Book Review! "Cooking for Less: Chicken"

As I was looking through my cookbook cupboard today I decided to start writing reviews on my cookbooks, partly to see how the books fit into a budget, but also because I don't read my cookbooks enough.

"Cooking for Le$$: Chicken", is from a series of cookbooks published by the people that bring you Favorite BrandName Recipes. This book was made to teach people how to make their favorite Chicken dishes on a budget. The first section of the book goes through the basics of learning to budget. Their main points include planning your meals before going grocery shopping, being aware of sale scams, flavor on a budget and not wasting. A lot of the points mentioned are things that I believe in myself and things that I have blogged about aswell. I did disagree with one point though. The book states that eating fruits and vegetables is very inexpensive. In Canada, I have noticed that fruits and vegetables can be the priciest things at the supermarket, and since these foods are seasonal their prices are never predictable.

The recipes in the book looked very good. Most recipes were ones that people order from restaurants but may not know how to make at home. I enjoyed that the meals were well balanced, although almost all of the meals had some form of complex carbohydrate in them like rice, or pastas. I personally love carbs but know that I can't eat complex carbs at every meal without my body feeling it. I am assuming that the book used carbs in most of their meals because foods like pasta and rice and inexpensive foods to cook.

The book does seem to assume that people have many different types of food in their cupboards. Some of these foods include okra, and udon noodles. In Canadian grocery stores these types of foods are not consistently found, but these are foods that are hard to replace with other foods. Because of this there are many meals in the book that will need to be prepared or thought about ahead of time, which doesn't always work for a chef on the go.

As a whole I thought the book was a good beginners reference book for cooking and budgeting. Most of the meals are ones everyone has heard of which does take the element of creativity out, but for some that is what is necessary when starting budgeting. I would have liked to see a rough estimate of the price of each meal that was in the book. For people new to budgeting it is important to learn how much meals cost.

I also would have liked to have seen recipes that are more recipes that are more adaptable. For example, eventhough this is a chicken recipe book, I would've liked to have seen recipes that would've tasted good with beef, turkey or pork as well as chicken can be one of the more expensive meats out there.

As a person who has been budgeting my grocery bill for over a year now I didn't take much from this book. I do think beginning budgeters would learn a lot from it though, especially with the help from some outside resources. For example, knowledge on buying locally and supporting local buisnesses. I preach this gospel a lot because of the positive effect on community as well as the product you are recieving.