Rating: 
Summary: Wonderful!
Review: I recieved my copy of this great book 2 days ago. I have read through it and everything sounds wonderful and easy to prepare. So far, I have made the Spaghetti Cassarole and the Beef Stroganoff. I used Venison instead of beef in the Straganoff and it was wonderful! Give this book a try. You won't be sorry!
Rating: 
Summary: I really wanted to like this cookbook
Review: I should start by saying that I think Sandra Lee's Semi-Homemade cookbook and her Food Network recipes are beyond disgusting. However, the concept intrigued me. I was told that "The Dinner Doctor" took the same idea, but was several notches above Semi-Homemade in terms of overall quality of recipes and the end result. I had many recipes picked out the first time I read "The Dinner Doctor." The Pumpkin Orange Soup with Parmesan Toasts was okay, too orangey but I think I might have inadvertently put in too much orange juice. The Winter Night Beef Stew--well, she has you make a traditional beef stew, browning stew meat, adding broth and vegetables and red wine, but then she inexplicably tells you to thicken the stew using...canned beef stew! Ick! I mean, why go to the trouble in the first place to make a nice stew, if you're going to foul it up? Why not just eat the Dinty Moore in the first place? She does say if you don't want to do that, to add more broth and flour and cook it longer. I did that but had to add mashed potato flakes to thicken it in the end. It did taste good. The Sesame Peanut Noodles calls for a cup of red wine vinaigrette. I love peanut sauce. This was foul. Way too sweet because bottled vinaigrette has tons of corn syrup. At the same time, it was too vinegary. Just not even close to an authentic recipe, which is easy in the first place and shouldn't need doctoring. The Chinese Chicken tasted okay but when I added the sauce mixed with cornstarch as directed, it turned into gobs of jellied goo and never did relax and turn into a sauce. Maybe it was my cooking, but I followed the directions exactly. The Chicken Piccata was good; the Black Bean and Vegetable Stack was okay. The Easy Beef Stroganoff called for a packet of onion soup mix, and since the recipe also calls for sour cream, the finished product tasted very strongly like onion dip. My husband liked it, but I couldn't even eat it. The Turkey Hash in a Flash reminded me of the cafeteria food in my grade school in the late '70s. Gross texture, salty yet bland. I wouldn't eat it again and in fact didn't finish my portion. I was going to try more recipes, but got tired of wasting food. I think her overall execution is better than Sandra Lee's, but still leaves much to be desired.
Rating: 
Summary: Terrible book
Review: I'm really stunned by the reviews this book has gotten here. I've tried a few of the recipes and not only were they not especially quick they were not good at all. It strikes me as a cookbook for people who don't know how to cook and don't know much about good food.
Rating:
Summary: Disappointment.
Review: Majority of recipes are gourmet-type recipes with ingredients my family would never touch. I was surprised, because I really liked her Cake Mix Doctor Book.
Rating:
Summary: The doctor is definitely in.
Review: Ms. Byrn has hit the nail on the head with this one. I love the cake mix doctor and converted from being a complete baking snob into a cake mix regular for birthday cakes and special occasion treats. No one knows the diff and the cakes are great. Same goes for the new Dinner Doc. I especially like the cool easy soups that taste so homemade and my family has been aching for some good casseroles for a long time. The hardest part of figuring out dinner to me is wandering through all the new crazy products in the grocery store. This book addresses that and has made me a better shopper and better at adding a little finesse to a meal.
Rating: 
Summary: Decent cookbook
Review: The Dinner Doctor is a decent cookbook with many interesting recipes. My main complaint about this collection is that the recipes do not include any nutritional information, although it's pretty easy to tell that most of these recipes will not show up in the pages of Cooking Light, unless it's in the recipe rescue section. That being said, this book is filled with recipes that have good short cuts and Byrn provides many useful hints that are adaptable to more healthier recipes, just don't expect to find any guidance in this book on how to get there.
