Saving Dinner

Certified nutritionist Leanne Ely has a simple philosophy: “Make it and they will come.” Dinner, that is. Take-out, opening a can, or microwave fare shouldn’t pass for a nice, healthy meal–and nothing can replace a family’s time together. Believe it or not, preparing dinner can be a stress-free endeavor. Even your time in the supermarket can be cut in half! Full of practical tips on simple, healthy meal planning, Saving Dinner is the ideal solution for today’s busy parents who would love to have their family sitting around the dinner table once again–sharing stories along with a nutritious meal. Efficiently divided by season, each section features six weeks of menus with delicious recipes, side dish suggestions, and an itemized grocery list that is organized by product (dairy, meat, produce) to make one-stop shopping a snap. Plus the book is packed with helpful hints and short cuts in the kitchen that make cooking easier and more fun. From Big Basil Burgers and Salmon Carbonara to Crockpot Chili and Spicy Apricot Chicken, Saving Dinner will have your family coming back to the table–and back again for seconds! Leanne Ely is considered the expert on family cooking and healthy eating. Between her popular “Heart of a Woman” radio show in Southern California and her weekly “Food for Thought” column on the ever-popular Flylady.net Web site, thousands of fans have already discovered Leanne’s secrets to easily prepared, well-balanced meals.

Cooking 101 If you think that folding an egg has something to do with laundry, or that a wok is good exercise, you’ve come to the right place. Nutritionist and family meal-planner extraordinaire, Leanne Ely knows her way around a stove and a pantry–and she provides everything you need to know, from mincing garlic and barbecuing beef to pulling off your first dinner party. Select chapters feature tasty recipes that can be prepared with the greatest of ease. You’ll find practical and trustworthy advice on • equipping your kitchen: what you must have, what you don’t need • stocking your cupboards, fridge, and freezer with the essentials • selecting fresh produce and high-quality meats, poultry, and fish • slicing, dicing, sautéing, simmering, and other prep techniques • whipping up quick, scrumptious dishes with ingredients on hand • ensuring that your main course and side dishes are ready at the same time • preparing mouthwatering one-pot meals, from Lemon Tarragon Chicken to Easily the Best Casserole in the World • baking fast and easy cookies, pies, cakes, and cobblers Saving Dinner Basics also includes a handy glossary of common food terminology, a spice primer (it’s about time you discovered thyme!), and a troubleshooting guide for various cooking challenges. Let Leanne Ely help you turn your kitchen into what it was meant to be: the place where great meals begin. Leanne Ely is considered the expert on family cooking and healthy eating. She is a syndicated newspaper columnist (The Dinner Diva), a certified nutritionist, and the host of SavingDinner.com. Leanne has a weekly “Food for Thought” column on the ever-popular FlyLady.net website, as well as her own e-zine, Healthy Foods. She is the author of Saving Dinner, Saving Dinner the Low-Carb Way and Saving Dinner for the Holidays. She lives in North Carolina with her two teenage children. “Anyone who finds cooking a mystery needs Saving Dinner Basics.” –Marla Cilley, The FlyLady, author of Sink Reflections

Leanne Ely doesn’t actually cook dinner for your family. It just feels that way. Certified nutritionist Leanne Ely loves delicious food and is dedicated to enticing today’s busy families back to the dinner table with home cooking that cannot be beat. In Saving Dinner the Low-Carb Way, she integrates low-carb requirements into her mélange of dining pleasures for every season–providing easy-to-follow menus and highlighting per-serving measurements of calories, fat, protein, carbohydrates, cholesterol, and sodium for each dish. Itemizing ingredients by product in convenient lists, Ely makes your grocery shopping quick and effortless. She also gives you a helping hand in the kitchen with shortcuts that take the stress out of cooking, and suggests menu variations for children and family members who choose not to go the low-carb route. The result? These dinners are not only balanced and healthy but truly varied and delectably good to eat. Main dishes like Low-Carb Beef Stroganoff, Crustless Quiche Lorraine, Crock-Pot Pork Jambalaya, Skillet Salmon with Horseradish Cream, and nearly 150 other entrees (plus recommendations for great side dishes) make dinnertime special in more ways than one.

