Robin Takes 5: 500 Recipes, 5 Ingredients or Less, 500 … (2024)

I really like 'Robin Takes 5!': the recipes are easy to follow and the fact that each one contains only five or fewer ingredients is excellent. This book gives a great choice of recipes and there is something suitable for everyone. It is handy that each item gives the serving quantity, prep time and cooking time plus a list of nutrients per serving. I would have preferred there to have been illustrations.

Although there are many good recipe ideas in this cookbook, some of them could have definitely benefitted by adding more ingredients. I know that is not the point of this book, but the dishes seemed overly simplistic.

Robin Takes 5 by Robin Miller ISBN#978-1-4494-0845-9
The first chapter gives us soups, stews & chowders. Recipes are simple and with only 5 ingredients in each recipe. Chilled Roasted Red Pepper Soup sounds like a delicious way to start off this book. Robin has soups with all kinds of veggies from peas, potatoes, broccoli to caramelized onions! Southwestern soups to chicken and rice. Seafood soups and chowders to sausage and rice. They all were simple and sounded mouthwatering good.

The next chapter has all my favorites; pizzas, flat breads, cal zones & strudels. Pizza's with toppings from cheese & veggies to meat, chicken, seafood & Polestar. Focaccia & flatbreads with assorted toppings. On to the Calzones, from a simple broccoli and cheese to Philly cheese steak and French dip. Under the strudels we have a chipotle-corn strudel with cheddar among others.

The third chapter has recipes for pasta, risotto & Rice. There are quite a few recipes for veggies and pasta such as, asparagus, peas, zucchini, tomatoes and red peppers to name a few. And than come our cheese and pasta dishes such as fettuccine Alfredo or pesto-stuffed lasagne. Getting hungry yet? Asian dishes such as penne with seared tuna and capers or chinese noodles with black bean sauce and bok choy. If you prefer a pasta salad than read on and get the recipe for tuna pasta salad with roasted red peppers or cellophane noodles with shredded carrots and zucchini. There are two recipes for pasta and seafood so dive in. Or move on to some poultry & meat dishes like Orzo with herbed turkey, sage and pears. There are six Risotto recipes from butternut squash risotto with smoked mozzarella to risotto fritters with wild mushroom sauce. And finally five rice recipe. Chicken friend rice with cumin and apricots to Mexican red rice with shrimp.

Chapter four are your chicken & turkey recipes. You can make your chicken recipes from Southwest/Texas/Mexico style to Asian, French, Italian, Mediterranean, tropical or just plain American style! And there are plenty to choose from as well. Turkey recipes from curried turkey tenderloin to chipotle turkey burgers.

Chapter five is chocked full of beef & pork recipes. How would you like your steak? Perhaps recipes from Southwest/Mexico/Cuba or Mediterranean/American or even Asian. Take your ground beef and cook up some allspice burgers with grilled pineapple while your beef brisket can be cider-braised with red cabbage. Pork chops with plum sauce to pork tenderloin with mint-pea puree. Honey mustard pulled pork to ham, prosciutto, pancetta and sausage recipes are all included in this chapter.

Chapter six brings us to the seafood and shellfish dishes. Salmon, tuna, white fish and that is not all...shrimp,crab, lobster clams and let us not forget the calamari, mussels & scallops. Blackened, seared & glazed or steamed, chilled and braised.

Chapter seven will give you the side dish recipes to go with your meals. Salads & slaws including crunchy Asian slaw with fried noodles and roasted vegetable salad. Vegetables are always a great side dish like some garlic-ginger green beans or ricotta stuffed tomatoes. Potatoes are always a favorite from home fries with bacon and red onion to caramelized sweet potatoes. There are a few recipes with rice and couscous and then a few more breads, pies, biscuits and pancakes. Some pimento-studded corn bread or wild mushroom pancakes with Parmesan.

And most people will think chapter eight is the best; desserts! No-bake desserts such as cinnamon apple burritos to mini chocolate cream pies. Frozen desserts such as vanilla ice cream with tropical mango sauce to fresh lime pie with vanilla cookie crust. Puddings and mousse to chocolate confections. Cakes, cookies, brownies and rolls to tarts, pastries, pies and cobblers. Add a few snacks like fruity granola bars or pomegranate smoothies and you should find a dessert or thirty that is to your liking.

