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Dinner Tonight (Canada, UK)
By Marge Perry
Publication Date: Feb. 2000
ISBN: 1885134185

If you’re one of those natural-born cooks who can make a meal out of anything, get lost! If not, here’s a book for you

We all know people who go into a kitchen, toss a few things together, rattle a few pans, and come up with a delicious meal. Whether it’s quick and easy or quite complicated, these "natural cooks" are never at a loss for what to make — they know how things go together, they don’t break a sweat, and their food is always great.

This book is not for those people. It’s for the rest of us, for everyone who has the challenge of getting dinner on the table night after night (and generally after a full day of work), who wants it to go together quickly, and wants to know that it’s nutritious.

Marge Perry, a working mother, based the book on the newspaper column she writes for Newsday. It starts with a section on how to shop and keep your pantry, refrigerator and freezer stocked, and follows with recipes for poultry, beef, pork & lamb, fish & shellfish, pasta, meatless meals, pizza & sandwiches, and meals "Good Enough for Guests." The recipes are all supposed to go together quickly, provide lots of variety, and be pretty low in fat, calories, etc.

One of my favorite features is that Perry recommends side dishes for every entrée. I can’t count the number of times I manage to get a main course ready and wind up splashing some applesauce on the plate because I haven’t thought of anything to go with it (sadly, our children think applesauce is a vegetable).

Most of the ingredients called for in the book are not exotic, certainly, but you are still unlikely to have everything on hand: radicchio, wild mushrooms, artichoke-flavored precooked sausage, etc. In other words, you’ll still have to plan ahead; you can’t expect to just arrive home and whip up whatever you find. In fact, I had to go shopping to be able to prepare anything in the book (but our cupboards were pretty bare).

Indeed, my biggest criticism of the book — and it’s pretty modest — is that it calls for a very broad range of ingredients. To make really good use of the book, you have to shop and stock up the way Ms Perry wants you to.

And how does Ms Perry want you to shop? She says the key to getting tasty, nutritious meals on the table is keeping the kitchen stocked with "foods that do the work for you without compromising nutrition or flavor." She provides an extensive section on recommended staples that will allow you to make most of these meals with the addition of a few fresh ingredients.

I prepared the Maple-Mustard Glazed Chicken Thighs, which includes five ingredients, and took about 40 minutes from start to finish (30 of which is time in the oven). Beyond the fact that children have a hard time liking chicken thighs and dealing with separating the meat from the bone, I’d say the it was a pretty big hit. I thought the glaze was delicious, and would not, under normal circumstances, be inclined to combine mustard and maple syrup.

I didn’t prepare anything from the chapter on dishes for guests, but they do look very tasty: Fig-Stuffed Pork Loin Roast, Spanish Snapper, Coconut Shrimp Soup, Golden Chicken with Grapes & Almonds, etc.

I have a few other comments/quibbles about the book.

A with any recipes, there are pre-preparation steps — chop an onion into thin strips, mince ginger, mince garlic, etc. — that will affect the total preparation time, depending on your proficiency at these tasks. The author says she can get most of these meals on the table in 30 minutes or less; non-professionals are likely to take longer, at least until they become familiar with a recipe.

The Ginger Peach Chicken calls for sautéeing chicken breasts for 10 minutes before cooking them for 3 more minutes with other ingredients. That sounds like a recipe for overcooked chicken to me, especially if you take the author’s general suggestion to pound chicken breasts to a uniform thickness of 1/2 inch.

There are only three recipes that call for ground beef, which is not necessarily a flaw, but when I look in the freezer, ground beef is often looking back, and new ideas for getting a meal out of it would be helpful.

The recipes come one to a page, which is convenient, and each includes a nutritional analysis. The book is essentially without photos. As with almost any cookbook, I would appreciate a better index. Once you’ve made a dish a few times, you might remember its name in order to find it in the index. But more often, I have ground beef or chicken breasts or a can of beans and would like to be able to find recipe in the index that matches what I’m holding. Can’t be done with this book.

An awful lot of "quick" cookbooks tend to be about just combining foods, throwing things together, and winding up with a mish-mash, but Dinner Tonight involves real cooking, in the sense that you wind up with a cohesive (hot) dish. There are no earth-shaking recipes in it, but a family could live off this book. You could prepare and eat these meals five nights a week all year and still feel you’re getting plenty of variety, flavor, and nutrition.

Dinner Tonight! (Canada, UK)

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