Rating:
Summary: Decent cookbook
Review: The Dinner Doctor is a decent cookbook with many interesting recipes. My main complaint about this collection is that the recipes do not include any nutritional information, although it's pretty easy to tell that most of these recipes will not show up in the pages of Cooking Light, unless it's in the recipe rescue section. That being said, this book is filled with recipes that have good short cuts and Byrn provides many useful hints that are adaptable to more healthier recipes, just don't expect to find any guidance in this book on how to get there.
Rating: 
Summary: Quick and Easy Family Food!
Review: The part I like best about this book is the pantry list in the back. It prepares your kitchen for any type of quick and delicious meal. I have tried several of the recipes and enjoyed them all.
Rating:
Summary: Quick and Easy Family Food!
Review: The part I like best about this book is the pantry list in the back. It prepares your kitchen for any type of quick and delicious meal. I have tried several of the recipes and enjoyed them all.
Rating:
Summary: Prescriptions for Easy, Flavorful, and Fatty Meals
Review: The premise of 'the Dinner Doctor' by Anne Byrn is that good meals can be made with less trouble than if they were made from scratch if prepared foods such as frozen ravioli or deli potato salad or canned baked beans are enhanced with extra ingredients such as diced vegetables or bottled salsa. It is important to recognize that contrary to two different statements on the cover of the book, the author's premise is not about speed. Byrn praises slow cooking as one technique to achieve 'doctored' meals with less trouble and includes an entire chapter on the subject. She also makes the point that she is not interested in holding a stopwatch to the reader to beat. One should be clear that Ms. Byrn is not entirely a throwback to the style of cooking praised in the fifties where virtually all meals were seen as something out of a box or a can. Healthy food with only a reasonable amount of unnecessary additives is her objective. The author to which she is the most similar is Sandra Lee of 'semi-homemade' fame. Both of these writers could be compared to Rachael Ray's style of cooking, but it is important to recognize the differences. While both Byrn and Lee are concerned with 'easy', Rachael is mostly concerned with quick. What is so amazing about Rachel's results is that they are achieved with so few prepared ingredients. I think Rachael succeeds so well at what she does because she relies on a certain level of kitchen skills which may be more than whan Ms. Byrn expects. Almost all of the commercial preparations Rachael uses are achieved from packaged skinless and filleted meats, cleaned and cut vegetables, and canned rather than dry beans. Ray achieves her results by modifying classic recipes to use smaller dices and grilling or stovetop braising in place of oven roasting or braising. The differences between Anne Byrn and Rachael Ray are exactly where I have reservations about Byrn's approach. At the outset, I disagree with her suggestion that one should stock a pantry with a wide variety of dried, bottled, canned, and frozen ingredients. As I have said with every other writer who makes this suggestion, the best approach is simply to get the ingredients for dishes you definitely plan to make in the next week, so in the case you don't like that dish, you don't have ingredients you may not need. I have it on the authority of no less than Madhur Jaffrey that this is a wise thing to do. I also have the vague suspicion that Ms. Byrn is too concerned about always creating dishes with a great complexity of flavor. I got this idea when I read her suggestion about enhancing deli potato salad with several supplementary ingredients to improve the 'bland' salad. Since I happen to like simple potato salads with no more dressing than a bit of oil and garlic and parsley, I was really wondering why she thought a simple potato salad needed any help in the first place. The irony of this is that she was so proud of the story she told about a meeting with Julia Child where Ms. Child created a salad simply by washing and drying some lettuce, salting the lettuce, and tossing the greens with some olive oil, and that was it. In spite of my reservations, this is a very worthy book for the right audience. Judjing from the number of five star ratings and review, this book has found that audience. It does the excellent service of giving estimates of how long each dish will take to prepare and cook. Also, these recipes are very easy to read and follow. If you are looking for tasty dishes with little trouble to prepare plus some general suggestions on getting in and out of the kitchen quickly, this book will work for you. Just be sure you are aware of the trade offs. This food will, in general, be more expensive, have more additives, and be slightly more fatty (note the high use of grated and processed cheese) than if you worked entirely from scratch. I give the book high marks for giving you a large number of recipes for a very reasonable cost.
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