by Dee Delaney

Created on: January 11, 2011

'Jamie's 30 Minute Meals' was the 'must buy' cook book of the year, but has recently attracted a lot of negative publicity over the truth of the title. Hundreds of women are queuing up to report that the 30 minute meal in fact takes longer than an hour to make, and Jamie Oliver's so far untouchable image may be getting a little tarnished as a result.

Having watched Jamie whizzing around the kitchen on TV, creating the most beautiful meals for his friends in easily under 30 minutes, I was delighted when I got this book as a present for Christmas. My first impressions were very positive; the book was chock-a-block full of colour photographs, which I find that I always need in a cookbook both for guidance and inspiration. Unfortunately when I got down to making the recipes, my enthusiasm started to wane.

~~The Book~~
The book is a hardback, and very substantial. It has a full length photograph of a laughing Jamie on the front, in his usual hands on hips confrontational pose. The subtitle is 'a revolutionary approach to cooking good food fast'.

Inside, there is a handy ribbon page marker - a very good idea for me as I always end up sticking in bits of paper to mark favourite or current recipes.

As I flicked through the first few pages I was instantly irritated by the lack of order. Perhaps this is Jamie's way of stimulating creativity, but there was no contents page to flick through, just a huge long list of 'The Meals'. This list has absolutely no order that I can see. It is not divided into starters, mains, salads, etc; it is not alphabetical; instead it is colour coded. The meal titles are purple, green, red or blue. I couldn't see any explanation of this coding. At first I thought that perhaps the green titles were vegetarian - but then why was Cauliflower Macaroni in purple? I gave up and moved on.

The next few pages did nothing to assuage my annoyance. Having Jamie patronise me by telling me 'I can do it', telling me that this is 'an energetic workhorse of a book' and listing my 'essential kit' all just made me even more irritated.

At the back there is a fairly comprehensive index, which made me a bit happier. For example, if I looked up Salmon, five salmon recipes were listed. The recipes that were vegetarian had a small red V next to them, just as you would find on a menu.

Before I started to scan the recipes, I had to endure some more Jamie advice. 'Clear your table before you start cooking', 'make sure that your pre-made pastry cases are made with free range

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