Robin Miller the host of a popular Food Network TV program provides the reader with 200 recipes which cook up in as little time as 15 minutes from start to finish.  The perfect answer to today's busy cooks. Most of us don't have all the time in the world these days to prepare really good, creative meals each and every time.

This is an easy cookbook to use and the reader will appreciate how she uses the main meal to create recipes for other meals. Her recipes are pantry-friendly in that she uses products that most of us already have in our pantry.

For those of you that choose a cookbook based upon lavish photos this is not the one for you. If you appreciate new ideas for meal solutions and time is a scare commodity, Robin Miller's QUICK FIX MEALS cookbook is well worth getting.

Because most of what we're consuming today is not food, and how we're consuming it -- in the car, in front of the TV, and increasingly alone -- is not really eating. Instead of food, we're consuming "edible foodlike substances" -- no longer the products of nature but of food science. Many of them come packaged with health claims that should be our first clue they are anything but healthy. In the so-called Western diet, food has been replaced by nutrients and common sense by confusion. The result is what Michael Pollan calls the American paradox: The more we worry about nutrition, the less healthy we seem to become.

But if real food -- the sort of food our great grandmothers would recognize as food -- stands in need of defense, from whom does it need defending? From the food industry on one side and nutritional science on the other. Both stand to gain much from widespread confusion about what to eat, a question that for most of human history people have been able to answer without expert help.

So what makes this book so different?  The author Michael Pollan, has developed a good background in this area. His previous book, The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals (2006), was named one of the ten best books of 2006 by the New York Times and the Washington Post. He is also the author of The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World (2001); A Place of My Own (1997); and Second Nature (1991). Michael is also a contributing writer to the New York Times Magazine. Pollan served for many years as executive editor of Harper's Magazine and is now teaching Science and Environmental Journalism at UC Berkeley.

I have found the book to be very credible, informative and enjoyable. I am sure that anyone whom eats to live will enjoy this fine book also.

It is not something that you buy to set on a coffee table for guests to thumb through pictures for it only has drawings. I have never read a book on cooking that I refer back to as often as this one.

Harold McGee's On Food and Cooking is a kitchen classic. Hailed by Time magazine as "a minor masterpiece" when it first appeared in 1984, On Food and Cooking is the bible to which food lovers; novice and professionals turn for an unmatched understanding of where foods come from, what they're made of, and how the process of cooking transforms them.

McGee prepared a new, fully revised and updated edition of On Food and Cooking for the books 20^th anniversary. McGee has rewritten the text almost completely, expanded it by two-thirds, and added more than 100 new illustrations. The new edition of On Food and Cooking provides countless insights into food, preparation, and enjoyment.

From the publisher:

On Food and Cooking pioneered the translation of technical food science into cook-friendly kitchen science and helped give birth to the inventive culinary movement known as "molecular gastronomy." Though other books have now been written about kitchen science, On Food and Cooking remains unmatched in the accuracy, clarity, and thoroughness of its explanations, and the intriguing way in which it blends science with the historical evolution of foods and cooking techniques.

Among the major themes addressed throughout this new edition are:

    * Traditional and modern methods of food production and their influences on food quality

    * The great diversity of methods by which people in different places and times have prepared the same ingredients

    * Tips for selecting the best ingredients and preparing them successfully

    * The particular substances that give foods their flavors and that give us pleasure

    * Our evolving knowledge of the health benefits and risks of foods

On Food and Cooking is an invaluable and monumental compendium of basic information about ingredients, cooking methods, and the pleasures of eating. It will delight and fascinate anyone who has ever cooked, savored, or wondered about food.

Harold McGee writes a column on science and food for the New York Times called The Curious Cook and has a blog where he files

". . . brief reports from the intersection of food and science. It's a lively neighborhood these days. There's a constant influx of new information in food chemistry and microbiology, agriculture and manufacturing, and in human perception and health. I glean items from current technical publications and scientific meetings, from conversations with cooks and scientists, and from questions that come up in my own kitchen in the San Francisco Bay area." - Harold McGee

You can see the table of contents and read excerpts of the book on his website Curious Cook as well as see links to his New York Times article. The current Times article is titled; The Invisible Ingredient in Every Kitchen but there are many more and hopefully Harold will continue to share is insightful and much needed knowledge for the rest of us just trying to catch up.