[amb23]

If we're on the topic of how to cook rather than just what to cook: I just got A New Way to Dinner (a cookbook from Food52) earlier this summer and have been using it religiously pretty much every week since. It's a strategy guide on how to prep all your food on the weekend and have diverse meals throughout the week. You basically do 1-3 hours of cooking on the weekend to make the components for your dishes, and then a bit of assembly work during the week to combine different components and build your meals (i.e. A roast chicken on Monday can turn into a chicken salad with fennel on Wednesday and a chicken salad sandwich for lunch anytime during the week)

If I don't plan and cook my meals like this, then I end up either spending an hour plus to make a new dinner every weeknight, or getting lazy and frying up some eggs, or making a huge batch of whatever and reheating the same thing again and again. It's been such a timesaver during the week, I really wish more recipes & cookbooks were formatted like this.

[knight17]

Thank you for mentioning it. It is a useful way to organise a book for busy people who wants to cook. I found this aspect of the book interesting and searched for some reviews and found this critique of its ingredient list; that it is expensive:

>>> ... seem unaware of their privilege ... ask you to buy near industrial quantities of certain expensive ingredients. Worse, there’s often no suggestion as to alternatives if the budget cannot quite stretch to a kilo of black raspberries ... painfully unconscious of this element to their book ... an expressly upper middle class lifestyle cookbook. [] <<<

I usually discount criticisms of privilige but in this case of a cookbook it seems to be synonymous with expensive.

[] http://cookthesebooks.com/a-new-way-to-dinner-amanda-hesser-...

Anyone know of other books or resources along similar lines?

[amb23]

I haven’t found the ingredients to be too expensive for most of the menus honestly, but I also live by a really cheap fruit and veggie store. (A kilo of blackberries isn’t gonna break the budget when it’s $1.00 a carton.) The book’s recipes are sized for a family of four hence the huge portions; I’m single so I usually cut the recipes in half and save a lot for leftovers. I’d say there’s a lot of substitutes you can make in the book for rare/pricier items and it’s realistic for most middle class budgets. They also group menus by season, so you buy the ingredients for the week when the produce is at its cheapest. But yeah, they do have the occasional ingredient like ground lamb or garlic scapes that can make the menus annoying/expensive to put together exactly.

[morsch]

Sounds like something I might want to try. We mostly cook vegetarian, so roast chicken turning into salad and then sandwhiches is out, would you still recommend it?

On a sidenote, this made me realise Food52 is back online for me; it used to be down with a GDPR apology page, I stopped checking after a while.

[amb23]

I would not recommend it for vegetarians as most of their menus have meat as a core dish unfortunately. The idea is translateable to a vegetarian diet; the menus are not.