A good book for beginning home cooks with lots of tips and easy to make recipes. A friendly casual vibe, very intimidating.

I had never heard of Ryan Scott before looking at this cookbook (One to Five: One Shortcut Recipe Transformed into Five Easy Dishes); I don’t watch much TV and have never seen the Rachel Ray show, but I am glad I now know of him. Rachel Ray even wrote the introduction of the book.

In this book Ryan Scott shows you how to take one main item and convert it into five different meals. The recipes often use supermarket shortcuts (microwavable rice, canned beans, etc.), but still taste wonderful. The book is full of wonderful, brightly colored pictures and I especially like the “blooper reel” at the back of the book.

The book starts with staples you should stock up on broken out by wear you would store them: fridge, freezer, pantry. The list was great, but almost too long of a list to keep as staples; my small kitchen would be bursting at the seams if I tried to keep most of the items on the in my house at all times. But some of the highlights I do now keep in my kitchen are: lots of hot sauce, ginger paste, canned beans, frozen berries, and wondra flour. The book next goes into essential tools to have – a blender and food processor come first.

And then comes the best part - the recipes. You would think my favorite chapters would be the ones involving chocolate, bacon, and pork, but this book really made the veggie recipes stand out to me. I have slowly been cooking my way through most of this cookbook (I did skip the chapters on mushrooms, canned tuna, and frozen shrimp as I do not like those) and have been really pleased with the recipes. My favorite chapters: are broccoli especially the broccoli almond pesto and the broccamole, and cauliflower for the cauliflower, bacon, and jalapeno bake with ranch crumb topping and the sriracha, sesame, and scallion cauliflower. Some other recipe highlights for me were the deviled egg salad sandwich, the year round sweet corn soup, and the garlic bread soup. And the recipe that made the book for me and I now make all the time is the carrot hot sauce…it is sooo good (I would recommend this book for that recipe alone).

I would recommend this cookbook for anyone looking for quick and relatively easy recipes that still taste absolutely delicious and will wow anyone you make them for (especially the carrot hot sauce!).

One to Five: One Shortcut Recipe Transformed into Five Easy Dishes

By Ryan Scott; published by Tim Inc. Books, Oxmoor House

I remember Ryan Scott when he was on Top Chef Chicago and his P.O.V. was very much about food being fussy and overdone. I’m glad to see that he’s embraced a more simple approach, but I feel now it’s so packaged and processed that it still doesn’t appeal to me very much. The recipes feel dated, bland and uninteresting If you like to use a lot of premade dough products, then you might enjoy this book. But, I think I’ll stick to things that use a lot more technique.

What a brilliant idea for a cookbook. Take one very basic thing – like your basic boiled egg – and learn how to do it well – and then learn how to use that basic thing as the foundation for five other recipes. The book is thoroughly illustrated, and the recipes are extremely useful. Highly recommended.

The usual disclaimer: I received this book via Netgalley for review.

I hesitated for a long time to provide a review. Mostly it's because I did not try any of his recipes. 1st, I was shocked at how few recipes there were in this book until I got the point that it was to make 5 key dishes that you can further make variations. Likely, many of us do this today. For instance, I have a go-to marinade that works for all meats really well and sometimes I slice the meat up to add to salad, sandwiches or plain. Super simple, right?

The value I gain from a cookbook is to increase my recipe collection and the 5 from Ryan Scott didn't necessarily fit my lifestyle. The only one I could see myself using was his pork recipe, of which I would need to invest some hours to letting it cook and I'm kind of in need of faster recipes, that I could turn into tacos and whatnot. Unfortunately, I can't justify the ROI of what I'd pay for the book or the shelf space for this one recipe.

You gotta love a cookbook that features"Foolproof Hard-Boiled Eggs" as its first recipe. When I saw the title I would have bet money that he boiled his eggs like I do. Nope. Going to have to give Ryan's eggs a try.

The philosophy behind this cookbook is to master one basic recipe, like hard-boiled eggs, and spin it into five quick, affordable, and crowd-pleasing dishes. I like it!

I enjoy reading cookbooks and looking at the pictures, unfortunately I didn't get to make any of the recipes before reviewing this book - blame it on a month of flu/cold. I liked the introduction and pictures of Ryan and his mother.