This is a book every one of us can use:
- Food novices or experienced cooks
- Single folks starting out, busy parents, or empty-nesters who find they have even less time on their hands [although they don’t know why!]
- People who open cans and uses frozen vegetables or those who threw away their can opener decades ago
- Lovok that every one of us can use:
- ers of American, Mexican, Italian, Greek or Asian cooking
- People whose favorite food is meat — chicken, turkey, beef, salmon — or just veggies and pasta
- Cooks who need a fix in less than an hour or folks with patience to let their slow cooker bubble for hours
You fit somewhere in that spectrum of cookers and eaters. So somewhere, in the 200 recipes in One-Pot Dinners, somewhere you will find temptation. Probably “somewheres” and not just one “somewhere.”
There are six chapters in One-Pot Dinner, each devoted to a style of cooking where an entire meal can be made in a pot or on the stove:
- Casseroles are devote to those baked one-dish meals that were fashionable half a century ago and deserve new attention
- Pot Pies present ideas that have never faded and are now even more popular
- Oven-Roasted Dinners are very traditional meals but now with veggies added so you do have just a one-tray baking or roasting away in your oven
- Stovetop Meals allow you quickly craft you entire meal in one pot laden with lots of ingredients and in just a very short time
- Slow-Cooker Choices allow your ingredients to blend for hours and hours, giving the benefit of aroma long before you actually taste
- Soups, Stews, and Chilies let you fashion very sophisticated dishes that you’ll consume one lovely spoonful at a time.
Now, if you read this blog often, you’ll know that Suzen and I favor homemade, local, fresh, from scratch. We favor those ideas, but we know not everyone can cook that way all the time. We don’t. Sometimes, the exigencies of life mean that you need to cook, for a family, for a hungry family. Going to your pantry shelf for a can of soup, to your freezer for some frozen veggies like corn, is something we all do. The great thing about One-Pot Dinners is that you can make that meal with some style and in a hurry.
And, and, One-Pot Dinners has other recipes where you do peel your sweet potatoes instead of defrosting them. Where you use broth and not soup.
Best of all, One-Pot Dinners is filled with ideas that you probably won’t have encountered but which may easily become part of your standard portfolio. Consider these lovely one-pot meal ideas:
Apple Cinnamon and Butternut Squash Soup
Bean and Barley Chili with Cilantro Sour Cream
Beer-braised Short Rib Dinner
Caramelized Onion Beef Stew
Chipotle Four-Bean Chili with Lime
Roasted Vegetable Lasagna with Goat Cheese
Tropical Stuffed Cabbage Rolls with Pineapple
Turkey Butternut Squash Ragout
Wild Rice Turkey Pot Pie
Yes, the book has regular chicken pot pie and spaghetti with meat balls and many other standards. And I’m not at all suggesting you not look at those recipes. But I think these more elevated, more sophisticated recipes are the reason to take this book home and begin experimenting.
Better yet, the recipes in this book really are templates for you. Every one of these recipes can be tinkered with. You can change the spices, top with sour cream, swap out one ingredient for another. The recipe calls for chicken soup and you have homemade chicken stock? By all means personalize the recipe. There’s a recipe in the book for Chicken Mushroom Pot Pie and it’s the day after Thanksgiving? What better way to enjoy your turkey leftovers.
One-Pot Dinners is book that will satisfy whatever culinary path you have chosen to follow. And, I’m sure, it may tempt you to take some shortcuts and try new directions in your kitchen. You’ll find many ways to use One-Pot Dinners, one night at a time.