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Review by Joanne Lewis Sears
A cookbook for working mothers as practical and useful as Desperation Dinners: Homecooked Meals for Frantic Families in 20 Minutes Flat doesn't come along often. Desperation Dinners shares what two bright working women learned the hard way about getting a family meal on the table at the edge of the dinner hour.
Like many these days, Beverly Mills and Alicia Ross don't have the luxury of time, but they also know that speedy meal systems are worthless if families won't eat what gets cooked.
Employing a combination of preprocessed foods and fresh ingredients, the recipes offer 21 soups, 18 stews, 33 skillet meals (things like "Lazy Lo Mein" and "Skillet Jambalaya"), and over 40 pasta recipes. An intriguing category, Food on Bread, includes tacos and Hungarian goulash on rye. Breakfast for Dinner features omelets and frittatas.
The authors scatter practical advice throughout the book and include great sections on stuff to keep on hand, how to store things for fast retrieval, and how to manage a Desperate Week with leftovers.
Desperation Dinners fills a slot in the twilight zone between Martha Stewart and McDonald's. Working householders of either sex are likely to be spotting up its pages with tomato sauce for years to come.
©1998, ProMotion, inc.
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