Mix-and-Match Meal Planner: Your Weekly Guide to Getting Dinner on the Table

For the home cooks this cookbook was written it couldn’t be better. It’s a superb cookbook and meal organizer aiming specifically for very busy home cooks who still prefer to cook their own healthy and flavorful meals with minimal effort and fuss. Mix & Match Meal Planner is a very cute, small-format, hardcover cookbook by writer and organizer extraordinaire Shay Shull. The cookbook is unusual—it provides recipes for a full year in two-week intervals, separately for the four seasons. After two weeks you repeat. The recipes are reasonably simple and quick to prepare using few ingredients, some ready-made (Bisquick mix, refrigerated biscuits, Graham cracker crust). The layout is very good, no page turning is necessary, instructions are easy to follow, all recipe ingredients available even in the smallest, most remote markets.

To make it even easier for busy cooks, Shull included a complete shopping list for every week’s recipes. Everything is completely organized for the cook. She listed recipes for each two-week interval. Photo illustrations are very nice, show exactly what you can expect for your dinner. Here are a few recipe examples: chicken chili verde, spaghetti and meat sauce, Butterfinger blondies. Recipe index is very good.