Cheap. Fast. Good! - Softcover

Who doesn’t want to eat cheaper? And who doesn’t want to eat better? And who wouldn’t like to sit down to a dinner of Salmon Pasta with Tomatoes and Dill, or Pan-Fried Pork Chops with Pepper Medley, or Enchanting Enchiladas, or Moroccan Meatballs over Couscous—and know that any one of these meals (for four) costs less than $2 a serving?

In their two previous cookbooks, Desperation Dinners! and Desperation Entertaining!—together with over 330,000 copies in print— Beverly Mills and Alicia Ross showed us how to save time in the kitchen without ever sacrificing flavor. Now the Desperate duo turns to the universally appealing idea of saving money, too. Cheap. Fast. Good! is not a penny-pinching cookbook—it’s a “get smart” cookbook. It’s about planning smart, shopping smart, cooking smart, and, not coincidentally, about eating smart. The work of two brilliant problem solvers, it presents 275 delicious recipes that are thrifty, quick to prepare, and intrinsically family-friendly and healthy, too: Barbecued Chicken and Black Bean Burritos, Sweet Onion Chowder, Bayou Stew, Ham and Asparagus Crostini, Basic Beef Brisket, Perfect Spinach Pesto Pizza, Gayle’s Country-Style Steak, Souped-Up Chicken Stroganoff. Recipes are filled with techniques for pushing flavor, substituting ingredients, and using what’s in the refrigerator or pantry already, and every chapter includes strategies for running a kitchen more economically—The When, Where, and How of Shopping, The Miracle of Menu Planning, Making Your Own Convenience Items, Cutting Up a Roasted Chicken, and more.

Beverly Mills and Alicia Ross have been writing together as a team for almost ten years. Their weekly newspaper column, "Desperation Dinners", is syndicated by United Media and appears in over 90 newspapers nationwide. Ms. Mills lives with her husband and two children outside of Minneapolis, Minnesota, and Ms. Ross lives with her husband and two children in Raleigh, North Carolina. Their Web site is www.desperationdinners.com.