Cooking

There are 40 recipes that you can get to the table in half and hour or less in this book and it covers everything from starters to dessert. I want to say that it's definitely a catch for busy working folks, but sometimes it is not the time needed to prepare and cook that is the deterrent to home-cooked foods, but rather the ingredients you need to seek out and gather. A short prep time is really pointless if you have to spend a lot of time getting the ingredients you need for a dish.

A look at the ingredients list on the recipes in this book sets this worry to rest. Most require only three to four main ingredients, with a few recipes going up to eight or nine, but chances are you would have these things already in your kitchen.

I chose a recipe with a particularly long ingredients list to test - the Mixed Seafood Curry on page 45. It requires four types of seafood, four cooking herbs, coconut milk, fish sauce, chilli sauce and vegetable oil. I had most of the herbs and condiments, so the only things I had to buy were the coconut milk and seafood.

It was a very short cooking process, taking me 10 minutes of prep time and another 10 minutes to cook. The recipe says it's 30 minutes to the table, so that was a nice bonus. The great thing about this recipe is that you can replace the seafood with other things - beef, cauliflower heads for a vegetarian version, chicken. For busy folks, just add rice and you have a meal. For a bit of green in your meals, there are five easy-to-assemble salads in the book.

Now for the dessert. Desserts always give the impression they are time-consuming and tedious, unless you are a scoop-ice cream-in-a-bowl chef. The three most complicated desserts in the book take under 30 minutes each to prepare - the strawberry baked alaska, cherry pancakes and banana stuffed crepes. The pancakes and the crepes took longer than the recipe said, about 40 minutes each, but that could be due to the time it takes to cook each crepe/pancake individually.

So if you have company and need to turn out 30 pancakes in half an hour, I suggest you look to other simpler desserts in the book. Try the grilled peaches and soured cream, which is incredibly easy to make and surprisingly tasty. Since peaches are not in abundance here, try it with apples and pears, although the latter two might take a little longer to grill.

For those with kids, there are some fast and healthy snacks that you can put together without hassle. I am loving the nachos and baked eggs with spinach. For something a little fancy at the breakfast table, try the croque monsier and eggs benedict.

Every recipe in here is worth a try, and the ample selection in each section allows you to put together a myriad of meal combinations. You can make salad, pasta and fruit skewers for a quick and light family dinner or potatoes with pesto, mussels in white wine and fruit cocktail when you are entertaining or hummus, grilled tuna and vegetable kebabs and chocolate fondue for a kid's lunch party.

The only drawback of this book is its unattractive cover; you are more likely to bypass it at the bookstore than pick it up and browse. But do pick it up, because there are more than a few gems within!