DinnerCHANGING THE GAME
Photographed by Eric Wolfinger
Each recipe in Dinner is meant to be dinner—one fantastic dish that is so satisfying and flavor-forward it can stand alone—or be paired with a simple salad or fresh bread on the side. This is what Melissa Clark means by changing the game.
Dinner is all about options: inventive, unfussy food with unexpected flavor. Clark’s mission is to help anyone—whether a novice with just a single pan or the experienced home cook—figure out what to make any night of the week without settling on fallbacks. These inherently simple recipes can turn anyone into a better and more confident cook.
Organized by main ingredient—chicken, meat, fish and seafood, eggs, pasta and noodles, tofu, vegetable dinners, grains, pizza, soups, and salads that mean it—Dinner covers an astonishing breadth of recipes. There is something for every mood, season, and the amount of time you have: sheet pan chicken laced with spicy harissa, burgers amped with chorizo, curried lentils with poached eggs; and if you want just a little something else, you’ll find green beans with caper vinaigrette, coconut rice, and skillet brown-butter cornbread, to name just a few dishes in this indispensable collection. Here, too, are easy flourishes that make dinner exceptional: stir charred lemon into pasta, toss creamy Caesar-like dressing on a grain bowl, add fresh ricotta and demerara sugar to stovetop mac and cheese; lavish a dollop of chile paste just about anywhere.
Melissa Clark, the New York Times bestselling author and one of the most beloved food writers of our generation, has written a comprehensive and practical book that reflects the way she cooks at home for her family and on those rare nights when she’s alone.
Melissa Clark has written for The New York Times, Food & Wine, Travel & Leisure, and Real Simple and has collaborated on twenty-one books.
“The recipes in Melissa Clark’s Dinner are everything I want for my dinner. Dishes which are familiar but fresh, approachable but exciting. The tone of the book is also just the sort of company I’d want around my table: Melissa is experienced enough in the kitchen to know that being relaxed is the only way to approach the evening meal. It should be fun, it should be easy, it should be delicious.”—YOTAM OTTOLENGHI
“Melissa Clark has an extrasensory ability to divine what we want to eat and a secret knowledge of how to take a familiar dish and make it just a little more interesting. In following her lead, dinner gets more delicious and we become better cooks.” —PETER MEEHAN
“Dinner is an expertly useful tool for the home cook. Melissa Clark has stripped away fussiness and pretension and replaced it with sensibility and flavor. This is food that you will absolutely crave!” —MICHAEL SOLOMONOV
“Brilliant, vibrant, doable ideas that will change the way you think about dinner. You’ll cook out of this book for years. Empowering.” —DIANA HENRY
“Melissa Clark will take your tired dinner repertoire, shake it out, and give it a transfusion of enthusiasm, flavor, and whip-smart efficiency. In Dinner, she takes the timeless task of cooking pleasing yet inspiring dinners and waves away the challenge. Dinner won’t get Melissa —or you—down. She had me dreaming of kofte and kimchi pork chops, coconut rice noodles and green aioli chicken salad.” —AMANDA HESSER
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