Rating: 
Summary: A delight...
Review: Rachel is a delight to watch and to read.
Her book is great for people who have no talent/experience at cooking, like me.
Her pleasant, easy-going style is found throughout the book.
Rating:
Summary: Well, you always get points for trying
Review: As much as I want to love this book, I can't; most of these recipes require you to do some cooking. I take care of four kids, and when my husband comes home from the mines he wants an excellent meal quickly. I bought this book with the intention of making him delicious and fast meals. But this book, it is far too taxing. I mean, who has specialty spoons that measure not only tablespoons, but teaspoons? With all this required gadgetry, most of these meals never felt worth the time (or large investment) that they demanded. If we all had money to be throwing around on specialty spoons, maybe this book would have been more practical.
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Summary: Easy to follow
Review: I love this book, as well as her TV show. I find she is easy to follow and her meals are great. I like her easy style of cooking. Many of the items listed in her book can be found in my cubords. Keep up the great job.
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Summary: Great Meals is only half the story
Review: This is a great book that contains wonderful ideals for quick, easy, healthy meals. It will definitely make it easier to make healthy eating more consistent, but I'm convinced that the only way to really stick to any diet is to make it part of your routine by making it a habit. A friend of mine who is a clinical dietitian gave me an amazing book entitled The Power of Habit. It explains how our eating (when we eat, what we eat, and how much we eat) is all habit. It teaches you how to change your eating habits to make healthy eating a permanent, automatic part of your lifestyle. 30-Minute Meals 2 gives you great, easy, low-hassel recipes, and The Power of Habit teaches you how to stick to them. I highly recommend both books.
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Summary: Good Food for Busy People
Review: Rachael Ray combines three or more recipes into a meal which can be made at home by inexperienced cooks from ingredients available at your local supermarket in about 30 minutes, with some minimal advance preparation. She does this very, very well in her books and on her Food Network series.Rachael's TV series is shown somewhere between Mario Batali's ethnic Italian cuisine and Martha Stewart's high end cooking / entertaining demonstrations. Herein lies the moral of the story. Rachael does not feature haute cuisine, ethnic Italian, formal entertaining, fancy pastry, high nutrition, low calorie, economic preparations, or vegetarian. She does good food at home in a short time. This doesn't mean her meals are not nutritious or fattening, or use poor technique. Her preparations use a very high percentage of fresh ingredients and a low percentage of suspect animal fats and overly prepared ingredients. Many meals are a Mediterranean diet for everyman. Her use of extra virgin olive oil rivals Mario and her use of garlic would make Emril proud. Her techniques are sound and very achievable for anyone with at least one very good knife, a food processor, a grill pan, and a few large saute pans and a large dutch oven. The only culinary skill one needs are fairly good knive skills, plus the discipline to keep that one knive very sharp. For those critics who say they learn nothing from Rachael's presentations, I say they miss the point. She is showing you how to eat well without great chops in the kitchen. The thing which impresses me the most is that in spite of her retro 50's décor on her show, her food does NOT emulate the 50's food doctrines focusing on assembling easy meals from prepared foods. Having lived through the 50's with a working mother, I know exactly what that was like, and this ain't it. There is a fairly heavy use of fresh foods in partially prepared form, such as deboned chicken breasts and prewashed, precut salad greens. This means Rachael's meals may be slightly more expensive than similar meals done a la Mario from prima materia, but if you're a 35 year old with a good job, working 10 hours a day, 30 minutes to prepare a meal is a real bargain. I also know that loosing the bone on meats will loose some sources of flavor, but cross your heart and hope to die, do you really notice the difference on Tuesday night after a hard day at work. If one compares Rachael's work to those nearest to her style on the Food Network, I believe you will see the really has her act much more firmly together than the new 'Good Food Fast' show and, dare I say it, she succeeds much better at what she does than the Food Network icon Sara Moulton. Sara concentrates on techniques, unusual foods, and unusual cuisines. I routinely cook from Sara Moulton's book and I do not routinely cook from Rachal's books, but then I'm retired and cooking is my hobby. Rachael does what she does very, very well. She may just not be what you are looking for. I started taking Rachael much more seriously when I realized her 30 Minute Meal format predated her appearing on the Food Network. She cooked it up herself and was not a creature of Food Network producers. Another kudo to Food Network for, like Alton Brown's 'Good Eats', seeing something good and running with it. The most important caveat I would place on Rachael's menus is that accomplishing them in 30 minutes does require you to have a well organized kitchen with all foods equipment in good working order and immediately at hand. It also requires a very good advance knowledge of the recipes. The 30 minutes doesn't include the time it takes to read the recipe, do the shopping, and make sure everything is at the ready. It also helps to be thirtysomething with good knife skills. I have never caught Rachael cheating on her show (unlike Ms. Carmichael on the Good Food Fast show) but she accomplishes her goal by being constantly in motion, with not a second taken to reread the recipe or track down a missing onion. Rachael's books are not free of errors. In one recipe, for example, a russet potato is identified as general purpose, when it is much more properly identified as a starchy potato. However, the use to which the potato was put in the recipe was CORRECT. I have found more serious culinary mistakes in a book by Emeril Legasse! Rachael is not Julia Child or Lidia Bastianich or Diana Kennedy. She does food quickly at home with simple ingredients and equipment and she does it very well, presented at a very reasonable price.
