It’s 5:35 p.m. on a Thursday. At this point in the week, motivation and meal-planning tend to be lacking. If your house is like my house, you have great intentions of planning out the week’s menu. But if your house is like my house, the following conversation comes next:
“I didn’t take any meat out and I don’t feel like making anything. Do you? Maybe we should get take out? But tomorrow is Friday, and we’ll definitely want to order out…should we wait? What should we have?”
Ugh. The work-week meal slump. It happens all over America. But, help is here from the new cookbook from Southern Living, What’s for Supper: 5 Ingredient Weeknight Meals. This is a realistic cookbook. It could march into most homes and fit right in. Unpretentious, unassuming help.
The front of the cookbook is organized like a textbook, only with beautiful photos, a modern layout and fun, bold colors that make you want to open it up and thumb through. It starts by sharing a fabulous and sometimes forgotten kitchen secret: many recipe items should already be part of your stocked pantry; however, this cookbook doesn’t expect us to have obscure, gourmet ingredients to complete a recipe. We’re talking oils, vinegar, condiments—ingredients that we all have at home. Again, this is written for the realistic cook. The cookbook goes on to discuss how fewer ingredients can lead to more flavorful cooking by purchasing high-quality ingredients or trying frozen ingredients. More isn’t always better. Because this cookbook is designed to show home cooks how to make family-friendly meals, I figured I would choose a recipe and see if my family found it to be friendly. I chose the Grilled Tomato-Peach Pizza because we love to use our grill and I thought it was likely that our sons would try it.
Recipe first impression: simple, with complementary and contrasting flavors of peach, tomato, basil and mozzarella. I sliced up one peach, as instructed, and maybe would have done a little more. I suppose playing around with the amount of tomato and peach on top depends on personal preference; it’s easy enough to adjust. The first breakdown in the recipe was my fault…I was all set and had the veggies grilling when I realized I couldn’t find my pizza grilling pan. I hadn’t sprayed down the grill grates and didn’t want to try to put the crust right on them, so I improvised and used my pizza stone in the oven. Disaster averted, but I was bummed that the whole thing wouldn’t be grilled.
I sliced the fresh mozzarella and placed it on top, piling the tomato and peaches on top of that. I also added the basil then, too, because I wanted it to wilt a little and blend into the other flavors. I’m not sure if it’s more potent when put on at the end, but that was my strategy. I was disappointed to check the pizza and see pooling mozzarella water weeping from the cheese and sogging my crust. I gently used a paper towel to sop it up and the crust was able to dry out.
The final product was really tasty. The sweet peach was delicious against the more biting tomato chunks. My husband complimented the pizza several times, and he can be a tough critic. I feel like it could have benefited from just one more ingredient—I know…against the rules! But, I may have drizzled some balsamic over top for some extra deliciousness.
In flipping through the cookbook, I see that there are many recipes that are not from scratch. For the purposes of this cookbook, this is awesome. One recipe calls for already prepared shredded pork—the intent being to help a tired working mind come up with a creative way to serve it. The little tips on each page offer suggestions on halving the recipe, adding one more little something to make it a fuller meal or even just a variation on serving.
This cookbook won’t be the one to end all cookbooks in your kitchen, but it will be the one you reach for when you lose inspiration and need a reminder of what you can be capable of. That means using ingredients you likely have and not spending three hours making a gourmet Thursday-night meal. It will help you make a tasty meal, in a realistic amount of time, which means you can spend more time being the tickle monster, trying to remember how to do algebra or sitting with a glass of wine in front of the news. In other words, you can still be YOU and put a great, healthy meal on the table. So, have at it!
Snag your copy of Southern Living What’s for Supper: 5-Ingredient Weeknight Meals on Amazon.
