Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I love the idea of "once a month cooking" and ordered this book with high hopes. I have to say that it is something of a dissappointment. There IS some useful info in the book [how to prepare for cooking day & freezing tips, etc], but it could all be contained in a 10 page booklet, easily. [Not worth [price]by any stretch of the imagination]. The book begins with a short intro explaining the theory behind OAMC that is pretty helpful and then moves into the "menu cycles", which are highly repetitive [to the extreme]. [The book includes 3 two week cycles and 2 one month cycles]. You get the same "preparation" pages before each cycle, and many of the recipes are repeated two and three times. The recipes themselves are a problem - most of them are loaded with fat and rely heavily on prepackaged "convenience foods" to cook [ie: velveeta cheese, canned soup, refrigerated biscuit dough, roll dough, pizza dough, jarred salsa, etc] . There is one two week "low fat" cycle included, but even that relies heavily on the convenience foods and most of them don't look very healthy to me. [many of them just substitute "low fat" or "fat free" convenience foods for the regular stuff]. For anyone who would like to have a more healthful diet or who would prefer to cook "real" food from scratch, the recipes are useless. I am glad I bought this book just in that I now understand the theory and can use it to adapt my own recipes to a 2 week or 30 day cycle, but I really can't recommend that anyone buy this book - check it out of your library and take what is useful to you. It really isn't worth the price. [Or, search on the internet - you could probably find more useful information on OAMC that way for free without even leaving your home].