Frozen Assets

Deborah Taylor-Hough, mother of four, is as organized as a soldier. She shops one morning in less than an hour, chops and prepares ingredients the next night after dinner, and then spends one long day cooking. Making double and triple batches of 10 recipes, she ends up putting 30 meals for two adults and two children into the freezer, ready to heat and eat. Taylor-Hough's plan uses simple, familiar recipes. Her family eats meat loaf, baked ziti, and chicken and broccoli casserole made with canned soup. Each dish is repeated several times a month. To keep her grocery bill under $200 a month, she uses store brands and buys ground meat in bulk, and only when it's on special. As much a manual for a way of life as a cookbook, Frozen Assets tells how to create your own meal plans, cope with a small, "in refrigerator" freezer, and how to use this bulk-cooking method even if you are single. If you are into efficiency and want a guide to reorganizing your culinary life, this book is a must-have. It even offers advice on how to recover from a whole day of cooking. Taylor-Hough's recommendation: go out to dinner that night! --Dana Jacobi

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All Customer Reviews
Average Customer Review:
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:

A bit plain, repetitive and lacking in efficiency., 2008-04-27
Some people may like having a the same meat mix for their sauce, meatballs, meatloaf, etc; however I find it to be a bit plain. The same dishes are repeated over and over in different meal plans and many meals are cooked to prepare it, and then cooked for another hour the day it is served. I prefer Don't Panic-Dinner's in the Freezer for it's variety, easy to prepare meals and efficiency.


0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:

Surprisingly good, 2007-12-17
I was dubious when I first looked at Deborah Taylor-Hough's "Frozen Assets: How to Ccook for a Day and Eat for a Month." I have a great love of good food (and cooking), and the idea of eating frozen dinners hardly appealed to me. Instead, what I discovered was a new philosophy of shopping, cooking, and eating that slimmed our grocery bills, turned out to be surprisingly adaptable, and still managed to satisfy our taste buds!

Frozen Assets isn't so much a cookbook as a method and a philosophy. It's aimed at people with slim budgets and/or a lack of time on their hands. Although it isn't the only use for this cookbook, the basic theory is called "once a month cooking" (or OAMC). The idea is that you plan your meals for a month, then spend one full day cooking a bunch of freezable main dishes. Then, for the rest of the month, you have only to thaw things, make a few side dishes, and eat.

This isn't nearly as difficult or outlandish as it sounds. Deborah achieves this largely by creating several very adaptable meal components - such as a ground meat mix and a spaghetti sauce - that can be combined and re-combined in a number of ways to make a delicious variety of dishes. She also has a wide range of hints to help you fit this bounty into your little refrigerator freezer (although having a full-size freezer wouldn't hurt).

I admit, I didn't expect to love the food in this cookbook. It's simple stuff, and often uses simple inexpensive ingredients - which in some people's hands can lead to some truly awful food. But in this author's hands it leads to delicious meals! The baked ziti is one of our favorites. It makes a full 13×9-inch pan full of ziti with sauce and a small amount of meat and cheese - plus enough for two frozen batches of the same size. The lentils ranchero primarily consists of lentil (with a small amount of ground meat, lots of ketchup, and some onion soup mix) - but somehow it comes out tasting like it's all yummy hamburger! (It's black magic, I'm telling you.)

One of our complaints about this cookbook won't apply to everyone and is easy to fix - many of these recipes are most definitely not diet food (the author has young, growing children, after all!). However, this is offset by the fact that these recipes are incredibly easy to adapt. Want to reduce the calories of the ziti? Substitute broccoli for some of the pasta and use less cheese. Want to reduce the fattiness of the wonderful breakfast casserole? Add an extra apple, use Egg Beaters instead of eggs, and take out half of the sausage. These are remarkably flexible recipes, and their simplicity lends itself very well to adaptation of almost any kind.

Because of the format (meal plans including recipes), a number of recipes get repeated in several places. I would have preferred to have that space taken up by more recipes. There are a couple of minor snafus here and there - a recipe or two that list an ingredient in the ingredient list and then forget to mention it in the preparation instructions, things like that. But again, since the recipes are so simple it's usually pretty easy to figure out what to do.

The cookbook isn't perfect, and I do wish there had been more recipes provided, but it's still surprisingly helpful and adaptable. The lists of grocery tips are bound to lower your food bill at least a little, and if you're a busy mom or dad with lots of little mouths to feed, you'll love not having to cook every night - yet being able to provide a nutritious home-cooked meal.


3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

Love it!, 2007-01-10
I don't always follow the once a month cooking way, but the recipes are great and easy. Most items are nice and cheap, well tolerated by little picky eaters! I also ordered the Lite version too, and enjoy half of the recipes in it (blah..tofu recipes??yuck). Great tips and easy to mix around if your family doesn't like a recipe or two. Occasionally I find myself getting items on the shopping list but can't figure out what they went to- guess its the mental craziness of cooking with preschoolers around.


4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

informative, 2007-01-09
I rather enjoyed this book; I checked it out at the library and intend to buy it. There is a lot of info in this book that helped me out as I've never bulk cooked before. She includes
a menu,
the shopping list,
what to do the night before,
and the prep on cooking day

She also includes a section on
what freezes well,
what does NOT freeze well and why,
what changes texture/flavor after freezing,
and encourages you to use your own recipies and get creative.

The author says upfront that these are basic recipies that her family enjoys, but acknowledges that its up to you to select what you will and begin your OWN freezer cooking.

I'd also recommend this book because the author intended it to be an instruction manual to bulk cooking, but not a 'all-inclusive-perfect' book for everyone and anyone. In the back she includes other books that have helped her.


3 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

Repetitive, Redundant, Recycled, 2006-12-01
The same handful of recipes, over and over and over and over...no advice or guidelines as to how to freeze dishes or what changes to expect beyond "try it and see what happens".

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