Tuesday, May 28, 2013

Review: Simplified Dinners: Gluten/Dairy Free

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You know how you sometimes get a cookbook that you have to have a dictionary and a thousand ingredients to make a meal? Yeah, I don't use those. Cooking isn't really my thang (lol), so I'm always on the lookout for a good, practical cookbook. When Simplified Pantry offered two of their cookbooks for us to review, I was pumped. Since P has some trouble with dairy, I was super excited to get to review their Simplified Dinners: Gluten Free/Dairy Free cookbook. I was thrilled to also receive their original Simplified Dinners ebook as well as their Paperless Home Organization ebook.

Simplified Pantry is the creation of Mystie Winckler, a mom who began her adventure of cooking from scratch when her child was diagnosed with food allergies. Since P has a lot of trouble with dairy, I downloaded the Gluten Free/ Dairy Free book first.

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If you are like me, you have an idea of what a "cookbook" is going to look like when you open that first page, right? This ain't your grandma's cookbook...or rather, maybe it IS your grandma's cookbook. lol. Instead of telling you to put 1/4 cup of x with 1/2 cup of z, Mystie simplifies it all. She shows you HOW to make different meals, like soups, pasta, crockpot or grill. Then gives you tons of choices so you can make what you like! For example, the top of the page tells how to cook something in the crock pot, then below that, she lists many different variations you can put in the crock pot and just follow the directions at the top of the page after you choose your ingredients. Simple (even though I'm muddling up this description).  Check out this sample from her regular book and you will understand what I'm saying. It's like a cookbook that teaches you how to took, instead of what to cook.

Our family is pretty picky, so this is perfect for us...and totally genius for a cookbook! The meal ideas are endless and she even has sides and desserts. We were able to make a menu for the entire week of things we all liked - wow!  We are able to leave out things we don't like (or have - haha) and make meals that we actually wanted. It was easy to eliminate dairy when it was all laid out for us like this. I did take some of the meals from the "normal" Simplified Dinners book with gluten since we aren't avoiding that. 

I have tons of cookbooks with one or two recipes in them that we like...taking up room on our shelves. Ugh. With this, there were very few pages we didn't find something we like (we aren't big soup people so didn't try any of these ideas), and since it is an ebook, I just saved it on my ipad and didn't have to print anything at all.

Each of the cookbooks are the same layout and are $12.99. The Paperless Home Organizing is only $3.99 (and the apps I downloaded to use this were free!). Also, Mystie is graciously offering 30% off any of the ebooks when you enter TOS2013 at checkout from May 20 through June 3rd.




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