Quickies: Ten Quick Ways with Everyday Foods

When you participate in an ongoing activity like the A-Z Wednesday Challenge, you can't help but think ahead to the more troublesome letters and wonder what books you'll choose when the appropriate week rolls around. As of now, I don't know what book I'll blog about when X and Z are featured, but I never doubted for a moment what I would post about during this week, Q week.

Chatelaine is one of Canada's most popular women's magazines and their cookbooks are terrific. Quickies: Ten Quick Ways with Everyday Foods was the first in the series of "Quickies" cookbooks; I have several of them and this one is quite possibly the best of the bunch. It's certainly the one I use more than the others. Written by the magazine's then food editor, Monda Rosenberg, the book features pages and pages of food items with 10 quick recipes for each. In total, the book features 1,000 ideas! The food items are presented alphabetically, making it easy to look up something for which you need inspiration -- perhaps asparagus, broccoli, chicken thighs, all the way through to zucchini. It's a great resource and some of my favourite recipes are from this book. In particular, the spiced nuts (I have the recipe posted HERE) -- they're a Christmas staple for me. Other "nut" suggestions from the book include "Sugar Snap Peas & Cashews" and "Chili-Lime Peanuts", along with 7 others including the aforementioned spiced nuts. Yum, yum.

I believe this book is out-of-print, but I found it listed at Amazon with used copies available. Since this is a Canadian book, I doubt my American friends will be able to find it in their local libraries, but here in Canada it shouldn't be too hard to locate.