Forget complicated! Enjoy cooking daily meals
`Cooking doesn't have to be complicated to be delicious'
For those of us working from home during the pandemic, it may seem like we have all the time in the world to contemplate dinner.
With no commute to face, the workday bleeds into yet another evening at home. Walking from the table (or desk if you're lucky) to the kitchen is as much of a transition as you're going to get.
With many other critical worries on our minds, it's easy for dinner to become an afterthought.
The struggle for meal ideas hasn't gone away amid the COVID-19 chaos. It's just sunk deeper into the chasm of concerns occupying our thoughts. And as much as baking has become a popular pastime, one cannot live on banana bread and brownies alone.
During the pandemic, maintaining the dinner custom has only become more of a priority for author Claire Tansey.
Inspired by enthusiastic reader responses to the dinner recipes in her first book, Uncomplicated (Penguin Canada, 2018), she decided to follow it up with a focus on the evening meal in Dinner Uncomplicated (Page Two, 2020).
“It's always been my driving belief that cooking doesn't have to be complicated to be delicious,” says Tansey. “That's who I am. That's the kind of cooking I do whether I'm on the clock or writing for somebody else or if I'm just cooking for me.”
Providing strategies, advice and an array of dinner recipes seemed timely when Tansey started writing the book last fall. But in the intervening months, it's proven to be more useful than she ever anticipated. “Now that we've all been forced to cook for ourselves every night of the week, I think a book that's about making dinner easier and less stressful is almost critically necessary,” says Tansey, laughing. “It seems even more important to allow yourself to carve out space to cook dinner.”
A former chef, Tansey goes by the title “food pro.” As someone who's filled various roles throughout her more than two-decadeslong culinary career — from baker at Whole Foods to product developer at President's Choice — she says if there's a mistake to be made, she's made it.
Informed by her professional knowledge, past missteps and successes, she takes a realistic approach to home cooking.
Home cooks shouldn't be expected to behave like chefs, Tansey emphasizes, “but that doesn't make home cooking any less wonderful or any less nourishing or joyful or fabulous. It's just different.”
This belief plays out in Dinner Uncomplicated in numerous ways: The recipes in the 15 Minutes chapter, for example, don't call for any premade ingredients such as caramelized onions that would take 45 minutes to make on their own.
Tansey set her timer before she opened the fridge, started chopping or heated pans on burners, and if she wasn't eating in 15 minutes, the recipe couldn't be included in that chapter. In developing the book's 90 recipes, Tansey considered any possible shortcut she could take and “stretched and reached out into every aisle of the grocery store for ideas.”
The 15-minute cut-off is the lightest commitment time-wise, followed by chapters devoted to 45 Minutes or Less, Set It and Forget It, Make It Ahead, Sunday Stash (in which “you do favours for your future self”), Weekends and Celebrations, and Side Dishes.
“One of the big things that I discovered when I was writing this book about how to make dinner easier is how important meal planning is,” says Tansey.