Not as good as homemade (obviously)
352356
Believe the hype.  Not as good as homemade (obviously), but by far, the best banana bread mix available on the market.
2925025
I bought this to save some time when making Mexican dishes that call for it. Making it from scratch with anatto seeds in a blender is kind of messy and time consuming but the flavor is a million times better than this stuff. It's also really too dry to even be called a paste.
3497514
Just got this for my birthday and have just made the lamb rogan josh.  Turned out fine, but I couldn't adhere completely to the recipe because it called for 1/4 cup "curry paste."  My other Asian cookbooks include recipes to make your own pastes and spice blends.  This one does not.  It assumes you live near an Asian grocery.  I do not. So I had to haul out a few other books and approximate a bit for this recipe.  It would be a better book if it provided for do-it-yourselfers like me, who have spice staples on hand.  It has some fun ideas and a great variety of curries.  It is almost all curries, though,so if you're looking for other kinds of recipes, this is not the book for you.
2857
I really try to avoid processed foods, but if I'm going to splurge and eat something unhealthy one of my very favorite cheat foods is Velveeta shells and cheese.  When I saw this I instantly thought that it would be a great thing to keep in the house for a last minute guilty pleasure dinner.  However, when I made it I only had a few bites and threw the rest away.  It just didn't taste nearly good enought to rationalize all of the preservatives and empty calories.  Something is off about the sauce, it isn't the same as shells and cheese and the whole thing just had a really funny mouthfeel and flavor.  I would skip this and just stick with the original which is always a great indulgence!
3626476
I was really excited to start using this book but now have found it to be "just meh". I rounded up to 3 stars. The recipes aren't very creative and somewhat boring. The ingredients are just not very flavorful or exciting. And you can tell just by looking at them that the recipe will be fairly meh tasting, ok but nothing special.

Also, the recipes are very unhealthy. Most of them require a can of cream of chicken/mushroom/etc. soup or a can of cheddar cheese soup or Velveeta or packages of soup mixes or packages of brown gravy mix or "9 slices of American processed cheese" (yes, really) or 2 tbs of bacon grease or yellow cake mix or canned apple pie filling. I could keep going.

I'm not a crazy health nut. However, I bought this book for easy cooking for my family on a regular basis. If I used these canned, packaged, preservative-filled items on a regular basis, we'd be 10 sizes bigger and not very healthy. I can understand using recipes like this on the occasion, but I can't imagine cooking these recipes regularly. I was pretty disappointed. Guess I'll pull it out around the holidays and whenever I'm feeling too skinny, lol.
3286819
This tea is what I'd call un-spectacular. It's not very strong and has kind of an indistinct flavor. I got it because I wanted to make my own natural Thai tea (actually hot, though, rather than iced) and had read that Ceylon is best for this. I feel the need to use multiple bags of this tea to get the strength I want when mixing with cream for an approximation of real Thai tea (or for just my regular tea with cream or half and half). The quest for the perfect from-scratch Thai tea with no artificial ingredients continues (I welcome suggestions, in fact).
4344869
More of a novelty. Makes a bit of a mess out of it. Maybe good if you are making a bunch at once for family, but if you just want one or two, it's probably more trouble than the setup and cleanup is worth.
1122985
I tried one recipe so far, and it was a banana bread recipe. It called for 1 Tablespoon of baking soda. I thought  that I had never seen that much called for in a recipe (for one loaf), but nevertheless, not being that knowledgeable about cooking, I did it anyway. The recipe also called for 1 tsp. of salt and I also used regular (salted) butter, part of the recipe too. The end product tasted to me way too salty, and then I took a little raw taste of baking soda and realized how salty it was. I ended up throwing the banana bread out. I noticed other recipes too that seemed to be heavy handed with the baking soda. I'm not any kind of expert and maybe many people prefer this taste, but we go light on the salt here. Maybe many of the other recipes are fine. This is just my one experience.
3826253
I ended up making my own lactation cookies using a recipe I found online.  Mine tasted much better because they were fresher.  Also a couple of these cookies were broken in the mail, which is fine but when you only get 10 you want them to be whole cookies and not crumbs!
1572065
I will give it credit for having healthy ingredients, however the package is only a one time use.  It cost me $22 after shipping. Then it did not cook up well.  they came out very flat. You can do better from scratch.  There are many very healthy Vegan pancake recipes out there, that are just about as easy as this one is and they will come out much more appetizing.
719287
I really want to love this cookbook. I love Jamie's Food Revolution shows and some of the food they show on there looks so good and easy. I was hoping this book would be full of that, but it's not. The premise of the book is affordable, healthy meals, but the meals I have done have been more expensive than what I am typically cooking (but they are full of healthy things). Some of the instructions are not as well written as they could be. As an example, one of the recipes I did called for me chop a butternut squash into one inch pieces. Then it tells you to cut them smaller. Why not just tell me what size they should be in the first place, especially on something like a butternut squash that is more difficult to cut?

I do like that it is a cookbook where I know all the ingredients going into my meals and as long as I don't use products with artificial ingredients, they aren't in the finished product.

I will continue to use this cookbook, but not as often as I was hoping.
866850
Kinda corny... made in someone's kitchen and not very impressive.
3334558
Not all the recipes are "super easy". Some of them take a decent amount of prep work. Of the recipes I've tried they've been good though.
4492447
I love the girls of "A Beautiful Mess." I did not love this book. I actually avoided preordering this book and didn't expect to buy it. I bought it after reading reviews and believing that nothing these girls do could be bad. This book reads exactly like the blog, however I was expecting more "grown up" projects for a handmade home that will last. Sharpies on mugs and dishes are a nice idea for a quick DIY project on the blog, but not what I expected out of this book. I feel like a lot of the projects in this book were rehashed from the blog. This was just disappointing.
4393319
I have been eating paleo for 3 years, and I have tried a lot of things, so I feel like I have the street cred to make an informed review about this. More and more companies are coming up with commercial products to appeal to those of us on this diet, and that's exciting. But basically, there is just no magic sugar bomb chocolately goodness goodie out there that I have probably not already made myself. And if it's that yummy, I probably shouldn't be eating it anyway. And this stuff, it's just...meh. Yes it's mildly chocolately, yes it's mildly sweet. It's also gritty...so that guy that's using it in his coffee, well that didn't work for me. It's not like frosting. It's just, well, slightly chocolately coconut oil. Do you like to just consume coconut oil? No? I don't either. Anything I bake that had that and chocolate, I just added the chocolate in the recipe. So this and the vanilla one just sit in my cupboard.
3132798
The recipes I've tried make the food really mushy. So there is a lot of experimenting that needs to be done. The pre-sets overcook everything.
1399417
It was okay, not great - certainly not like homemade. Too thin, without any body. Needs more potatoes and veggies if you plan to make it. Unfortunately, I didn't realize and wasn't prepared to add more body to the soup, so we had to live with it as it was. Just okay.