Danielle Walker’s Against the Grain: Meals Made Simple

Danielle Walker’s Against the Grain: Meals Made Simple is a relatively recent addition to my cookbook collection. My daughter had an allergy to Cow’s Milk Protein for the first several months of her life. Since I wanted to continue nursing, I had to cut ALL dairy out of my diet. In my search for cookbooks with easy, realistic dairy-free recipes, this specific cookbook kept popping up so I had to grab it and try some of the recipes. No surprise, they were great.

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Danielle Walker's Against All Grain: Meals Made Simple by Danielle Walker
Published by Victory Belt Publishing on September 2, 2014
Pages: 336

Say good-bye to rushed, repetitive, unimaginative weeknight meals.
Do you ever feel that no matter how much time you dedicate to cooking during the week, dinner time still seems to creep up on you without warning so that you’re left frantically trying to throw something together? It’s time to put those days behind you!

In Meals Made Simple, New York Times bestselling author Danielle Walker applies her experience with creating amazing gluten-free, dairy-free, and Paleo recipes to planning and preparing simple, tasty meals any night of the week. Preparing real foods can be time-consuming and monotonous, but Danielle brings both simplicity and creativity to the everyday meal with an enthusiasm for flavors and textures that are often lacking in easy weeknight dishes.

In Meals Made Simple, Danielle provides eight weeks’ worth of dinner ideas, complete with full weekly shopping lists, and shares how to have fresh, home-cooked meals that are easy to prepare and filled with variety, while still meeting the needs of various dietary restrictions. The book includes
• A variety of slow cooker, one-pot, and thirty-minute meals
• Ideas for creating entirely new dishes from leftovers
• Special “tidbits” to help ensure that your meals turn out picture-perfect
• Meal plans that make the most of the ingredients in the shopping lists, which helps you save money and reduce food waste
• Recipes for delicious, nutritious dishes such as
• Pork Ragu
• Beef Stroganoff
• Peruvian-Style Chicken
• Chicken and Rice Casserole
• Salmon with Peach Salsa
• Snacks and sweets

Regardless of whether you follow a Paleo lifestyle to manage health concerns or simply want to improve your current nutritional model by removing processed foods and ingredients, Danielle helps you prepare easy, delicious meals for you and your family

General Thoughts

Danielle Walker has a pretty big empire of healthy cooking books and recipes. I was just looking for a cookbook that had really easy dairy-free meals to make and came across her work. I’m not dairy-free anymore but the recipes continue to entice me for a quick, easy dinner. The book is excellent for gluten-free, dairy-free and Paleo diets. The recipes are very easy to make and the ingredients are all fairly common year-round.

There’s suggestions on which recipes work well when made ahead of time. There’s also suggestions on how to freeze and defrost recipes when you are batch-cooking. Both of these are so useful to me as a working parent trying to make dinner last for more than one evening.

There’s a lot of information at the beginning of the book on how to make meals simple. The back of the book has a couple tear-outs to keep in your bag for reference when grocery shopping. Guides on what is paleo, what is ‘clean’ and a sample shopping list are very valuable, especially when I go to the grocery store not knowing what to cook. At least I’d have everything I need to make recipes from this book!

Also, as I was doing the research for this post about this book, I found that Danielle Walker sells signed copies of the book on her website. I might need to update my own copy! Grab it here.

Weeknight Cooking?

This cookbook was made for weeknight cooking. All the recipes that I’ve looked at are easy to make either in the evening or in a crockpot (or as I’ll do it, the instant pot) all day. I appreciate that there is a whole 8-week meal plan at the beginning of the book, which can help come up with meal pairings. Personally, I cook so that there’s enough for leftovers the next day, but maybe when I’m feeding more than my husband and myself, this will be a bit more useful.

Basics or Advanced?

This book is cooking beginner friendly and goes through the basics. The intended audience is people who want to make healthy meals quickly, especially those with certain dietary restrictions. There are a lot of recipes inspired by other cultures, but if you’re looking for the most authentic versions, this isn’t that book. This book is the basic recipes to make a lot of different things.

Picture Quality

The picture quality is excellent. Each recipe has a picture next to it, which is basically all that you can ask for if you are trying to re-create recipes. Photography is excellent as well. Not one complaint here!

Unique Tools and Ingredients?

There’s nothing calling for unique tools in this cookbook, unless you don’t have a slow cooker or instant pot. Even so, those recipes can be made on a stovetop cooking low and slow, so there’s nothing stopping anyone from cooking.

The ingredients are generally easy to find too. I will note though, since this is a dairy-free cookbook, that a lot of the dairy alternatives are nut-based. It’s not that nuts are unique. It’s just that buying raw nuts can get really expensive really fast, let alone buying pre-made nut milks and sauces. However, she notes when regular milk can be used if people can tolerate it. I’d also recommend buying nuts in bulk and keeping them in the fridge to avoid them spoiling.

Recipes I’ve Cooked From Danielle Walker’s Against the Grain: Meals Made Simple

Chicken Tikka Masala.

Recipes That I Have on my To-Make List From Danielle Walker’s Against the Grain: Meals Made Simple

Ropa Vieja. Italian Wedding Soup. Grilled Greek Summer Squash Salad. Pineapple Beef Kabobs.