It's tricky to get dinner on the table when you're working around T-ball practice, gymnastics and play dates - sometimes all in the same day.
Luckily, "The Best Simple Recipes" offers homemade dinners ready in a snap, or at the longest, half an hour. That's my kind of cookbook.
This book - from the people behind Cook's Illustrated and Cook's Country magazines and the public-television cooking show "America's Test Kitchen" - offers lots of color photos and quick entrees along with side dish suggestions.
Recipes also include handy tips for preparation or shopping. Recipes vary from skillet shepherd's pie - which calls for speeding things along by microwaving frozen, shredded hash brown potatoes - and meatloaf that's ready quickly by making individual servings rather than a big ol' loaf that takes an hour to cook. Smart.
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The salad offerings (always a good choice for a fast, relatively healthy meal) included chopped salad with apples, bacon and turkey. Chopped apples offered sweetness and crunch, while crumbled bacon satisfied that salty craving. Chopped romaine, deli turkey and creamy blue cheese rounded out the salad, which called for whisking together a super-simple dressing of olive oil, blue cheese, vinegar and a touch of salt and pepper. That was it.
We loved the novel idea of turning comfort food like chicken and dumplings into a soup. A store-bought rotisserie chicken cut down the prep time, and teaspoon-size dumplings meant the soup was ready to eat in a matter of minutes.
This recipe, though, lacked that depth of flavor that comes from all-day simmering. We blame the chicken bouillon broth.
Next time we'll throw that chicken carcass into a stockpot and simmer our own. That would definitely boost the flavor - and rating - of this soup.
QUICK REVIEW
"The Best Simple Recipes" (America's Test Kitchen, $26.95)
Contact Kristen Cook at kcook@azstarnet.com or 573-4194.