Happy Cooking: Make Every Meal Count ... Without Stressing Out: A Cookbook

I have all of her other books which are beautifully photographed. This is the first one from a new imprint and the quality is disappointing. The quality of the pages, the quality of the photographs, the busy page layouts...they just do not compare to her past books. I waited a long time for it to arrive and am disappointed with the overall quality and layout as compared to all her prior books.

This book was long I won't lie but it really was packed full of great recipes. Again I love how Giada puts a few history lessons here & there.

Great easy to do recipes! Nice photos too.

Love all her recipes. She has so many good ones, can't wait to try some. some seem easy to do.

I love receiving my books immediately. This one has very good tips.

Who doesn’t want more a little more happiness in their lives?

I had actually never heard of Giada de Laurentis before I got this book, I don’t watch the food network, and I don’t own any of her previous books.

Appearance-wise the book is bright and colourful, containing lots of pictures of the food, which I like, interpersed with smiling pictures of Giada.

Recipes cover a range of different foods:

Breakfast
Snacks and Small Plates
Salads and Seasons
Soups and Stews
Pastas and Risottos
Eating Clean
Weeknight Warriors
Vegetables and Sides
Weekends and Holidays
Treats and Sweets
Not all the recipes are super healthy, I think there is a little bit of everything in there covering lots of bases including very veggie friendly dishes along with meat and fish. I instantly bookmarked the “Go-Green Carbonara with Peas”, “Zucchini Spaghetti with Sun Gold Tomato Sauce”, “Lentil Salade Nicoise” and the “Superfood Fudge Torte” as recipes I wanted to try.

The “Superfood Fudge Torte” I ended up making for my friend as a birthday cake. The “Superfood” of the title referring to all of the very now ingredients contained within: spinach; blueberries; agave syrup; brown rice flour; flax meal; oats; and a bit of spiced greek yogurt on top. Yum! The torte is a very fudgey consistency, slightly fruity in flavour, but is perfectly complemented by the yogurt.

I have also made the overnight oats featured in the breakfast section a couple of times, one time I threw all the ingredients in a pot just before we headed to the mountains to go skiing. They made a perfect breakfast to fuel a day of skiing that was easily transportable. I just subbed out the fresh fruit for adding some raisins to the overnight mix, making it even easier to throw together from out of the cupboards.

Would I recommend it to others? Yep, I think I would.

I received this book from Blogging for Books for this review.

Giada De Laurentiis’s Happy Cooking: Make Every Meal Count … Without Stressing Out attempts to provide us with delicious foods that we don’t have to spend hours making. Simple, delicious, easy. I wouldn’t say these are all healthy per se, but there are a lot of fresh, delicious foods in here. One of my favorites of the not-so-healthy recipes was a sausage-stuffed-bacon-wrapped date recipe with a lemon basil crema. SOOOO good.

There are plenty of light, ‘clean’ recipes in here. One of my favorites is a shaved vegetable salad with a goat cheese vinaigrette. I was stunned that the leftovers were still quite good the next night. Another favorite was a chicken salad recipe–the use of sliced snap sugar peas made it unusual and interesting (and delicious!). I also like that you use shredded chicken from an entire rotisserie chicken, meaning a nice combination of dark and white meat.

None of these recipes felt fussy or overly complicated. Even making our own lemon curd from the book to use in the Limoncello Parfaits was fantastic. (Although I’ll note that the recipe they advise you to use makes 3/4c curd, and the parfait recipe used 1 1/4, so be sure to make a double batch!) I’ve never had lemon curd before that didn’t strain out the zest, but if you’re using a Microplane zester the bits of zest are so small that it isn’t icky texture-wise.

The cookbook includes recipes for breakfast, snacks and small plates, salads and seasons, soups and stews, pastas and risottos, ‘eating clean,’ weeknight warriors, vegetables and sides, weekends and holidays, and treats and sweets. I wasn’t overly thrilled to see things like “detox soup”, since I pretty much believe that the entire ‘detoxing’ industry is snake oil. However, her detox soup recipe looks quite delicious, so I won’t knock it, at least as good food.

Every recipe we tried from this cookbook came out beautifully. The most effort we had to put into anything was the lemon curd, and even that was pretty easy. I wish we still had some of those dates left–time to make more!

NOTE: This book was provided free for review by Blogging for Books.