A PLAYBOOK FOR DINNER

The cookbook from the website Food52, ‘A New Way to Dinner: A Playbook of Recipes and Strategies for the Week Ahead’ by Amanda Hesser and Merrill Stubbs, is designed to help busy parents get a delicious meal on the table every weeknight quickly and with minimum stress. They have created 16 weekly meal plans, 4 for each season, that help streamline what is typically a nightly slug, allowing an interesting and tasty dinner to be prepared quickly and enjoyed before everyone dissolves into a puddle of hungry misery. Their strategy is clever – they have you prepare a few main components for the upcoming week on the weekend, then do minimal final prep on the evening of. The meals are designed so that you can use the main components in different ways to create 5 varied, non-repetitive dinners, or at least that is the goal.

I really like this cookbook, and used it this past fall and winter as a basis for planning what to cook for the week. I loved having a pile of great recipes in front of me not just for an entire meal, but for an entire week of meals – mains and sides and condiments and desserts - all in one place, complete with a grocery list and a day-by-day plan. And the recipes are really good – some simple, some more complicated, some familiar, some I had never heard of. I appreciate that it calls for ingredients like preserved lemons, smoked paprika, anchovies and other such 'modern' pantry staples, and thus sets itself apart from a run of the mill ‘mom’ cookbook. Nonetheless, I am perplexed by a few things -

If the point of this cookbook is to make planning and cooking meals easier and less stressful, why does it often call for produce/meat/fish that are hard to find? For example, the very first weekly menu calls for pea shoots, ramps, and ground lamb, and doesn't highlight any substitutes (and even mentions that ramps have a 'ridiculously brief' season). Since these ingredients are required for every single dinner that week, even if you do find substitutes you are facing disappointment and frustration each and every night as you read through the recipes and are reminded of what you do not have.

In other weekly menus you would need items such as Fuyu persimmons, garlic scapes, baby turnips, shelled peas, Atlantic char, salt cod, squid, fresh crabmeat, oxtails, and raw pork or chicken bones. Additionally, ingredients that are otherwise easy to find are given qualifiers that make them either harder to get or likely to be more expensive - to whit: 'fresh' ricotta, 'aged' sherry vinegar, 'large' couscous (which is a completely different type of couscous, so you can't just drop the 'large', as you could with the 'aged') and 'hulled' barley (no idea what would change if you dropped the 'hulled', but presumably something).

All these ingredients sound great, but I would prefer they not be part of the cookbook that is supposed to make my life easier. Since it covers only 4 weeks of each season, leaving one plenty of other weekends to make ramp butter, why complicate matters? Especially as it otherwise satisfies their presumed target audience of the more-sophisticated-than-average cook.

Although I am not, nor anywhere near, a vegetarian, I also don't want to eat meat every single evening. And have I been reading the wrong blogs, or is it not true that many people are trying to cut down on their consumption of animal products? This cookbook, however, is extremely heavy on meat. Although the menus call for plenty of fresh vegetables, they are still centered around meat, and only occasionally fish, calling for it generally 5 out of 5 nights. And mostly not friendlier meat, like chicken, or little meat, like a bit of ham in a pea soup, and not in a way that you could easily work around, like leaving beef strips out of a stir-fry. I am talking about big hunks of pork, dutch ovens full of oxtails, and slabs of beef short ribs. And since my teenagers seem to decide every other night that they are vegetarian, this poses a problem. Here is part of a shopping list for one week‘s meals: One pound ground beef, a half-pound ground pork, and 4 pounds of pork shoulder. (Oh, also some pancetta, but at that point who's counting?). How do you substitute your way around that?

The menu plans do not always live up to their promise of prepping a small(ish) list of items ahead, then using them in different ways during the week. One plan has you making 3 pounds of ground lamb into patties using middle-eastern spices (which sounds delicious); then on two of the nights they are served as patties with different sides, and on a third night the patties are broken up to serve with pasta. They even suggesting having a leftover patty for lunch one day. I don’t know about you, but to me that is a lot of the same meat with the same spices in one week.

Another weekly menu has you roasting chicken legs with tomatoes, garlic, herbs and wine, which also sounds delicious. But again, they want you to serve it two nights that week as is, just with different sides dishes, which is not my idea of variety. They then have you use the chicken a third night in a warm chicken salad, which is a great riff, but still means eating chicken 3 out of 5 nights. Do I need to point out that they call for buying 6 pounds of chicken for this weekly menu, or is that already obvious to you? Why not have you buy a much more reasonable 4 pounds of chicken and serve it just two nights? Yes, you would then have to prep something else for the missing chicken night, but with all the sides and marinades and other bits they have you making, I think there is a fifth meal to be found in there somewhere without much extra work. Taking a few ingredients and making them work in different ways: good; 24 limes for a week’s meal: borderline cuckoo.

Those are my quibbles, and although relatively big as quibbles go, quibbles they remain. I still love planning our meals by looking at their weekly menus as a footprint, then substituting things out to make it less meat and exotic fruit/vegetable heavy. I have some recipe favorites in constant rotation, such as overnight pork (I said I wasn’t a vegetarian), spicy roasted cauliflower, barley salad with onion confit and Fuyu persimmons (in my case bulgur and pears), anchovy dressing, applesauce cake, and pickled onions. Especially the pickled onions. While a mere condiment, they require exactly 4 pantry ingredients, take 15 minutes to make, keep for weeks, and give a fresh crunch and bright zing to all manner of meals – and actually do what the cookbook promises - transform Wednesday’s chicken roasted and wine into Friday’s mexican-spiced tacos.