Robin finishes the book with metric conversions and equivalents to help you keep your measuring accurate in the kitchen.
**Received through NetGalley for review.

It's a common experience to get home from work and have to get dinner on the table pronto because someone has baseball practice, someone else has to go to work, someone has a meeting. Robin Miller, host of the Food Network's Quick Fix Meals, has a solution for us with her book
Robin Takes 5: 500 recipes, 5 ingredients or less, 500 calories or less, 5 nights a week at 5PM.

Five hundred recipes is a lot, and many of them can be repetitive (and a good number of them use mustard for some reason), but I found several recipes that I will use. I'm trying to get more fiber in our diet, and Miller has some good recipes using all kinds of canned beans.

I know my college aged sons would enjoy Chicken Nacho Dinner, made by topping corn tortilla chips with a can of black beans, shredded chicken, shredded cheese and salsa and baking for 10 minutes. It also has 6g of fiber. I love that there are so many recipes in this book that have lots of fiber, including Cheese Tortellini with Wild Mushroom Gravy (9g), Pasta Spirals with White Beans, Broccoli and Parmesan (9g) and Penne with Zucchini-Roasted Garlic Sauce (8g), and one that I have already tried, Tuscan Chicken with White Beans, Tomatoes and Oregano (5g) that was really tasty and reminded me of one of our favorite dinners at an Italian restaurant we frequent. Next time, I would cook the chicken breasts whole, instead of dicing them, but another good thing about this book is that it is easy to tweak recipes to your own liking.

The book is divided into eight chapters, like Soups, Stews & Chowders, Pasta, Risotto & Rice, Chicken & Turkey, Side Dishes and Desserts. Now that fall is here, I can't wait to try Carmelized Onion Soup with Melted Swiss & Croutons, Wild Mushroom Soup, and Corn Chowder with Shrimp.

I made Chocolate Raspberry Sorbet, which was simply adding hot fudge sauce and mini chocolate chips to your favorite store bought raspberry sorbet and refreezing. It got rave reviews from two gentlemen who love gourmet foods, and had them fooled. One recipe I did make, Butterscotch Brownies, did not turn out as I hoped, but you can't win them all.

I like that the nutritional information for each recipe is located in a prominent box to the left of the recipe. It makes it so easy to compare and find what you're looking for, whether's it's calorie counts, carb counts or fiber content.

Robin Takes 5 is perfect for busy moms and dads, for people just learning how to cook, and college students. It has easy, clear-to-understand instructions and uses ingredients that most people already have in their pantry. If you want to make healthy, easy dinners for your family, instead of picking up fast food, pick up Robin Takes 5; your family will thank you.

Well, I liked that the recipes were fairly simple and took little prep work, but there were caveats to that like left over items already made (for example left-over chicken or rice) or buying things already made from the store (like cole-slaw) vs making it yourself. If you are truly in it for simplicity and need ideas on what to do with left over stuff, maybe that is fine.

I was a bit disappointed, particularly by the chicken recipes with only a few actually using something other than boneless, skinless breasts or leftover meat. I get that the boneless breast are quick and easy but chicken comes out so much tastier when it's cooked whole and bone-in, and that also gives a nice source for that left over meat. Sure it takes longer to actually cook, but takes little prep time.

Chicken aside, I found that the pasta dishes, soups and pizza dishes seemed the most inspired. I don't need a cookbook to suggest seasoning meat with salt and pepper, and cooking it with spices onions and/or mushrooms. Again maybe simplicity is the point, but the recipes seemed repetitive and often had only minor variations. Out of 500 recipes, there were probably less than 20 I thought I might try. It just didn't work for me.

