The BIG Cook

The BIG cook 
Written by Deanna Siemens, Lorelei Thomas & Joanne Smith
YouCan2 Publishing

About the book

It is 5:00pm ....
• You are not rushing around frantically trying to get supper made.
• You have a freezer full of delicious, nutritious homemade meals that are ready to be cooked and enjoyed.
• You prepared all these meals in one day while having fun with friends!
• We have proven that it only takes a little longer to make 8 meals of the same recipe as it does to make one.
This is not an ordinary cookbook; it is much more than that. It is a 'cooking concept'.

The Big Cook comes complete with full instructions for:
• choosing and using the recipes
• making the grocery list and buying the groceries
• how to prepare the meals with friends
• storage of meals.

The Big Cook book also comes with:
• 73 delicious beef, chicken and pork recipes
• full color photographs of all 73 recipes
• 2 suggested sample cooks complete with grocery lists

My Thoughts

We are a family of six and we are always on the lookout for new ideas on how to prepare meals and reduce the money spent.    While participating to a swimming activity with our kids, I got to know a couple of the other women and one of them mentioned the book The BIG Cook one week.   I was curious and when I got home I googled it.    I loved what I read on the website and decided to ask to see if I could review their cookbook.    Imagine my delight when I got an email from one of the author agreeing to send me one copy.   I was looking forward to this package.

Interestingly enough, the week I received my BIG cook we had friends over one night.  And my friend Shannon asked me “So what do you do for supper each week?  I am tired of eating the same thing…”  Ah!   When I received the BIG Cook and read about the concept of getting together with friends to cook for a whole day, I immediately thought of Shannon and her comment.    Well, Shannon my friend if you are ready to do some cooking with us, I have the perfect book to help us!   (I sure hope she will be reading this!).   

On December day, I decided to make the Maple Chicken recipe that can be found in the BIG Cook.   Just the word MAPLE draw me to this recipe.  We improvised a bit with what was on sale that week.

For example, the recipe suggest to take skinless boneless chicken breast and we decided to purchase some thighs that had skin and bones on it.   I removed the skin before the recipe but left the bones in.  

For the cooking it is strongly suggested that doing it on the BBQ would be better but being in the winter and not really feeling like using the BBQ that day (because yes we do use it regularly during winter time), I opted to cook the meal in the oven.

Finally, here’s the meal fully cooked with rice, tomatoes and thai sauce.  Everyone in the family enjoyed it from the smallest to the oldest.   Yum!

The meal was delicious and everyone in my family loved it!    I think this has become a recipe that will come monthly on our plates… *grin*

Would I recommend this cookbook to anyone?  For sure,  you can easily manage the smaller quantities if you are a single person or get-together with neighbours to prepare larger quantities of food.  It would help a lot of you have a freezer though.   We are fortunate to have a stand-up freezer which we use quite a lot.    As soon as what’s in it gets eaten, I would like to plan larger quantities of meals from The BIG Cook.

The BIG Cook is available at your favourite bookstore, even at amazon.ca.

 

Disclaimer: Thanks to the authors for sending me the featured product for review purpose. I was not monetarily compensated for this review. Please note that the review was not influenced by the Sponsor in any way.  All opinions expressed here are only my own.