I recently started working again after not working for over a decade of dedicating my life solely to taking care of my 3 kids. The last time I was working full time I was pregnant with my twin boys who just turned 11 a few weeks ago. I am finding it difficult to balance mom and wife life with work life, even though I am working from home. We are also renovating our house, which throws an extra challenge into me fitting in all that needs to be fit in to a 24 hour day. The 30-Minute Cooking from Frozen Cookbook makes meal planning even easier than regular meal planning cookbooks by including many recipes that are cooked from frozen foods which takes an extra step or two out of cooking and condensing time for people like me who really don't have any to spare. This will be a go to cookbook for the modern day busy person.

I was a bit disappointed in this cookbook. I frequently find myself looking up recipes for cooking frozen ingredients that I didn't remember to defrost (the Instant Pot can be especially handy for this but you need to adjust cooking times), so this seemed right up my alley. It mostly has recipes for frozen processed foods though, which I don't generally cook with, such as frozen waffle fries, precooked shredded chicken breasts, puff pastry, tater tots, battered fish fillets, and so on.

In other cases, the frozen ingredients are things we all know how to cook with already like frozen vegetables or ice cream (not cooked with but part of a recipe where the rest of the ingredients are standard), or ones that you just microwave to heat and then cook with. For example, there's a breakfast sandwich where you toast an english muffin, bake some scrambled eggs in the oven, and microwave a frozen (cooked) sausage patty, and then assemble it all with a slice of processed cheese. I don't know that that's really cooking from frozen. It's microwaving one frozen ingredient. Shrug.

In cases where real ingredients were called for like ground beef, these are generally supposed to be fresh or already thawed. The meatball wedding soup calls for ground chicken that you form into meatballs (none of it frozen) and then using frozen spinach. You'd still better have defrosted that ground chicken or bought it fresh. In the case of seafood I thought that could be helpful because many types of seafood can be easily cooked from frozen. For the most part, she has you either use frozen processed fish products or thaw it first, with the exception of salmon that she sometimes gives frozen recipes for. With shrimp, she has you thaw it under running water for five minutes, which is not best for shrimp and is also wasteful of water. That's not nearly as wasteful as the salmon recipe that calls for thawing the salmon fillets under cold running water for 15 minutes though. I'm horrified at the amount of water that wastes, not to mention the quality of the salmon when you're done.

I did appreciate the inclusion of nutritional information, though I suspect it may sometimes be wrong. One recipe that consisted mostly of broccoli and almonds said it contained 0 grams of fiber, which seems almost certainly wrong. Recipes that called for tater tots and other potato ingredients also seemed suspiciously low in carbohydrates. Hopefully these were anomalies and will be cleared up in editing.

Speaking of editing, the intro texts for each section are in all caps in my ARC, which read like paragraphs and sometimes entire pages of being screamed at in teal letters. I hope this will be changed in the final copy.

There are photos for some of the recipes, but only maybe 1/4 of them. These photos are well done and attractive. There is a vegetarian section. It is not very well suited for people on specialty diets or with allergies to foods like gluten and dairy.

All in all, this will be a good cookbook for those who like convenience food and eat the Standard American Diet, especially those without a lot of cooking experience.

I read a temporary digital ARC of this book for review.

Finally! A cookbook that takes frozen foods and produces some great looking recipes. Frozen foods are much...much cheaper and have no less nutritional value. This book speaks from the heart as it introduces ways to produce meals in less than thirty minutes.

What did I like? I bookmarked a few recipes to try and I value this cookbook because let’s face it.... some recipes are hard to make during the winter months when fresh is hardly available. It’s easier to utilize frozen and this cookbook offers you some helpful tips to navigate the frozen cooking world.

Would I buy or recommend? This was a fun cookbook... not as many pictures as I’d like but still it has plausibility. I’d buy it and I’m definitely going to put together a few of these recipes. Bottom line is frozen food is not a bad thing... buy it... use it... eat it. Five stars for an out of the box cookbook idea!

I received a copy to read and voluntarily left a review.

The 30 Minute Cooking From Frozen Cookbook by Carole Jones was a little disappointing. I was thinking it would be about cooking full meals, all ingredients frozen. Most of the recipes only utilized one or two frozen ingredients so I felt that it didn’t make it any easier or quicker to make these recipes. I also like to see more pictures in my cookbooks. There were very few in this one. I did appreciate that every recipe had the nutritional value listed. I also liked that there were recipes for most every meal time and many options for meats, fish, poultry, and vegetables. I will definitely be trying the Jerk Chicken, caramelized onion and pear grilled cheese, mixed berry streusel French toast, and blackened lime mahi mahi. I’m not sure I will reach for this one very often but do appreciate the concept of it. May be great if you are very busy and keep a lot of frozen foods in your freezer.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the opportunity to read this cookbook.

It's a great book for who doesn't have much time to cook. Not all the ingredients are frozen, of course, just the fruits, veggies and meat. Some of the recipes ask for frozen fulled cooked chicken, for example, so you need to prepare some of these things before to save you time. Not all the recipes have photos though but the recipes are easy to read and easy to follow and they're all 30min recipes. I received a free digital copy of this book from NetGalley in exchange for my honest review

As a novice cook trying to learn on a budget during pandemic food supply issues, I found this book immensely useful. The recipes are good, but the best part is all of the tips on how to adjust cooking methods and times when using frozen vegetables. I’ll now be freezing what is still readily available for use later with confidence that it will be used well. The only downside is I wish there were more photos.

