One of my personal pet peeves with cookbooks is when a recipe takes more than a page. Unless it’s for a really elaborate dish, there’s just no need to have to flip through multiple pages to make a soup or casserole. I grew up cooking from my mother’s and grandmother’s Meta Givens and Betty Crocker cookbooks where there were often 4 or even 8 recipes to a page and a recipe was a paragraph. I love a photo, but it can be a small color photo on the side. I really don’t need to flip through multiple pages for each recipe. I know I’m probably in the minority and nowadays people want a happy little story and then detailed ingredients and then detailed instructions for every step, and this is a great cookbook if that’s what you want.

The recipes are typical SAD (standard American diet) types of recipes. Coffee cakes for breakfast. Cheesy dips. Pasta dishes. Roast chicken. Chicken and steak fajitas. Chocolate chunk cookies. There wasn’t anything I felt the need to try, but it would be a good cookbook for a new cook. There are photos for more than half of the recipes. There is no nutritional information. The recipes are not well suited for families with members who are on special diets like vegan or paleo or who have allergies like gluten or dairy. They use a fair amount of premade ingredients but also a fair amount of real foods.

There are lots of photos of the authors and their kids, who seem to be popular on YouTube. If you are a fan of this couple then this will probably be a wonderful cookbook. If not, it’s still a nice cookbook if this style suits you.

I read a digital ARC of this book via netgalley.