Author: Shauna Evans
Publisher: Front Table Books
ISBN: 978-1-4621-1428-3

“This book is designed to help families eat less fast food by making food fast. With easy-to-prepare recipes, family meals do not need to be a thing of the past. On these pages, you will be equipped with yummy dishes that help save you money and time and enhance your family’s nutritional health,” Shauna Evans writes in her book, 30 Minute Meals for Families.

At one hundred and sixty pages, this square paperback targets those looking for quick, delicious recipes that can be made in less than a half hour. After an introduction, the book is divided into nine chapters. Full-page colored photographs cover about one third of the completed concoctions. The ending includes cooking and metric measurement equivalents, index, advertisements for two other books by the author, and her biography.

Concentrating on preparing fast meals to be enjoyed by the family, the author promotes having leftovers, buying cooked rotisserie chicken, doubling recipes, freezing meals, and keeping track of food inventory.

Each recipe covers one to two pages with its name along with serving size at the top of the page, followed by a paragraph explaining the dish’s specialty. Ingredients are usually listed on the top half of the page while numbered directions are on the bottom.

With color-coded themes, almost ninety meals are divided into chapters on breakfasts, sandwiches, salads, soups, casseroles, pastas, chicken, beef, and fish. Some of the unique dishes are sausage and egg mini frittatas, bananas foster French toast, caprese sandwiches, chicken salad croissants, prosciutto salad kebabs, walking taco salad, Bahama chicken soup, cheeseburger soup, shepherd’s pie, chicken enchiladas, bow-tie carbonara, pomodoro sauce and spaghetti, popcorn chicken, Hawaiian haystacks, garden burger sliders, beef stroganoff, green onion and lemon-crusted halibut, and fish sticks with tartar sauce.

The writer suggests one perfect way to get vegetables into children’s diets is the vegetable cream cheese and bagel recipe. Using cream cheese, grated carrot, green onion, red pepper, and bagels, there are only two steps with no cooking. Another choice might be the more complicated lemon and dill poached salmon that is served with a cucumber dill tartar sauce and has a side dish of sautéed spinach and garlic.

Although there are not photographs of every completed meal or desserts, this book is a good source for healthy, reliable meals that can be prepared in no time.

Thanks to Cedar Fort for furnishing this complimentary book in exchange for a review of the reader’s honest opinion.

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