Donna’s latest book is all about new ways to make cooking easier. It features new flavour combinations and new shortcuts, designed to simplify life in the kitchen. It captures how most of us, including Donna, like to cook – with quick solutions for busy weeknights, and special dishes for weekends when you have more time up your sleeve. Each chapter contains clever and versatile ideas to put a spin on some of your favourites. So once you’ve mastered a dish, you can refer to a new section called ‘re-style’, showing you how to transform it into a chic starter for a dinner party, say, or a handy addition to a picnic.
It’s hard for me to review a cookbook – I feel I can’t give an honest opinion until I’ve had a go at making all the recipes. But then it’ll be four years before I can write a review, so I’m going to write it now, after only completing a few recipes.
Donna’s latest cookbook is designed to make cooking easy, for people like myself who don’t want to waste a lot of time cooking. I don’t want to slave away in the kitchen, since I live with roommates and I’m the only one who eats what I cook anyway. Just quietly, I’m a serial cereal-for-dinner offender.
I definitely think this cookbook is targeted at families or people who are cooking for more than just themselves. The recipes are detailed, plentiful, and take a bit of time to do. Even the chapter for ‘weekends’ seems a little over-catered for. The instructions are easy to follow; however, sometimes they aren’t detailed enough.
The first recipe I made was the Easy Banana Bread, and Donna’s instructions on mashing the bananas was a little vague. I assume you’re supposed to mash them as much as possible? But I mashed for what felt like hours and there were still lumps? Also, I personally feel that four bananas is too much for a banana bread recipe. It was too flavour heavy, not to mention the random bits of lumpy banana throughout. But at least I know now for when I decide to make it again.
‘The New Easy’ is beautifully laid out with stunning pictures and clear photographs of the meals (let’s just clarify that my banana bread DID NOT look like the picture, but when does a recipe ever look as good as in the book?).
My Score: 8/10
Buy HERE