Lane - Dinner Just for Two

Christina Lane To Brian. For everything. This unexpected career has put me on a whirlwind pathyou always set me straight and steer me toward the big picture. If no one hears our small-batch cooking gospel, at least you believed in me. It means the world to me. I love you.

And to Camille, my sweet baby. Your face is the reason I get out of bed in the morning, and I work hard every day to show you how to chase your own dreams someday. Mama loves you.

Ive come to learn over the years that there is a great amount of fear and avoidance surrounding cooking. I grew up cooking, so Im a little less fearful than most, but when I think back to those first few years out on my own, in college, I can remember fumbling around in the kitchen. But over the years, as cooking has moved from my hobby to my passion to my full-time job, Ive learned that all you need is practice.

No one walks into the kitchen a fantastic cook. Nothing about cooking comes naturallyit is like a science experiment that you must perform in the right order or it flops. No one naturally knows how to do science without being taught first, right? I tackled my trepidation in the kitchen two ways: by watching cooking shows and by practicing. I would watch Rachael Ray or Giada De Laurentiis (often skipping class, ha ha) on TV, and it would fill me with confidence. They made it look so easy! So, I would bounce off the couch and head to the store for ingredients (often, finding unfamiliar ingredients can be the hardest part of cooking!), then come home and try to cook just like them. It wasnt perfect, not even close, but the first time I made a pot of my favorite soupminestrone, a recipe by Rachael Ray that made 16 servingsI was proud.

And then I just kept at it. The more I flexed my cooking muscle, the bigger it became. To improve, you just gotta get in there and do it. The more you do it, the better youll get. And then one day youll wake up and find yourself riffing on your leftovers in the fridge and coming up with a meal on your own. And when that day happens, I want you to step back and celebrate, because cooking is a skill that is hard-won and should be celebrated.

So, start with just one day a week. Make dinner. Slow down and enjoy the process. Ive always believed that when learning how to cook, its best to start small. I started my business sharing small dessert recipes (Dessert for Two, actually) and loved that it inspired confidence in the kitchen. Its a lot easier to master a small recipe for four cupcakes rather than try for a large recipe that makes 36 cupcakes and risk a recipe failure.

If a small recipe fails, its a lot fewer wasted ingredients. Once you can confidently make a small recipe, youre ready to scale up. The recipes in this book can absolutely be scaled up to serve a larger crowd. But if Im being honest, I created these recipes for small households like mine. I was single and living on my own when I learned how to cook, and, often, cutting a regular recipe in half didnt work. I was inspired to create recipes for households of one or two people.

Just because youre not a family of six doesnt mean you dont get to enjoy food! Most recipes make six to eight servings, which contributes to a lot of food waste, even with a family of four. My recipes aim to make enough food for dinner tonight with the potential of leftovers for lunch the next day. And thats it. No more pans of lasagna that make 17 servings. No more getting tired of leftovers and tossing them in the bin. I feel so strongly about reducing food waste that I compiled a list of recipes in the back of the book to help you use the remaining portion of food you might have from making one or two recipes.

If you have a large bunch of cilantro left over from making my Creamy Chicken Enchiladas, then I want you to know that there are 16 other recipes here to help you use the remaining bundle of herbs, including a cilantro pesto that youll want to slather on everything. While I am incredibly blessed that my household of one became a household of three when I got married and had my daughter, we still cook small dinners. We do this mainly because we enjoy cooking together every night. If I make a large recipe for a stew on Monday, were not only facing leftovers, but were also limiting our ability to make something new the next night. Small-batch cooking is in my blood. My grandmother scaled down almost every recipe she made, and I cherish her vintage 6-inch pie pan.

I remember her small apple pies that used one or two apples instead of a 5-pound bag. I come from a semifamous restaurant family in Dallas, and so cooking for people and feeding them well is important to me. I do it with love, and I do it often. My grandma and her sister, Rose, ran a restaurant in Dallas called Roses Bluebonnet Sandwich Shop. When my mom was little, Roses was the place where all downtown Dallas workers stopped by for a plate lunch. Rose got up early and flipped the barbecue in the smokers; her arms and hands were black from the smoke.

When the original Bonnie and Clyde was being filmed in Dallas, she was tasked with feeding the crew during filming. Rose fed people well. Over the years, Roses transitioned from barbecue plate lunches to burgers only. After that, my grandma helped Rose fend off the celebrities and press that wanted to sing the praises of the best hamburgers ever because the two of them really couldnt handle any more business. When D Magazine would write about her or when Mickey Mantle would tell someone to eat there, the two of them would groan and complain as the line formed out the door. When Don Henley dedicated a song to her burgers at a concert my parents attended, we laughed because we knew Rose was gonna be pissed.

When I was a teenager, I began spending part of my summer in the restaurant during lunch service. I remember my grandma counting tickets at the end of each day, and I recall 75 to 120 burgers was the usual amount. We called her restaurant Rosies, never Bluebonnet, and none of us has ever had a better burger anywhere. Rose passed when I was in college, and, unfortunately, my grandmother passed a few years after that. I didnt quite know that the summers I spent working in her restaurant would mean anything to me later in life. I only knew that all of the adults around me talked frequently about how she should retire and take a break from feeding and serving people.

Shed been doing it too long, in their opinion. But she didnt. When she called for an ambulance on a Friday afternoon (after lunch service and cleaning up the kitchen), she knew if she went to the hospital, she wouldnt be coming home. She was right. There are still remnants of Rose in Dallas. Ive just moved back to Texas after 12 years away, and Ive never felt more comfortable in my own skin in this town.

I love Texas with my whole heart. Its an identity for me. Rose is still a beacon to me and to the city of Dallas. And she did it all with her sister. Neither of them are here anymore to help me with my journey to have a career in the food world, but, as strong women, they would tell me that women dont really need help; we just need time to figure things out. Ive been told that I cook like Rose.