The Six O’Clock Scramble: Quick, Healthy, and Delicious Dinner Recipes for Busy Families
The Six O’Clock Scramble: Quick, Healthy, and Delicious Dinner Recipes for Busy Families
The Six O’Clock Scramble cookbook is a companion to Aviva’s wonderful email-based newsletter service that provides busy moms with easy and nutritious meals for their families.The Scramble is a weekly e-mail newsletter that features: Five flavorful and healthy, tried-and-true dinner recipes with side dish suggestions, emailed to you each week. Easy-to-prepare dinners in 30 minutes (or less), most with fewer than 10 ingredients. Delicious, easy recipes like Asian Turkey Burgers, Tortellini Tossed with Fresh Mozzarella, honey glazed salmon and red beans and rice burritos. Includes an organized grocery list so you can print and shop. Perfect for working or full-time parents, or anyone who wants to make easy, delicious home-cooked meals. From O, The Oprah magazine:Aviva Goldfarb had one of those ideas - incredibly obvious, yet nobody had thought of it - that immediately make the pieces of your brain fit together with a neat click. A wife, mother, self-published cookbook author, and organizational ace, Goldfarb realized that for most people 6 P.M. was too late to start wondering what to cook for dinner. So she started the Six O’Clock Scramble (thescramble.com), a weekly e-mail newsletter with five days’ worth of dinner recipes, plus grocery lists. The meals (grilled teriyaki chicken tenderloins one night, baked huevos rancheros another) take about a half hour to prepare and are creative, healthy, unprocessed and kid-friendly without being adult-alienating. A subscription costs $5 a month - a small price to pay for a whole new kind of happy meal. Goldfarb herself is happy, having graduated from the self-publishing business: Next fall St. Martin’s Press will release The Six O’Clock Scramble Cookbook.
Customer Review: Great format - maybe a little more oomph?
Have tried a few of the recipes now and plan to keep making more. I love the format: the weekly/seasonal grocery lists, suggested side dishes, healthy ingredients and the mix of meat and meatless dishes. Definitely a great framework for putting together a weekly repertoire (it makes me braver about thinking up menus on my own, or just augmenting what’s in this book with favorites from elsewhere).
Cons:
Based on the entrees I’ve made so far (e.g. fettucine with chickpeas, Mediterranean chicken), and what I’ve skimmed past, the recipes seem to be on the bland side. I’ve been enhancing as I go - sun-dried tomatoes here, black olives and salt there - but wish the flavors were a little more complex and powerful. Then again, that would probably make the cooking time longer. Will be interesting to see how the more “exotic” entrees turn out.
Have also noticed that there’s a fair amount of cleanup involved - i.e., this is not one-dish cooking. In some cases it seems like you could saute all the ingredients in the same pan if the order was just switched around. Certainly there are other cookbooks for one-pot cooking, but if you’re looking to streamline your nightline routine, be aware there’s work on the back end here. Could be that this is a result of the recipes originating from different kitchens: I’ve found that the Barefoot Contessa recipes, for instance, tend to be pretty efficient, and I’m guessing that’s because they were developed under commercial conditions.
Lastly, I think it would be great if the seasonal menu pages as well as the grocery lists (”Fall,” “Winter,” and so on) had page numbers for each recipe, so that one doesn’t have to flip thru the index in back for each dish.
Customer Review: Great recipes
I enjoy making meals out of this book, however I must admit, they aren’t as kid friendly as they say. Yes, the recipes call for easy to find ingredients (except for the one with mango chutney, can’t find that in Mitchell, SD!), and I don’t consider my kids to be the pickiest eaters (I know pickier!), but I couldn’t get my 5 year old to eat more than half of the recipes I tried. My husband and I loved them, but not the kids. Aside from that, the book did help me make grocery lists with ease and I loved how fast the meals came together.
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Black Poodles in Basket Christmas Figurine AKC CUTE!! 
This great figurine features the adorable AKC black poodles in their Christmas Basket. Figure stands 2 3/4″ tall and has its own tiny AKC tag on the front. Bright and colorful, this is a neat Christmas figurine!!
