Helwig - Bare Minimum Dinners: Recipes and Strategies for Doing Less in the Kitchen

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To Dave and Rosen,
My favorite dinner companions

Copyright 2021 by Jenna Helwig

Photography copyright 2021 by Linda Xiao

All rights reserved

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

hmhbooks.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

ISBN 978-0-358-434719 (print)

ISBN 978-0-358-43546-4 (ebook)

Book and cover design by Melissa Lotfy

Cover photography by Linda Xiao

v1.0821

Acknowledgments

Sharon Bowers, I raise my Negroni glass to you! Cheers to another project together, and thank you for always being in my corner.

To my editor, Stephanie Fletcher, thank you for your faith in me and in the concept of this book. I am so grateful for your guidance. And to the amazing team at HMH, including Rebecca Springer, Bridget Nocera, Samantha Simon, Jacqueline Quirk, and Kevin Watt; working with you is a true pleasure. Melissa Lotfy, thank you for your creative vision and design expertise.

I am blown away by the beauty of the book youre holding in your hands. Credit goes to the photography dream team: Linda Xiao, Maeve Sheridan, and Monica Pierini, who powered through six days of shooting with energy, enthusiasm, and smiles under face masks. Thank you for caring so much about Bare Minimum Dinners!

Suzy Scherr, you are a bona fide slow cooker genius, and Im so appreciative. Renae Wilson, thank you for your meticulous recipe testing and friendship.

The inspiration for this book came from my close friends, the (mostly) women who hustle so hard to feed themselves and the people they love on a daily basis. Cooking dinner most nights is a wonderful thing, but it isnt easy. My friendsconsider this book a small thank-you for your enduring love and support. Grace Bastidas, Audrey Bellezza, Heather Date, Allison Graham, Emily Harding, Jessica Winchell Morsa, Nicole Page, Felicity Rowe, Danielle Wilkie, and Zoran Zgoncyou are all in my heart.

Laura Fenton, its so fun to have you as a companion on this book-writing adventure! Thanks for keeping me accountable.

Thank you to my friends and colleagues at Real Simple , Parents , and Health , especially Liz Vaccariello, who gave me my dream job, and Ananda Eidelstein, with whom it is my true delight to work with every day. Thank you also to Steve Engel and Heidi Reavis; Im so happy to still be part of the Engel Entertainment family after all these years.

Speaking of familyAndy and Linda Helwig, David and China Helwig, Cole, Tasha, and Daphne, I wish I could have dinner with you more often. I love you, and I miss you.

And to my regular dinner companions, Dave and Rosen, thank you for your patience with my experiments, your good humor when things dont go exactly as planned, your enthusiastic appetites, and your unflagging support. You are my everythings.

I have spent much of my career urging people to do more in the kitchenoften with the goal of making weeknight dinners less stressful. Ive touted weekend meal prep sessions, carefully curated pantries, big batches of dinners for the freezer, homemade marinara sauce, and DIY pizza crust, all with the goal of serving delicious, healthy-ish homemade meals most nights of the week.

I wasnt wrong! And yet...

As my life has become ever busier and my friends lives have gotten more hectic, and as Ive heard from readers and the fans of my previous books, Ive had a change of heart. My goal is still the same: more cooking at home for yummy, nourishing dinners. But my strategy has changed.

I realized that instead of doing more, we should all strive to do less in the kitchen, to spend less time shopping, cooking, and cleaning up. Of course, this doesnt mean that there wont be special meals or even weekend dinners where we spend an hour or three in the kitchen (and I confess, thats one of my favorite ways to pass the time... when I have the time).

But on a daily basis, life is just too busyand the truth is, most people (probably you and me included) would rather be doing something else .

And while theres no shame in outsourcing dinner occasionally (trust me, I feel no shame), homemade is still the goal, for a whole host of reasons, including:

• Unless youre eating truffles and fancy cheeses every night or, conversely, eating only at fast food joints, home-cooked meals are usually less expensive than restaurant food.
• Its also healthier. The recipes in this book werent created to fit into any rigid nutritional parameters, but chances are theyll have less sodium, less saturated fat, and more real, whole ingredients than most delivery or takeout food.
• You know exactly whats in your food. Even if you use a jar of store-bought sauce in a meal, youll be able to see the ingredient list and make choices about what goes into your dinner. This is especially helpful if you or someone in your family has a dietary restriction or food allergy.

So instead of stressing out about dinner, I propose that to feed our families happily, we strive to simply skate by. This cookbook gives you permission to take smart supermarket shortcuts, to skip the mile-long ingredient list, to just say no to pre-prepping homemade sauces, togasp!omit the garnish. In this book, we do the bare minimum, and it tastes delicious.

About the Icons

Many of the recipes in this book are marked with one of these two symbols:

Vegetarian. These dishes dont contain any meat, poultry, or fish, or come with easy instructions to Make It Meatless.

These are the MVPs. In a word, these recipes are gold. They may show up in any of the main dish chapters, and they deliver on time, ingredients, and equipment, meaning they require 30 minutes or less, include seven ingredients or less, and come together in a single pot or pan.

Each chapter addresses a specific dinnertime pain point, be it cook time, ingredients, cleanup, hands-on time, or how to round out a meal. All of them feature recipes that are an easy lift.

will get you set up for supper success. From recommended kitchen gear to workhorse pantry items, being prepared will make cooking even easier.