Life has taken quite a turn and people are staying home more than usual. For some, that presents an opportunity to dust off their cooking skills. For others, it’s been a time of reckoning with the need to acquire some cooking skills. This book will work for either person. The author has presented a variety of recipes and tips for preparing meals using frozen foods.

People who cook a lot may feel that using only fresh ingredients is best. However, there is a lot to be said for using frozen ingredients. Using frozen ingredients can save the preparer time and money while still providing a nutritious meal as many foods are frozen at their nutritional peak. In addition, for a person who needs to improve their cooking skills, this is a great way to prepare delicious recipes without the stress of needing a lot of food preparation skills. Furthermore, the variety of recipes provide opportunities to find meal ideas that will make this book great for personal use or as a gift.

I voluntarily reviewed an Advanced Reader Copy of this book provided by the publisher and Net Galley. However, the thoughts expressed are my own.

I love the use of almond flower and coconut cream, this is great for non dairy eaters. They recipes are easy to follow and the photos look like what you make.

I've never been a cook from frozen kind of person but this cookbook had some really interesting recipes and I'm looking forward to trying them out. Anything that saves me time when it comes to making meals is always a plus!
Thank you to netgalley and the publishers for providing me with an arc for an honest review.

This is such a great cookbook. It not only has great recipes and beautiful pictures of the recipes, but it also has tips on how to keep the food from getting soggy. I love that the recipes feature ingredients that don't have to be thawed out ahead of time. This would be so helpful if you have a day where you forget to take food out of the freezer earlier in the day.

Are you looking for a cookbook that could save you time and money? Are you looking for away to stock so you are prepared for uncertain times? The 30-Minute Cooking from Frozen Cookbook by Carole Jones will help with all of the above.

Jones cookbook tells how you can prepare tasty meals using frozen ingredients stored in your home freezer. She gives tips on how to make the most of frozen ingredients such as using high heat to help reduce the amount of water often found in frozen vegetables.

Her cookbook is chockfull of tasty recipes too. Some of the recipes you will find include:

Monkey Bread Muffins'
Egg, Sausage, and Cheese English Muffin Sandwiches
Vegetable Fried Rice
Swiss Mushroom. Steak Hoagies
Vegetarian Coconut Curry with Rice
Grilled Strawberry Cheesecake Sandwiches
Orange Creamsicle Truffles

Recommend.

Review written after downloading a galley from NetGalley.

The idea of this book was great and got me excited. The book itself was a little disappointing, I missed pictures overall. Next to that most recipes are part frozen, so it didn't do its name justice. Could have been so much more.

Thanks to NetGalley and Adams Media for this copy of The 30-Minute Cooking from Frozen Cookbook
100 Delicious Recipes That Will Save You Time and Money—No Pre-Thawing Required! by Carole Jones in exchange for an honest review. It publishes October 6, 2020
This is an inspiring cookbook for any busy home chef! I will definitely be trying these out soon!
This would make a great gift!

What a genius idea.
I’ll admit, I hadn’t really thought about how useful frozen foods could be in cooking. I buy frozen entrees sometimes like lasagna or pizza. But I hadn’t really thought of using frozen items as ingredients in recipes. The last time I tried, I nearly messed up a recipe with frozen hash browns. Thanks to this cookbook, I can already tell that I shouldn’t have thawed them first!

I think one of the recipes I’ll try right away is the steak fajita bowls. You can just use those fully cooked steak strips, cook them up and making a delicious looking steak bowl with other fresh ingredients.

The meatball and mozzarella stick sub sounds like a fun idea to try.

The individual cheesy potato casseroles also sound right up my alley.

I’ve bookmarked a number of recipes to try.

As always with a cookbook, I feel like this could use more pictures of the recipes.

First let me say I am not a great cook and it is partly because I am not creative and don't feel as though I know enough to experiment, so I love a cookbook that uses little tricks, in this case using frozen ingredients to make the cooking time shorter and the experience smoother!

I especially loved that the recipes used the frozen ingredients in their frozen state and in some cases you were instructed NOT to thaw as it would help in the cooking process. I picked out a few recipes in each section that I would be interested in trying and am excited to incorporate them into our meal rotation in the next few weeks.

I was really excited about this book but ended up being pretty disappointed. First of all, there are barely any pictures. In an era where most good cookbooks have pictures for most, if not all, recipes, this one didn't cut it on the pictures. There were maybe pictures for 10-20% of recipes. Because of this, the recipes didn't really hold my interest. There were nutritional facts for each recipe, which is another thing I consider a must, but the recipes themselves didn't fit with the title very well to me. Yes, most seemed to have some kind of frozen food, but it seemed to only be a ingredient or a few. Certainly the meal wasn't centered on frozen items as I was expecting. My family already uses frozen meat, veggies, or fruit in our meals and usually much more than these recipes have so the recipes themselves did not really seem special. Combined with a lack of pictures, there was not a single recipe that I felt I have to try, as I do with many cookbooks.

**I received and voluntarily read an e-ARC from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. All thoughts and opinions are my own.**

While I love cooking an entire meal from scratch, sometimes you just don't have the time, and that's where cookbooks like this one come in handy!

There's a huge variety of recipes, pretty much something for everyone, even if you might need to modify a little for certain dietary needs/restrictions. While most of the recipes weren't to my taste, I did find three or four recipes that I'm looking forward to trying. It's not a book that speak to me, but I can certainly see the appeal for most people.

Overall, this would be a great cookbook for busy people who don't have time to spend prepping and cooking a whole meal.