Frozen Assets: How to Cook for a Day and Eat for a Month

Customer Reviews

A real asset to your kitchen

Cooking for the freezer is one of the more valuable techniques I use to save time in the kitchen. This popular method has many fans, so why is it so hard to find a good freezer cookbook?

This void is now filled by the recent publication of Frozen Assets, cleverly subtitled, How to Cook for a Day and Eat for a Month. The author, Debi Taylor-Hough, originally promoted her Once A Month Cooking ideas on the Internet and found such a wide and eager audience, she knew the technique would make a wonderful book. And it does! Although the book focuses on mass cooking in large quantities for the freezer, the techniques, tips and recipes are applicable to anyone wanting to cook in advance.

A cookbook is typically a collection of recipes. Frozen Assets is so much more than that. It is a very comprehensive guide to bulk freezer cooking, covering everything you need to know in great detail, from planning and grocery shopping to cooking, freezing and serving. Throughout the book, Debi shares great tips that you usually learn only through experience.

The most valuable chapters in the book are the complete meal plans. Each plan includes a menu list, a shopping list, step-by-step instructions and the recipes. There is a 30 day plan, a two week plan (a good way to get your feet wet) and a 10 day holiday plan. This latter plan takes you through the busiest time of the year with ease, a wonderful idea.

In addition to the menu plans you will find other freezer recipes organized into main dish, breakfast, lunch, and dessert categories. Other bonuses include recipes for mixes, a chapter containing 100 money-saving tips, an appendix on cooking for one, and lots more.

If you're a wanna-be Once-A-Month cook, a seasoned pro, or just looking for some new dishes with which to stock your freezer, you'll find Frozen Assets to be a real asset in your kitchen.

Excellent time-saving tool

I found this book to be very informative - a shopping list is provided and I shopped on a Monday and then began cooking for 30 days on Tuesday. It took me from 7:00 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. to complete 26 dinners. I left out the soup. The recipes are easy, kid-friendly (my picky eater loved the mexi-chicken especially) and freeze well. As a home-school mom, I find it difficult to get dinner on the table with teaching, field trips, etc. It is great to know there are a month's worth of dinners in the freezer and the recipes are good, easy to follow, and ones my kids and husband enjoy.

Don't waste your money!

With all the rave reviews this book has gotten, I couldn't wait to check it out myself. All I can say is, I'm glad I got it out of the library rather than spending my hard-earned cash on it. I guess it works for some people, but my objections to it are: 1) the advice on how to cook in bulk all seems very obvious to me, 2) the recipes are -- being diplomatic -- very unappealing and 3) the book could have used more editing -- many recipes and much of the advice is repeated several times throughout the book. With the redundancies eliminated, the book would have been about 1/3 as long.

I don't need a book to tell me that I should pick several recipes, triple them, write down all the ingredients, check my cupboards for any ingredients I already have, and then buy the rest. I don't need a book to tell me to use large pots when cooking large quantities, or to use freezer containers when freezing things. I certainly don't need a book to tell me (several times) not to shop hungry, and to leave the kids home on shopping day.

Then, there's the recipes. I can't imagine cooking any of these recipes even in small quantities, much less in mega-batches. It's hard to pick which recipe is the worst, but my candidate is "Chili Day Meatballs" -- which actually calls for cooking meatballs in a combination of, I kid you not, chili sauce and grape jelly! And to anyone who might try to tell me I should try it before saying it's awful -- I don't have to jump off a tall building to know I wouldn't like it, and I don't have to combine meatballs, chili sauce and grape jelly to know this would be a waste of good ingredients (I have no objection to grape jelly in its place, which as far as I'm concerned is in a PBJ sandwich, not on my meatballs, thank you very much!).

And even if you like the recipes and find the advice useful, do you really need them to be repeated 3 or more times?

I urge anyone who thinks they might like this book to borrow it from the library first and see for yourself -- you may be very glad that you did!