to shop and plan meals. I fully agree with him! After all, the more stocks, the easier it is to whip up something tasty. If not 15 minutes, then 30.
All dishes in the book are conveniently categorized: chicken, beef, pork, lamb, fish, pasta dishes, soups and sandwiches, vegetarian dishes.
There is a section "Breakfasts" … It's not very big, but there are a lot of interesting ideas out there. For example, a delicious fruit salad or homemade muesli.
For those who are afraid to gain weight or want to lose weight, there is a detailed a description of the composition of dishes by calorie content, sugar and fat content (even indicating saturated!). I am not a proponent of calorie counting and not an enemy of fat. Modern science is finding more and more evidence that the fat content in food is not the cause of excess weight and many diseases. Therefore, I included this feature of the book as an advantage, simply for reasons of convenience for some people.
The good and the big photos of all dishes … I always want to see what happens as a result.
Proven recipe. Often there are books where one is forgotten, then another. As a result, you stand with a sliced eggplant, which you never put anywhere, because the author simply forgot about it in the "cooking" paragraph. This never happens with Jamie's books!
All dishes are simple in preparation. Yes, there are many ingredients. Even a LOT. But even a teenager can handle the process itself. No pies and cabbage rolls.
At the end of the book - convenient navigation through food products … If you have rice and chicken, it will be very easy to find in this big book what to make with them.
A wonderful generalization at the end of the book with images of all dishes in miniature with the indication of the page number with the recipe. We are visuals. You look at the photo and immediately understand what you want to cook.

Now about the cons

Too many ingredients. What I ranked earlier as a plus is also a minus. A varied diet is undoubtedly very healthy. But we will have to cut and clean all this ourselves, and not Jamie or a neighbor (unfortunately). With your own hands. It takes time and energy. It is this fact that prevents the idea of a dinner from coming true in just 15 minutes.
Many unknown ingredients. Jamie lives in England. It is because of this that it is very difficult to find all those "simple", according to him, ingredients in our stores. Therefore, I advise you not to take the lack of mango to heart. If you don't have any condiment or coconut milk, then either replace it with something similar or ignore it. Of course, coconut milk is not always ignored, but at worst it can be replaced with regular low-fat cream. The taste will change, but then you can safely call yourself a culinary experimenter.
Inconvenient description of the cooking process. Personally, I like it when each dish is described separately. Jamie implies that we will cook exactly in the order he suggested (to speed up the process). But for me it turns out exactly the opposite. While I am looking for chicken, I spend a couple of extra minutes …

I did not find any more minuses.

Perhaps they should include the high cost of the book. But I didn't. I am sure that it will save you a lot of nerves, because you will not need to puzzle over what to cook for dinner. And the book will surely be so fond of that it will be inherited. At worst, to save money, you can buy a second-hand book.

conclusions

Buy and you will not regret it if you:

love to cook according to new recipes;
an experimenter in the kitchen;
love exotic spices and spicy dishes;
your culinary fantasy has run out;
do not mind having a lot of interesting ingredients and seasonings in stock;
want to rise to the next level and learn simple but interesting cooking techniques;
decided to switch to a healthy diet, but do not know how to combine vegetables with seasonings.

It's not worth spending money if you:

do not burn with the desire to change the usual dishes;
do not like to cook in principle;
hate vegetables;
be wary and mistrustful of new tastes;
do not like spicy;
your favorite dish is french fries and big mac (and you are not going to change them either!);
not ready to spend an hour or two a week at the grocery store, where you will have to carefully look for the ingredients suggested in the book.