Published: 2010
Author: Jamie Oliver
A badly produced book which is more trouble than the recipes are worth
As regular readers will know, I enjoy a bit of cookery and baking. One of my bookshelves is absolutely full of recipe books and my collection is growing. That doesn’t mean though that I actually use them all. Once I find recipes that I like I tend to stick with them and adapt them to suit my mood (and ingredients). One book that has been on my shelf for a while is Jamie’s 30-Minute Meals
One of the big selling points of this book (and the TV series upon which it is based) is that Jamie was that this isn’t a typical recipe book which gives you the details of one dish – each recipe here is for an entire meal. And that meal can be prepared, cooked and served up within 30 minutes. Ideal for me as my timekeeping skills are abysmal so 275 pages of 50 easy to knock-up meals seemed like the dream recipe book for me.
I flicked through the contents and this is where I encountered my first issue with this book. This is going to sound a bit strange, but I hated the font that the meals were listed in. I found myself squinting to read down the list, but with a little work I got through it. The first dish I plumped for was the tasty sounding Killer Jerk Chicken.
And here I hit my second issue – the font size is ridiculously small. I’m not a typesetting expert and normally font size isn’t even on my radar but when I’m cooking I like to prop my recipe book up on a stand and glance over to it every couple of minutes to make sure I’m doing the right thing. Something that is absolutely impossible with this book. I had to stop and peer at the text every couple of minutes which slowed me in my tracks.
It wasn’t just the stopping to read the recipe often that slowed me down. I realise that some people are naturally quick in the kitchen, Jamie Oliver is clearly one of those people. I, on the other hand, am not. Preparation alone took me a good fifteen to twenty minutes and blew the idea that I could prepare the full meal in half an hour completely out of the water. I felt at times as though I was reading a recipe book for highly trained and skilled chefs – not your average person in a domestic setting.
Don’t get me wrong, I love cooking. I’m happy to put on some music, close all the doors and spend hours in the kitchen. But that’s when I know I have the time to do so and have planned accordingly. If the book was called Jamie’s 60 minute meals or Jamie’s Nice Meals I think I’d be more inclined to return to it over and over again. As it is this book will probably continue to languish on the shelf, having been judged as more trouble than it’s actually worth.