Sara Moulton - Sara Moultons Everyday Family Dinners

ALSO BY SARA MOULTON

Saras Secrets for Weeknight Meals

Sara Moulton Cooks at Home

The Good Morning America Cut the Calories Cookbook

SARA MOULTON

with Photographs by JAMIE TIAMPO

SIMON & SCHUSTER
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Simon & Schuster
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Copyright 2010 by Sara Moulton Enterprises, Inc.

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First Simon & Schuster hardcover edition April 2010

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Designed by Jaime Putorti

Manufactured in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Moulton, Sara.
Sara Moultons everyday family dinners / by Sara Moulton ; with photographs by Jamie Tiampo.
p. cm.
1. Dinners and dining. 2. Quick and easy cookery. I. Title.
TX737.M66 2009
641.5'4dc22 2009041666

ISBN 978-1-4391-0251-0

ISBN 978-1-4391-9991-6 (ebook)

In addition to the greater Moulton and Adler families, who contributed many ideas and recipes to this book, theres a battle-tested squad of important people I have to thank:

Joanne Lamb Hayes, my partner and the hardest-working woman in the cookbook business.

Judith Weber, my agent, who suggested I write this book.

Sydny Miner, my wonderful editor.

Jennifer Day, my chef de cuisine at Gourmet and the creator of several great recipes in this book.

Helen Baldus, my stalwart publicist.

Jamie Tiampo, a hardworking, meticulous, and creative photographer.

Bill, Ruth, and Sam, my part-time tasting panel and full-time family.

Finally, I must acknowledge Gourmet magazine, which was shuttered as I was finishing this book. Theres no way for me to quantify how much I learned during my twenty-five years as a member of the team, except to say that my culinary education continued there until the very last day. More particularly, it is because of my years in Gourmets test kitchen that I can say with confidence and pride that the recipes in this book work.

TO RUTH HUMPHREY MOULTON,
MY FIRST COOKING TEACHER

Kalustyans on Lexington Avenue in New York, my favorite store for international ingredients.

SARA MOULTONS
EVERYDAY
FAMILY DINNERS

As the title indicates, this book is dedicated to cooking dinner for the family on a weeknight. Now, as ever, I believe that few things are as beneficial to our health, both body and soul, as a home-cooked meal eaten at the table with family and friends.

Ive spent a lot of time thinking about what constitutes dinner. Most of us tend to make the same ten recipes over and over again. This is boring, and when youre bored, youre disinclined to make any dinner at all. Broadly, this book is a compendium of strategies to wriggle free of the straitjacket that stipulates starch / vegetable / protein at every meal.

My continuing quest to rethink dinner has resulted in several new strategies. The chapter called Appetizers for Dinner formalizes my frequent preference for a meals starters to its main course. Two for One spells out how to make a great new meal with the leftovers from the night before, simply by making sure that there will be leftovers. In Five-Ingredient Mains, the challenge was to come up with recipes that are as delicious as they are quick to make. Also, theres Whole Grain and Hearty, a sign of my growing appreciation for the healthfulness, variety, and flexibility of whole grains.

This book has a vegetarian chapter, as well as a number of vegetarian recipes in the nonvegetarian chapters. (These are marked with a icon.) Vegetarian entres are greener than meat entres, after all, and theyre less expensive, too, which is not a small consideration during a recession. Most persuasive, perhaps, the variety, freshness, and flavor of the vegetables available to us now are greater than at any other time in history. Think of how hard Julia Child had to work a generation ago to get leeks and shallots into her local supermarket. Today we take leeks and shallots for grantedalong with tomatillos, fresh fennel, and edamame.

Most of the recipes in this book contain suggested variations: how to make it lighter, how to make it vegetarian, what to exchange for ingredients you hate or simply cant find in your hometown. But Im hoping to do more than provide you with options; Id like to spark your creativity. Real cooks dont need a recipe. They can look at their ingredients, consider their options, and make a meal.

Things have changed since I published my last book in 2005. I rely more on local and seasonal ingredients because more Americans are interested in cooking with them. (Theyre tastier than the mass-produced kind and friendlier to the environment, too.) I make use of a greater variety of international ingredients because theyre more widely available here both in stores and on the Internet. The current recession has inspired me to substitute less-expensive, but equally flavorful, ingredients for the ones I might have called for in my previous books. I rely less on the supermarket in general and on prepared ingredients in particular.

People often tell me that the hardest part of preparing a meal is timing. Accordingly, this book incorporates several new ideas about how to cook smarter, faster, and cleaner. The most important is concerned with mise en place; the term literally translates from the French as put in place. The idea is that all the ingredients of a recipe should be diced, sliced, and prepped before you start cooking. At the risk of banishment from my alma mater, the Culinary Institute of America, Ive dispensed with mise en place almost entirely. I agree that this method makes perfect sense for most Asian recipes, which call for the ingredients to get in and out of the pan in twenty seconds, but its a waste of time when youre cooking most other cuisines. In those cases, why not take advantage of the time required to cook an onionabout five minutesto slice your red pepper? On the other hand, I do recommend pulling all of the ingredients for a recipe out of the fridge and the cupboard and setting them on the counter before you start cooking. That is a time-saving move.