Family meals don't have to be elaborate and time-consuming. The basic ingredients are simple: ideas and planning. And plenty of sources can help.
By JANET K. KEELER
Published May 14, 2003
Where did we get the idea that it takes hours to make a decent meal?
Pasta cooks in 10 minutes. A boneless, skinless chicken breast is ready to eat in 20. Shrimp turns spanking pink in less than 5 minutes. Most vegetables hit their peak in under 10.
Yet we cling to the notion that it is lack of time that makes us rely on monster restaurant chains and precooked institutional foods to feed our families. We swear that if we had more time, our families would eat home-cooked meals every night, thus becoming healthier and happier and never, ever whining.
The truth is, time does not equal good food. The crucial elements are planning and ideas. Oh yeah, and knowing how to cook.
The Food Network's Rachael Ray, who never cooks a meal that doesn't suit her on 30 Minute Meals, is masterful at showing what can be done in under a half-hour. One day she is building curry burgers, the next she's searing ahi tuna to be served over greens drizzled with wasabi vinaigrette. The variety is dizzying: chicken Kiev, grilled veggie sandwiches, steak smothered in onions, fish stew, Greek meatballs, Vietnamese salad.
Okay, she's got a TV show and a staff. You can barely get help setting the table. (One quibble with Ray's otherwise instructive and inspiring show: She uses too many pots and pans. Who wants to make meals in minutes with cleanups that take longer?)
What Ray teaches us over and over again, though, is that ideas are gold.
That's why Christy Nelson of St. Petersburg, a busy mother of two young children, employs the help of www.menumailer.net Her kids won't eat casseroles, and she's not wild about the "meat and two sides" meal. In addition, she doesn't want to cook for more than 45 minutes but still wants to serve healthy, fresh meals.
Each week she gets an e-mail from Menu-Mailer that lists six dishes plus suggested sides, as well as a shopping list. Sample dishes on the Web site include apple chicken, beef and bean burritos, easy minestrone soup, ginger-glazed salmon and slow-cooker chicken stew.
"I generally pick four or five of the meals and have a breakfast-for-dinner night as well," Nelson wrote in an e-mail to the Taste section. Subscription rates for Menu-Mailer, the brainchild of cookbook author and certified nutritional consultant Leanne Ely, range from $9.95 for three months to $29.95 for a year.
Epicurious, which gleans recipes from Bon Appetit and Gourmet magazines, appeals to more experienced cooks and includes feedback from home cooks, a valuable tool in assessing the recipe.
It is difficult to resist a recipe for scallop chowder when John from Flower Mound, Texas, writes, "The recipe was very savory given the speed of its preparation. . . . An excellent, fast recipe, and one that I will surely keep." But a cook from Glasgow, Scotland, torpedoed broiled eggplant with garlic sauce by saying, "There was not enough sauce and overall it was quite bland."
The Internet won't help you if you won't do a little planning. Why do baked chicken, meatloaf and grilled pork chops play in regular rotation at your house? Because that's what you keep buying at the grocery store.
Not cooking in cyberspace yet? Turn to a cookbook standard such as Betty Crocker, Joy of Cooking or Better Homes and Gardens. Before you flip back the cover, jot down some categories of dinners: casseroles, soups, salad, slow-cooker, poultry, ethnic, vegetarian, grilled, seafood, beef, pork, sandwiches. Now start looking for recipes that fit the categories.
Let's say you want to cook at home five nights out of the next seven and only one night will be on the weekend. That means at least four of the meals need to be prepared quickly. Rather than relying on tired standards, spin the wheel. Find recipes for vegetarian, ethnic, grilled, slow-cooker and sandwich meals.
Here are recipes we found to match the categories from the newest version of the Better Homes and Gardens Cookbook (2002, $29.95).
Meal No. 1, vegetarian. The crust of Two-Bean Tamale Pie is made with corn muffin mix, and the kidney and pinto beans come courtesy of cans. Cook time is 25 minutes, and prep time is about 15. While the pie is baking, make a tossed salad.
Meal No. 2, ethnic. The cookbook promises that Thai Chicken Stir-Fry can be made, start to finish, in 35 minutes. There's more measuring than chopping, and the savory melange is served over hot rice and topped with chopped peanuts.
Meal No. 3, grilled. Barbecue T-bone steaks, which will take 10 to 20 minutes depending on desired doneness, and serve with Parmesan Cottage-Baked Potatoes and sliced, ripe tomatoes sprinkled with kosher salt and cracked black pepper.
Meal No. 4, slow-cooker. The prep work for Pork Roast with Cherries takes only 20 minutes, but you'll have to do it in the morning because the pork will need about nine hours to get succulent in the Crock-Pot. The recipe calls for 1 tablespoon of quick-cooking tapioca to thicken the sauce, but you can experiment with a tablespoon of flour. Serve over egg noodles, and nuke some broccoli florets.
Meal No. 5, sandwiches. Fish Fillet Muffuletta draws its inspiration from the famed New Orleans sandwich laden with green olives, mortadella and prosciutto. This recipe starts with frozen battered or breaded fish fillets and makes use of prepared salsa and coleslaw. Fresh fruit cuts the richness of the sandwich. You can ring the dinner bell in 25 minutes for this one.
It took about 15 minutes to find these recipes once the categories had been chosen. You've got to grocery shop anyway, so buying the ingredients won't add a burden. You know your family's tastes and your skill level in the kitchen. If the basics are more your style, check out a new cookbook called The Basics (Wiley, $20) by Mark Bittman, a New York Times food columnist whose Simple Cooking appears occasionally in the St. Petersburg Times. His recipe for baked sweet potatoes has two ingredients: four sweet potatoes and butter. He's not kidding about the basics.
Simple or not, Bittman knows we're hungry for meal suggestions.
English author Henry James wrote, "Ideas are, in truth, force." We suggest that they are also what puts home-cooked, satisfying meals on the table regularly.