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Summary: Joining the Anti-Karen fan club
Review: This is a great book. Rachael's style of cooking is simple and functional for the busy household. So what if she includes some store bought pre-made items? I have twin three year old boys, and if I make any of Rachael's recipes for them I'm way ahead of most! A question for our dear friend Karen: if you hate Rachael's show so much, why would you go out and buy her cookbook? Unless you didn't buy it at all and just posted to voice your nasty comments. In the meantime shut your pie hole (sorry, couldn't resist since we're talking about cooking and all...) and stick with the books and shows that are worthy of your gourmet talents. Perhaps an issue of Bon Appetit?
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Summary: A Must Have Cookbook
Review: This book, like many others, is often mistaken as a "I hate to cook!" book, when in fact it is more of a "I have no time to cook!" book. Cooking is one of my favorite passions, however working 50 hours a week really doesn't lend well to cooking elaborate meals. Rachael Ray provides a menu-style book that is both cost-effective and does not require unusual ingredients that are hard to find. The meals are easy and always 'homestyle' delicious. The only drawback, as many have pointed out, is that her deserts leave a lot to be desired. But it IS geared towards getting a meal done in 30 minutes, and as mentioned, I usually don't have time to make creme brulee. :-P
Rating: 
Summary: Good cook book for busy professional woman
Review: I have bought a lot of cook books before. And a lot of cook book's receipes took so long to prepare. It is not possible for a working mon to do all those works. I am very delight to find this Rachael Ray's cook book. I have also watched Rachael Ray 's show on TV. I myself is a pretty good cook in Asian dishes. This book is very good for very busy professional woman like me.
Rating:
Summary: GRATE
Review: the foods that she pepares in this book is grate--- and the show she has 40 a day i love it . a mouth a go i went to long beach for 3 days she gave me the ida to go on line and find cheep reatronts and i did thank you
Rating: 
Summary: Sorry, I was not empressed...
Review: I've been searching for cookbooks with easy to prepare homemade meals that are also easy to reference especially for those hectic days at work. We prefer low sugar and low carb meals but sometimes her meals have too much of both. And, like one reviewer mentioned some of the ingredients are pricey. (ie., veal, alcohol) The book is designed with appetizers, main dishes and desserts on the same page but I prefer to have them sectioned off for easy reference. And be warned there are little to no pictures inside. I personally prefer a few pictures for eye appeal and to help break up the book becasue I'm a very visual person. Besides, I can pick and chose which recipes I want to download from the website.
If I buy a book it has to be a very good referance as well as have great content. I'm not going to buy it just because it's the in thing to do at the moment and have it gather dust on my shelf within a few months. Rachel's tv show gives great advice and she cooks some tastey meals but her book doesn't live up to the idea of being convenient. The same goes for Alton Brown's new book which reads more like a novel than a cookbook.
On the other hand, Barefoot Contessa Family Style is one of the few Food tv cooks that came out with a easy to read book with old fashioned family meals.
If you want a fantastic cookbook with quick homemade meals try Betty Crocker's Cook It Quick.
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