Don’t Just Celebrate–Relax! We all know that holidays are meant to be fun. But for the cook planning the feast, the holidays can inspire dread. Feeding the family on a daily basis is hard enough. Making the meal both special and delicious can raise the bar out of sight. In Saving Dinner for the Holidays bona fide Dinner Diva Leanne Ely will show you that festive meals can be as easy and relaxing as they are tasty. She plans the menus, provides comprehensive, itemized shopping lists that are organized by supermarket section, includes heirloom recipes, and even includes the all-important timeline so that your party goes off without a hitch. She also gives you a big helping hand in the kitchen and offers tips on how to make your table sparkle with warmth and beauty. There’s a Valentine’s Day Chocolate Feast not to be missed, a Mother’s Day dinner that can actually be prepared by Dad and the kids, a Fourth of July picnic that lights up the palate, and many other red-letter feasts. There are even recipes that help turn leftovers into delectable dishes.

Organized by season, provides nutritious recipes, side dish tips, cooking hints, shortcut techniques, meal planning advice, and an itemized grocery list arranged by product.

Inspired by her beloved blog, dinneralovestory.com, Jenny Rosenstrach’s Dinner: A Love Story is many wonderful things: a memoir, a love story, a practical how-to guide for strengthening family bonds by making the most of dinnertime, and a compendium of magnificent, palate-pleasing recipes. Fans of “Pioneer Woman” Ree Drummond, Jessica Seinfeld, Amanda Hesser, Real Simple, and former readers of Cookie magazine will revel in these delectable dishes, and in the unforgettable story of Jenny’s transformation from enthusiastic kitchen novice to family dinnertime doyenne.

From podcast host Sutanya Dacres comes Dinner for One, an unforgettable memoir of how she rebuilt her life after her American-in-Paris fairy tale shattered, starting with cooking dinner for herself in her Montmartre kitchen When Sutanya Dacres married her French boyfriend and moved to Paris at twenty-seven, she felt like she was living out her very own Nora Ephron romantic comedy. Jamaican-born and Bronx-raised, she had never dreamed she herself could be one of those American women in Paris she admired from afar via their blogs, until she met the man of her dreams one night in Manhattan. A couple of years later, she married her Frenchman and moved to Paris, embarking on her own “happily-ever-after.” But when her marriage abruptly ended, the fairy tale came crashing down around her. Reeling from her sudden divorce and the cracked facade of that picture-perfect expat life, Sutanya grew determined to mend her broken heart and learn to love herself again. She began by cooking dinner for one in her Montmartre kitchen. Along the way, she builds Parisienne friendships, learns how to date in French, and examines what it means to be a Black American woman in Paris—all while adopting the French principle of pleasure, especially when it comes to good food, and exploring what the concept of self-care really means. Brimming with charm, humor, and hard-won wisdom, Sutanya's story takes you on an adventure through love, loss, and finding where you truly belong, even when it doesn’t look quite how you expected.

“There’s nothing dumbed down here, only honest cooking: simple stuff for everyday meals and gloriously rich, complex dishes for special occasions.” —Rick Bayless, James Beard Award-winning chef 2016 IACP Cookbook Award winner in Children, Youth & Family category JeanMarie Brownson has long been a beloved chef and food writer, from her time as the Chicago Tribune’s test kitchen director and associate food editor to her ongoing professional partnership with the iconic Rick Bayless (Frontera Grill, Topolobampo, Xoco). Since 2007, Brownson has chronicled her life of cooking in a series of Chicago Tribune columns, the best of which have been hand-picked to form her newest cookbook, Dinner at Home: 140 Recipes to Enjoy with Family and Friends. This book features inventive and easy-to-make recipe ideas, along with gorgeous full-color photography. Organized by course, Dinner at Home also devotes chapters to holiday dinners, party snacks, rubs and sauces, and “breakfast for dinner.” Readers will enjoy the seasonal menus, such as those for special occasions (Anniversary Dinner, Ultimate Father’s Day, and Sunday Brunch) as well as themed meals (Manhattan Cocktail Party, Saturday Night Beer Tasting, and Wish We Were in Ireland Supper). For Brownson, cooking for others ranks as one of life’s greatest pleasures, and her passion for creating trustworthy, approachable recipes is clear throughout Dinner at Home. This book is a must-have for home cooks who love the time spent gathered around the table with friends, family, and delicious meals. “This book shares flavorful recipes that are backed by years of solid testing and include straightforward nutrition notes. I’ll refer to this cookbook for years to come.” —Antonia Allegra, founder of The Symposium for Professional Food Writers

