Cheating at the Weeknight Dinner Game
I don’t blame you for assuming that someone who lovvvvvvvvvves to cook (and talk about it) as much as I do just bangs together satisfying and nutritious meals effortlessly, week in and week out, NBD.
Further, I don't blame you for throwing some shade in my direction when I tell you that I (gasp) ordered a recipe delivery box this week. Yeah, you heard me. I'm talking micro-portions of spices that I already obviously own. I'm talking plastic containers inside bags inside boxes. I'm talking two pre-measured tablespoons of Dijon mustard.
I'm also talking three magical evenings when I came home from work and didn't have to think about what the fuck to make for dinner. Judge not, my friends, because I guarantee that you all know the weeknight dinner struggle is real.
Even when you're doing it all right- whizzing up protein-packed smoothies full of leafy greens and homemade nut milks and algae that consumes wrinkles from the inside out. Spending entire Sundays batch-cooking ancient grains to be topped with gut-gracing fermented things and sprinkled with dulse and dukkah and sex dust for power lunches. Even when you've actually planned ahead, dinner can go off the rails faster than you can pop off your bra and pull on your cozy pants.
I have a kind of love/hate relationship with The Kitchn, but there's no denying they're an excellent resource for getting your meal-planning shit together. You can learn how to use Google Sheets to get organized, or if you've got information design OCD, Bullet Journalling. I like the idea of meal templates- pasta night, stirfry night, fish night, etc, etc. This gives you what an old colleague of mine would call "freedom within a framework," a wonky aphorism if there ever was one, but an idea that I find holds up in innumerable contexts. It's a good way to approach meal-planning with a little structure, but not fall into the hopeless rut of making the same things all the time. If you're like me, boredom is the death knell of cooking motivation. With templates, you can have a weekly curry night and still never have to eat the same one twice. Unless you want to. You do you.
Since I'm just cooking for my partner (yipes, make that husband...) and myself, it's much less consequential if we let things slide and succomb to the siren song of ordering a takeaway. But if you're cooking for your family, sticking to a plan is pretty much non-negotiable for maintaining your focus, your sanity, and your budget. In which case, you should be following my lady Leigh, whose personal project of planning her family's meals on her kitchen chalkboard is being formed into a gorgeous new book that'll be available in the coming months. Meanwhile, follow her weekly menus here.
In a stroke of remarkable serendipity, our kitchen gal Friday Melissa Clark this week released Dinner: Changing the Game, adding to her indispensable collection of books for everyday cooks. Clark reliably cranks out two hundred more of her unfussy and on-trend recipes to keep the spark alive in your weeknight routines. She is the undisputed queen of the sheetpan dinner, and I bow down to her. While I'm still trying to rev up my kitchen mojo in another new space, I'm pretty sure I can handle pulling together her smoky paprika chicken with roasted chickpeas and kale, or maybe even a simple eggplant gratin with goat's cheese topped with buttery, herby panko crunchies.
I'll tell you a secret, though. I don't usually buy cookbooks like Clark's. Not because they're not full of simple, clever, and inspiring recipes that I would love to cook and eat. I mean, obviously they are. It's because I pretend I don't need them. And I don't, really. I know exactly what I need to do in order to produce smoky paprika chicken with roasted chickpeas and kale. All the detail I require is pretty much conveyed in the title. I don't need the recipes. What I need is her ideas.
While I'm bestowing confidences here, let me also tell you that since being on this side of the pond, I've fallen for the irresistable charms (ok, lots of people find him decidely resistable) of Jamie Oliver. There's never a time when I'm watching one of his bazillion series that I don't come away with a pocketful of great ideas for wholesome, inventive meals, like pappardelle with slow-cooked leeks and porcini pangrattato. Yeah, you want that!
To ward off the insidious combination of laziness and cook's block, I've recently subscribed to the fantastic NYT Cooking newsletter that's compiled three times a week by Sam Sifton. Naturally Melissa Clark's brilliant ideas factor heavily here, but you'll find a generally excellent round-up of inspiration from around the web, in addition to Sifton's delightful wit and spot-on reading recommendations. If you sign up to one more newsletter next to my own, make it this one. I may not have the time or energy this weekend to make good on his suggestion of baking hamantaschen, (consider that Breads recipe bookmarked!) but I gladly followed through on his solid recommendation of Mike Birbiglia's latest special on Netflix, Thank God for Jokes.
We watched it while eating takeaway ramen.
There's no shortage of superb material out there revisiting the tenets of conventional home ec wisdom, but I think we can all admit that these sorts of adulting skills are becoming a lost art in our convenience and service-oriented culture. I don't think it's because we're any busier and more harried than previous generations, I just think we're paralysed by choice. Hence the paradox that has given rise to minimalism, Marie Kondo (how I am seriously writing about her TWICE today?), and capsule wardrobes.
So back to that recipe delivery box then. Don't think I approached this decision without a healthy dose of skepticism. I still see a number of challenges- in packaging, in customization, in recipe testing, that any one of the many emerging meal delivery kits will need to tweak with continued iteration. (And I would love to help!) The kit I selected ticked a number of critical boxes for my tastes: locally-sourced seasonal ingredients, an emphasis on veggie-forward recipes, and ready in around 30 minutes. I'll admit that following a recipe felt a little more fiddly that what I'd normally do, but if that's the trade-off for not having to conceive of at least three well-rounded meals on my own each week, then I'll take it. In fact, the dishes fit really well with things already in my rotation: yakitori-style chicken stir-fried with ginger, leeks, and greens and tossed with noodles; lamb meatball and lentil stew scented with a heady blend of warm Middle Eastern spices. I'll finish the kit tomorrow with black bean burgers in pita, topped with harissa yogurt sauce and a side of crunchy fennel-beet slaw.
I already ordered another round for this week.