Last time, we talked a bit about some of the fancy-pants food magazines we get here at the library.  Now, I'd like to go over a few that have a more down-home style to them.

Taste of Home is the place to go for comfort food for busy cooks.  The tagline is "Real food from real home cooks", and there's a lot of focus on inexpensive meals (the index at the back gives the cost per serving!) and simple preparation.  I like Taste of Home for its Tuesday night dinner focus, but I do find that the recipes feature a lot more prepared foods than I would personally prefer, and sometimes it's hard to tell the ads from the content.  Each recipe has a color picture, which I like, and the directions are always clear and well written.  Plus, unlike some of these magazines, prep times and servings are always clearly noted.

We also get Taste of Home Simple & Delicious, which is a version of its parent magazine with even faster and simpler recipes.  It offers meals organized by the time it takes to make them and has a lot of information on efficient menu planning, which I like.  Unfortunately, Simple & Delicious has even more prepared food ingredients than Taste of Home.  However, I like the fact that they understand that a meal that involves fifteen minutes of prep and eight hours of unattended cooking is still simple and quick.  Like Taste of Home, every recipe has a photograph and is listed in an index on the last page.  

Both of these magazines are really designed for somebody who wants to cook stuff out of them.  There aren't a bunch of floofy articles or travel pieces or interviews - there's food, and plenty of it.  It reminds me of how much better the Food Network used to be when it had cooking shows instead of reality, travel, and lifestyle stuff.

One other great thing about both of these magazines is that each issue has several of its recipes cut down to a meal for two people available on the website.  As somebody who doesn't have a bunch of kids to feed, I find this to be a really helpful feature.

Next up - food magazines by personalities!