Dawn Perry - Ready, Set, Cook: How To Make Good Food with Whats On Hand (No Fancy Skills, Fancy Equipment, or Fancy Budget Required)

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At the beginning of quarantine, which coincided with the bulk of my recipe development for this book, I wrote down and often posted publicly a daily gratitude list. Many days the list included things like butter, salt, and terrible streaming reality TV shows. What it didnt always include were the names of the individuals who made the writing of this book (and my day-to-day life) pretty easy, all things considered.

My deepest gratitude to my mom and dad, my sisters and their families for their unconditional love and endless good humor. I would choose you even if I wasnt lucky enough to call you family. To the Duckors for their love, support, and interest in the process.

Thank you to my agent, Kristin van Ogtrop: for your wit, smarts, and willingness to stick with me as I kneaded a half-baked idea into something worth sharing. I am so grateful for your guidance, your belief in me, and for that one time you told me I might be the most likeable person in New York City.

Thank you to the friends, family, and gifted cooks who tested the recipes in this book, for lending their time and skills: Theo Kaloudis, Mardi Miskit, Sana Lemoine, Charlyne Mattox, Sara Tane, Ananda Eidelstein, Grace Elkus, Greg Brownstein, Danielle Walsh, Eliza Lucas, Sarah Manganiello, Mollie Chen, and Rob Bonstein.

Thank you to my food friends, former colleagues, teachers, and students for helping me see food and cooking through so many different lenses. My deepest thanks to Adeena Sussman, Angela Cha, Antoni Porowski, Ben Mims, Claire Saffitz, Ethan Frisch, Grace Hahn, Jenny Rosenstrach, Jing Gao, Lior Lev Sercarz, Nik Sharma, and Sue Li for your kind words and helpful insights.

Thank you to Pam Zola, Kelly Keyes, Kari Woldum, Lauren Perth, Leah Pearson, Nancy Feig, Nancy Cha, Kate Ball, Tracy Wasserman, Erin Berlant Haggerty, the Bocar-Passettes, and the Wilsons for years of friendship and feedback and for never needing a backstory.

Thank you to the best shoot crew in the biz for your focus, laughter, free dance, and deep breaths. To photographer David Malosh for being honest, forgiving, and a consummate host; to prop stylists Megan Hedgepeth and John Lingenfelter, for making laid-back look really lovely. And to Jess Damuck: It never feels like work with you.

Thank you to the artists who helped make the proposal and finished product look so damn fine. To Alyce Jones for communicating in the proposals design what I didnt always have the language for. Thank you to Ali Cameron for your easy laugh, great glasses, and impeccable email response time. Thank you to designer and guru George McCalman for your decades of friendship and camaraderie, for knowing me so well and seeing me so fully, and for illustrating all of that in these pages.

To my brilliant editor Emily Graff: Thank you for your patience and enthusiasm throughout this process. The day we met I was sweaty, pregnant, and very scattered. Thank you for putting me at ease that day and every Friday since. Thank you to Brittany Adames and Lashanda Anakwah, to Jackie Seow, Ruth Mui-Lee, Beth Maglione, Samantha Hoback, Elizabeth Herman, Alyssa diPierro, Kimberly Goldstein, Rafael Taveras, Maxwell Smith and the rest of the team at Simon & Schuster for your time, input, and expertise.

Thank you, Matt, my cheerleader and champion. And to Ramona, and Russell, for keeping everything in perspective. Its all for you.

With love,

DP

I didnt plan dinner tonight. But Im not stressed. I pulled some salmon out of the freezer at lunchtime. I have some boiled potatoes in the fridge, and Ill toss some green beans with a little vinaigrette. Dinner will be ready in no time.

I didnt always cook this way. About fifteen years ago, I was hanging out with some friends after a celebratory evening on the town. We came home to their Brooklyn apartment and we needed a snack, stat. Too hungry to wait for pizza delivery, I started digging through the fridge and cupboard. I cant remember if they challenged me or if I took it on myself, but I was determined to make something delicious out of whatever they had on hand.

What if cooking could be fun and fast and easy all the time?

I was twenty-six, just getting my start in editorial foodthats industryspeak for writing recipes for magazinesand was still hung up on the nose to tail, root to tip, know your farmer by their first name food snobbery that plagues a lot of young food professionals. These are all good thingscertainly better for the planetbut swing too far in that righteous direction, and these views can be narrow at best and condescending at worst. Organic and ethically sourced ingredients are a priority for me, but there have been times in my life when the best I could afford was conventional produce and supermarket-brand staples. Im not going to tell someone they cant or shouldnt cook for themselves and their family because somethings too expensive or too hard to find.

But back to that night in Brooklyn. Perhaps it was necessity that softened my snobbery (or the alcohol). There were no market-fresh vegetables in the crisper, no aged cheddar in the deli drawer. I found a couple handfuls of pregrated cheese, half a box of penne, a little milk (skim, I think), and a bag of flour. I got it!

Cut to the three of us perched on the edge of the plush gray sofa, hands cupping steaming bowls of stovetop mac and cheese, friends impressed, all of us satisfied. An idea started to twinkle. What if cooking could be this fun and fast and easy all the time? No long grocery lists, no special market trips, but accessible, convenient, and at my fingertips.

I am a cook by trade. I got my start after college when, at a friends suggestion, I moved to the Bay Area (Jen: Im moving to San Francisco and I think you should come with me. Me: OK!). I was bright-eyed, bushy-tailed, and without direction. So I did what any practical person would do: I went to culinary school. Soon I found a job as a prep cook in a restaurant. Every grain of farro, every foraged mushroom, every fairy tale eggplant was from within a hundred miles of our kitchen and always peak-season perfect. Fish caught just that morning arrived on ice at the back door. Sides of beef and whole lambs came from nearby farms with noble-sounding names, like Kicking Bull and Don Watson. I once transported a whole hog, on the back seat of my car, from Chezas they called Chez Panisse, in Berkeleyback to the city for that weeks dinner service (I put down a tarp).