Ying Chang Compestine - Yings Best One-Pot Meals: Quick & Healthy Recipes for the Entire Family

If you ever find yourself standing in the kitchen, wondering what to do for dinner after a long, hard day of work, or after chauffeuring the kids to and from school, music lessons, baseball practice, and the dentists office, you might just find that these quick and delicious one-dish meals are the best answer.

Many of us struggle to find a balance between a concern for our familys well-being and the alleged convenience of processed and fast foods. In todays fast-paced culture, some of us dont realize that healthy meals can be flavorful while also being easy to prepare.

I dont think anyone should be subjected to hours of slaving away in the kitchen washing, chopping, slicing, roasting, and grilling after a busy day, just to provide their family with a healthy, tasty meal. Nor do I think that people should be condemned to peeling open plastic trays of frozen food or buying unwholesome take-out dinners because of the frenzied pace of our modern lifestyles.

With a son who runs cross-country, a husband who enjoys an occasional 80-mile bike ride, and my own passion for competitive badminton, our family is busy, active, and always ready for the next meal. Like most people, I dont have hours to spend in the kitchen preparing food, yet everyone in my family wants delicious, healthy food right away. So I depend on quick, flavorful, and nutritious one-dish meals that use fast cooking techniques and require minimal cleanup. To speed up the process, I enlist my familys help. While spending quality time together, we get to do some things we all love cooking and eating.

The following recipes are among my familys favorites. They have passed the three strict requirements of my sous-chefs quick, healthy, and delicious.

By utilizing fresh prewashed and precut produce, many of the recipes take less than 30 minutes to prepare. With the time spent driving and waiting for an order of unhealthy fast food or budget-busting take-out meal, you could put a healthier, more affordable homemade meal on the table. Each dish is a satisfying meal, combining good proteins with high-fiber, vitamin-rich carbohydrates and fresh vegetables packed with antioxidants and phytonutrients. Many of the dishes are also low in sodium, which helps control high blood pressure and promotes a healthy heart.

I hope the recipes that follow will not only simplify your cooking experience but also make it more enjoyable. Why not start today? Pick one of these simple and healthy dishes and invite your family into the kitchen to cook and eat!

My passion for food began when I was a young girl in Wuhan, China. I liked to follow Nai Nai, my grandmother, around the kitchen, watching her slice meat, pan-fry noodles, and cut tofu. Her skillful knife transformed bamboo shoots into miniature trees; green onions into brushes; and white onions, carrots, and radishes into flowers of all sorts. Along with the beautiful presentation, my grandmother always served vegetables, grains, and lean protein in equilibrium. She would find a task for my small hands so that I could be involved: shelling soybeans, or rinsing the rice between my little fingers. Best of all, I would get to taste what Nai Nai cooked before anyone else, including my voracious older brothers!

Years later, I realized that all that time in the kitchen with Nai Nai not only gave me an edge in my sibling rivalry, it also stirred my enthusiasm for cooking.

In 1987, shortly after I arrived as a graduate student at the University of Colorado in Boulder, I found myself sitting at a long, rectangular table surrounded by my host family. This was my first experience at a restaurant in the United States.

We exchanged small talk, and since I knew very little about American food, and was still shy about speaking English, I asked them to order for me. When the food came, I was shocked. Big cuts of meat and enormous unpeeled potatoes covered everyones plate. Back home, Nai Nai would have made a meal for the whole family from the meat on just one of those plates, and she would have diced the potato into proper bite-size pieces instead of serving it whole! Later I learned that they had taken me to a well-known steak house. I nibbled a bit and waited, hoping that more food would come: vegetables, rice, or noodles. To my disappointment, the only other things brought out were slices of chocolate cake.

This was the first time Id ever eaten a meal without green vegetables or grains. As for that big slab of meat, even with all my effort, I could bring myself to eat only a very small portion. And I was still hungry at the end of the dinner. For the next two years that I lived with them, I started creating recipes by mixing and matching the Western ingredients on hand with the Eastern skills I learned in my grandmothers kitchen. (In spite of our culinary disparities, they became my second family, and I lived with them until I received my Masters degree.)

These days, I divide my professional life between writing and public appearances. I spend a significant portion of my time lecturing around the world about healthy living and eating.

After each trip, I return to my kitchen inspired, and enthusiastically recreate the best dishes I tasted during my travels. It often turns into a little international tasting that I hold for my family and friends. Ive served them annatto rice from South America; a shrimp pizza from Rome; a pasta dish I picked up while in Greece; Wasabi Salmon with Miso-Sesame Sauce from Kobe, Japan; and Spicy Sesame Pad Thai that I ate at a street vendors stand in Pattaya, Thailand. I would mix and match my discoveries, while finding ways to simplify the steps, and use fresh, organic, easy-to-find substitutes for the less common ingredients.

I have always believed that food not only satisfies hunger, but it also plays an important role in our connection to others and to our past. Often when I cook certain dishes, they remind me of the places I have traveled, the people who taught me how to prepare the food, and the family and friends with whom I have shared meals. The recipes in this book are the favorites from these international tastings. They are one-of-a-kind, because they are my creations and my variations on simple and healthy meals from around the world, using ingredients that are readily available in local markets. I hope you will gather many happy memories as you enjoy these dishes.