Anybody have experience with this?
Somebody told me that basic recipes are in there.
I’m a non-cook but would like to make a few familiar foods.
I get tired of frozen dinners and have no family to hand down recipes.
Only of course I’m not cooking for a lot of people.
I was a Food service specialist in the US Army from 1982 through 1987. We used a set of recipe cards.
You can find them here http://www.quartermaster.army.mil/aces/publications/pubs/recipes/index/full_index.pdf
The standard recipe was for 100 people.
Can I ask the OP, why are you choosing the Army’s cookbook? Are meals from that something that you specifically want to recreate, or is it simply something that you feel will be easy for you to master?
If you’re looking for an easy cookbook, there are a lot out there, and they won’t require you to adjust the size down to something suitable for a single person living alone. Normally, at this time I’d suggest The Joy of Cooking*, but for someone as much a neophyte as you describe yourself to be, I can believe it would be intimidating to face a cookbook that deals with almost all the techniques one might use in a kitchen. It’s actually very good about describing them, and guiding you through them, but it’s still intimidating. The 1975 edition is the one I’d recommend, the 1997 is good, but a bit less of the comfort food and basics, and more on healthy cooking. I have no personal experience with the 2006 edition. Here’s a link to the Joy Kitchen online, which seems to contain many of their recipes.
*Link goes to the 1975 edition
A less intimidating cookbook is Peg Bracken’s The Compleat I Hate to Cookbook. Wry humor, and a lot of quick and dirty recipes.
From my time in Army Green, I can tell you this much:
“Step One: remove all flavor.”
Jesus H. Christ on the cross.
That’s insane.
That’s enough food to feed an army.
Nah, it’s just big enough for some company.
Looking at the recipes themselves, they look pretty decent, really. I think the key things that result in this effect is things like:
“7 1/2 Lbs. frozen egg whites”
“7 1/2 Lbs. frozen eggs”
“5 1/2 Lbs. canned tomatoes”
All the ingredients they use are chosen for large scale, long term storage. Preserving the flavor is of minor consideration. If you were to use store-bought, fresh ingredients, most of the issue would go away.
The other problem is that they’re cooking for a 100 people that all need to be served at roughly the same time. Cook up a big vat of stuff and then let it sit for a couple hours while you make other things, and there you go.
There’s one more issue with institutional cooking: They can’t afford to cook to the tastes of the more adventurous, they have to cook to the tastes of those people who find moderate levels of spices to be overpowering.
So, for the majority, the food is bland and tasteless. But if it were more seasoned, it’s possible that those other people would find it inedible.
Hmm. I’m beginning to think my friend was having fun at my expense. He said he often was called upon to make individual meals for the officer’s dining room. But I suppose he did that with a little pencil math in the margins 
The only recipe worth cooking would be SOS. Most every veteran remembers SOS fondly, even if they joke about it.
(In the Navy, we called it creamed foreskins on toast.)
While I’m sure that’s some of the problem, there’s also the issue of herbs and spices. Or rather, the lack thereof. Look at the Yankee Pot Roast recipe. Not a terrible recipe if you scan down the ingredient list. But look at the amounts: 1 Tablespoon garlic powder? 1 Tablespoon allspice? 1/8 tsp thyme? In a dish for 100 people? That’s crazy talk, man! I use nearly that in a dish for 6! (I use way *more *thyme in a dish for 6, actually.) That ain’t pot roast - that’s meat and veg boiled in salty water!
Little Radius Ulna (great name, by the way), choose a different book. These sure are *easy *recipes, but they’re not going to be *good *recipes, unless you grew up as an army brat eating at the mess hall.
Do you like to know *why *stuff works, and not just what to do? If you’d like to learn how to cook, not just how to make pot roast, then I recommend I’m Just Here For the Food, by Alton Brown. It’s not a regular cookbook - there are only about 50 recipes here. But there’s a lot of very easy to read information on the hows and whys of different cooking methods, with a few recipes as examples. Think of it as a textbook with lab component: You read about a particular method of cooking (say, boiling) and then you try it out in the form of a recipe that uses that method. So if you don’t know a sautée from a sweat, this is a great book for you.
I have made several items from this, they turned out well.