Healthy, Quick & Easy College Cookbook: 100 Simple, Budget-Friendly Recipes to Satisfy Your Campus Cravings

Healthy, Quick & Easy College Cookbook is an accessible and attractively presented cookbook with recipes by Dana Angelo White. Due out 13th July 2021 from Penguin Random House on their DK imprint, it's 160 pages and will be available in paperback format.

This is a basic, useful, and versatile recipe collection along with tutorials for setting up a kitchen, pantry, utensils lists, and more. The introduction (~15%) covers basic kitchen tools and procedures as well as background info on maximizing efficiency (and money) when shopping and eating healthy on a budget. 

The following chapters contain the recipes grouped roughly thematically: breakfasts, soups & salads,  sandwiches wraps & panini, main dishes, snacks, desserts, and late night cravings. There are 100 recipes included, but most are very versatile and lend themselves well to variations and different presentations.

The recipes themselves are formatted with an introduction and background, ingredients listed bullet style in a sidebar (US standard measures, and metric equivalents in parentheses, yay!), and step by step instructions. Alternative presentations, tips, and special definitions are provided in highlighted text bars at the end of the instructions. Nutritional info is included in a footer and contains calories, fat, saturated fat, carbs, and protein (in grams). Many of the recipes are vegetarian friendly with an emphasis on plant based ingredients, but not all. The vegetarian/vegan friendly recipes are mostly not specified or marked out. I would say that nearly all the recipes in the book can easily be adapted to be vegan friendly if desired.

Almost all of the ingredients are easily sourced at any moderately well stocked grocery store. Some few ingredients might be more easily found at a health food or international food grocery, but there's nothing that will be very difficult to find.

One of the standouts of this collection is the photography. The food is beautifully styled, clearly photographed, and serving suggestions are attractive and appropriate. Roughly a third of the recipes have pictures.

The book includes a cross-referenced index with recipes listed, but no ingredients (broccoli or avocado for example) are listed, so finding recipes based on items on-hand will be more of a challenge. This would be a good selection for folks newly living on their own as the recipes are especially beginner friendly and require little in the way of exotic ingredients or tools/supplies.

Five stars.

Disclosure: I received an ARC at no cost from the author/publisher for review purposes.