Book Review: 5 Ingredient 1 Pan Cookbook for Men

Title: 5 Ingredient 1 Pan Cookbook for Men

Author: Olivia Graham

Quote: "This is all about bold, satisfying meals that take minimal effort but deliver big-time flavor."

On the whole that's what this cookbook delivers. Meals with meat, vegetables, and mostly optional bread or rice, mostly cooked in one skillet. There are also some recipes for snacks and desserts. Each recipe calls for five essential ingredients, with "tips" that suggest extra ingredients for variations, not necessarily counting oil, water, salt, or pepper as ingredients. Most can be whipped up in half an hour. 

Graham imitates the tone of young male chefs like Emeril, with phrases like "Boom!" and "like a boss," addressing her audience as "guys" or "champs." This is probably a mistake for an author who doesn't have a TV show, but some readers may find it amusing. The recipes are worth trying, anyway.

There's more than a slight hint of trendy granola cuisine about these recipes, one of which is actually for granola, but they deliver plenty of protein and fibre with the option of adding more salt or other condiments if anyone really wants them. Generally the quality of these meals will depend on the quality of your vegetables. If you have garden-fresh asparagus the steak and asparagus dish will be excellent; if you try to rescue decomposing asparagus from the supermarket the steak won't save the poor wilted things. 

Olivia Graham has done a lot of e-cookbooks and, although they're all generally acceptable in the sense of telling readers how long different types of meat have to be cooked to be edible, the editing is on the sketchy side. In this one, not only are there disparities between the photos of some dishes and the recipes that cannot possibly make dishes that look like the photos, but there are disparities between the ingredient lists and the recipes. 

The lava cake recipe is especially disappointing, with a photo of a mug cake, an ingredient list that sounds unlikely to become any kind of cake (though it might taste good), and instructions that assume an ingredient list that would become a cake, including sugar and flour, which don't appear on the ingredient list, but it's baked in a pan in the oven, not microwaved in a mug. You knew lava cake had to have different proportions of sugar, flour, and chocolate than a normal chocolate cake. This recipe promises to tell you what those proportions are, and then it doesn't. 

But you might not mind, because chocolate cake is more of a children's thing and the no-flour, no-bake protein-bars-or-cookies are more of a men's thing, anyway. And the sweet and spicy sweetpotato fries and toasted garbanzo recipes will work; getting glyphosate-free sweetpotatoes and garbanzos is the only difficulty. 

As Graham repeatedly mentions in the instructions, cooking should be fun. These are not Grandma's recipes and they offer lots of kitchen fun for men, women, and children who want to experiment with a minimalist approach to food. If you decide you prefer Grandma's recipes, at least you've lost any fears that cooking is difficult, confusing, or stressful (apart from the literal heat--well you don't have to bake anything on a blazing-hot day).