500 recipes with 5 ingredients or less and 500 calories or less.... where do I sign up?!? You might think "how can you get a delicious meal when it has so few ingredients?" Well let me tell you... out of the recipes that I have made, I LOVED them! I have made the Pepper Jack Chicken w/ Chipotle Potato Chips (357 calories), Seared Steaks w/ Chipotle Butter (373 calories), Balsamic Glazed Burgers w/ Sauteed Onions & Peppers (428 calories) and my personal favorite Red Potato Salad w/Honey-Basil Vinaigrette (237 calories).

Robin Miller has done a fantastic job with this book. Very rarely do I love every recipe that I try from one cookbook. The directions are easy to follow and the ingredients are so simple that they are available at all grocery stores. She also includes pictures of the dishes and the nutritional facts as well. It is perfect for weeknight meals in that the recipes are all around 30 minutes to an hour to make from start to finish. Honestly, what more would you want in a cookbook?

I was not familiar with Robin Miller before I received her book. But, I love cooking and as we're trying to eat healthier at our house, this sounded terrific. Every recipe has just about 5 ingredients and is less than 500 calories. I've marked it up. Seriously, it's full of post-it tabs.

I do wish there were more photos, but it's easy to read and the recipes are easy to follow. Most recipes are fairly fast to make and not time intensive and the ingredients are ones you are likely to have on hand. I prepared the Pork Chops with Sauteed Apples for dinner and my family loved it. It received rave reviews and has earned a place in our dinner rotation. The leftovers are perfect on top of a salad. Next on my list is Smothered Steak with Onions, Mushrooms and Mashed Potatoes.

I like Robin Miller. I liked her when she was on Food Network and I liked many of her recipes and cooking ideas.

I like this cookbook for many reasons. I like that the recipes call for so few ingrediants, most that are already in your pantry. I like that the directions are easy to follow. I like that she has listed the nutrition information for each recipe. I like that most of the recipes are for 4 servings (I'm still learning how to cook for two people instead of an army of people). I like this cookbook!

This is a definite keeper and I will be using this for 'go to' recipes for many years.

I have been a huge fan of Robin Miller's ever since her debut on THE FOOD NETWORK. I have her best-selling QUICK FIX MEALS Cookbook and have made several things from there. So, when I had the chance to review her newest cookbook, I was super excited. There were so many delicious recipes to choose from. I also wanted recipes that mainly had ingredients already in my home. I chose 2 recipes to try and both were delicious, easy, and were made with ingredients already in my home. I found a lot of other recipes to try in this cookbook. I have no doubt this will be another best-selling cookbook for her!

I received an e-book copy from Netgalley.

I think this book would've been better if she hadn't worried about using only 5 ingredients or less. Some of my favorite low-cal foods (soups especially) were lacking in real nutrition because she wasn't using many vegetables. Most of them, were just broth with stuff floating in it. I also felt that she had to settle for milder flavor by using a processed, possibly hard-to-find product instead of telling you how to make something like a Thai peanut sauce. I think her future books should focus on flavor and easy of creation instead of such a small number of ingredients.

Food Networks Robin Miller has just the right cookbook for busy families. Robin Takes 5 contains 500 recipes that are 5 ingredients or less and all no more than 500 calories. As a busy working mom of 3 kids, I’m always looking for easy, healthier, yet delicious dishes I can quickly put together after a long day at work. And if I calculated it right, 500 recipes means I could technically serve a different dinner meal from the book for almost a year and a half! There were nicely photographed food images throughout that will have you salivating at the mouth for sure.

A good resource of over 500 recipes--5 ingredients or less, 500 calories or less from Robin Miller. You can read my full review and a couple of the recipes here:
http://kahakaikitchen.blogspot.com/20...

3 of 5 stars. Just for the deceiving cover. A little picture on bookpages wouldn't hurt --'

I love the cover, but I just can't get my self to really read it. I just shuffling page after page trying to find recipe that caught my attention. Nothing I could found. Maybe some other day?

I like this book but not as an e-book. It did make me realize that I will NEVER buy a cookbook for an ebook. it is too difficult for me to glip the pages.

Saw many simple recipes I would like to try. Not every night has to be a gourmet meal! I think I will put this one on my "to buy" list.

Has quite a few good recipes that take few ingredients.

Review to come shortly...

Quick, easy, simple and delicious recipes.