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From the New York Times food editor and former restaurant critic comes a cookbook to help us rediscover the art of Sunday supper and the joy of gathering with friends and family “A book to make home cooks, and those they feed, very happy indeed.”—Nigella Lawson NAMED ONE OF THE BEST COOKBOOKS OF THE YEAR BY NPR • Town & Country • Garden & Gun “People are lonely,” Sam Sifton writes. “They want to be part of something, even when they can’t identify that longing as a need. They show up. Feed them. It isn’t much more complicated than that.” Regular dinners with family and friends, he argues, are a metaphor for connection, a space where memories can be shared as easily as salt or hot sauce, where deliciousness reigns. The point of Sunday supper is to gather around a table with good company and eat. From years spent talking to restaurant chefs, cookbook authors, and home cooks in connection with his daily work at The New York Times, Sam Sifton’s See You on Sunday is a book to make those dinners possible. It is a guide to preparing meals for groups larger than the average American family (though everything here can be scaled down, or up). The 200 recipes are mostly simple and inexpensive (“You are not a feudal landowner entertaining the serfs”), and they derive from decades spent cooking for family and groups ranging from six to sixty. From big meats to big pots, with a few words on salad, and a diatribe on the needless complexity of desserts, See You on Sunday is an indispensable addition to any home cook’s library. From how to shuck an oyster to the perfection of Mallomars with flutes of milk, from the joys of grilled eggplant to those of gumbo and bog, this book is devoted to the preparation of delicious proteins and grains, vegetables and desserts, taco nights and pizza parties.

An NPR Best Book of the Year A one-stop resource for amazingly delicious complete meals made in just a single skillet or sheet pan, created by the food-world favorite husband-and-wife team who develop recipes for all the major magazines. Even if you love to cook, the last thing you want to do at the end of a long day is wash a sink full of pots and pans. Hero Dinners gives you the superpower to make delicious, well-balanced meals using fresh, wholesome ingredients—all in just one sheetpan or skillet. The wizardry behind these complete meals is in super smart, innovative—and simple!—techniques that ensure you won’t end up with muddled flavors and textures. With these inventive recipes, you’ll maximize the impact of each and every ingredient and flavor. And every recipe truly makes a complete meal, including protein and a vegetable or grain—and usually both. In clear, easy-to-follow instructions, cooking experts Marge Perry and David Bonom show you how to magically elevate commonplace ingredients into delicious meals you’ll make again and again. Sometimes the “magic” lies in respecting the inherently good flavors of the ingredients, as in bronzino roasted with orange slices, drizzled with a simple caper vinaigrette and accompanied by crisp roast potato slices layered with tomato and fennel. Other times, savvy use of interesting condiments, such as Moroccan harissa paste or pomegranate molasses, lend robust flavor with very little work. Hero Dinners includes 100 one-pan meals you can feel good about eating and feeding to your family, including: Ancho Chili Chicken Pot Pie with Cornbread Biscuit Topping Peruvian Chicken with Purple Potatoes, Brussels Sprouts and Aji Verde Sauce Salmon with Ginger Tomato Jalapeno Sauce and Zucchini Couscous Sheetpan Ooey Gooey Mac and Cheese Southern Style Smothered Pork Chops with Collard Greens and Grits Rigatoni with Meat Sauce Lemon Chicken with Orzo and Artichokes Sheetpan Pizza with Soft Eggs, Asparagus, and Peas Gochujang Skirt Steak with Scallion Polenta and Broccoli Apricot Honey Glazed Spareribs with Smash-Roasted Potatoes Skillet Lasagna with Caramelized Onions and Spinach A mouthwatering color photo accompanies every recipe, and the book is peppered with dozens of incredibly useful tip boxes to help cooks shave time or calories; learn about ingredients and substitutions; and get even more efficient in the kitchen. Hero Dinners is your powerful everyday mealtime solution: armed with the recipes in this book, you truly do make Hero Dinners.