The biggest issue with their recipes is that they, to an extent, tell you to do things in the wrong order. Picking a random recent one we had there was a step to season the meat and then heat some oil and then cook the meat. Well, heating the oil (to the point you'd want to add the meat) can take a few minutes and should have started before you even got the meat out of the package. What you actually have to do with the recipes is read the entire thing to find all the meat and produce and spice prep steps and all the measuring steps. Do all of those first while the oven is heating and maybe the pan with oil (though this can usually be delayed until you put something in the oven since the total stovetop time is usually 5-10 minutes less than the oven time). Then you start cooking, usually, with the recipes we've had, by putting a baking sheet of vegetables in to roast. Then start heating the oil (maybe a few minutes delay) and then start cooking the meat.
If you do that, the prep part takes 5-10 minutes depending on your knife skills and then the cooking takes as long as the longest cooking step (usually a vegetable roasting step). You cannot execute their recipes as written in the time they suggest, but you can definitely cook the meals in the time they suggest if you read the recipe and execute it in a proper order.
It would be nice, for people who aren't used to parallelizing work (most of us are engineers and programmers here, it's kind of what we do) if they laid it out differently, with a timeline or something.
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Prep: List all prep steps (chopping, dicing, measuring, seasoning, mixing sauces, etc.)
4. After 10 minutes remove onions, add oil, wait a minute and add meat (the pan will be so hot the oil needs little time to heat up)
5. Flip meat after 5 minutes
6. Remove meat from heat (have description and target temperature so people can know it's actually done), plate and cover with onions and herb butter mix (described in prep steps)
7. Remove vegetables from oven (include description of how they should look so they aren't over/undercooked) and plate
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That's how essentially every recipe ends up executing from what I've seen. If you read and parse the recipe steps into the actual prep portion (which they mix throughout) and heating portions (which they often list after they should be started) and cooking portions, the prep and cook times (more the cook times, prep depends on skill and focus) are pretty spot on.
This has been a long-standing gripe of mine when it comes to recipe syntax - by listing all the ingredients up front, recipes look like they should be parseable with a single pass, but in practice there are too many forward-references. I recently bought a cookbook for my child which has recipes written in a clear, procedural way, and the absence of gotchas is really refreshing: I wish this style would become standard.
If you do that, the prep part takes 5-10 minutes depending on your knife skills and then the cooking takes as long as the longest cooking step (usually a vegetable roasting step). You cannot execute their recipes as written in the time they suggest, but you can definitely cook the meals in the time they suggest if you read the recipe and execute it in a proper order.
It would be nice, for people who aren't used to parallelizing work (most of us are engineers and programmers here, it's kind of what we do) if they laid it out differently, with a timeline or something.
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Prep: List all prep steps (chopping, dicing, measuring, seasoning, mixing sauces, etc.)
1. Put baking sheet of vegetables into oven2. Add oil to pan and set to medium-high heat
3. Add onions to heated pan (stirring, etc.)
4. After 10 minutes remove onions, add oil, wait a minute and add meat (the pan will be so hot the oil needs little time to heat up)
5. Flip meat after 5 minutes
6. Remove meat from heat (have description and target temperature so people can know it's actually done), plate and cover with onions and herb butter mix (described in prep steps)
7. Remove vegetables from oven (include description of how they should look so they aren't over/undercooked) and plate
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That's how essentially every recipe ends up executing from what I've seen. If you read and parse the recipe steps into the actual prep portion (which they mix throughout) and heating portions (which they often list after they should be started) and cooking portions, the prep and cook times (more the cook times, prep depends on skill and focus) are pretty spot on.