Product Description

No time to cook? Got a hungry family to feed? In Dinners in a Dish or a Dash, award winning cookbook author Jean Anderson offers more than 275 great-tasting one-dish meals that are easy to prepare. Yet there's not one of yesteryear's "shelf magic" concoctions in the bunch, thank you.

Her secret? Today's supermarkets brim with a new generation of quality convenience foods-frozen chopped onions, peppers, and stir-fry mixes, packaged salas greens and slaws, elegant pasta sauces, cooked shrimp and chicken, frozen puff pastry, zesty salsas, and other spicy condiments, just to name a few. Anderson combines the best of these innovative foods with her impeccable cooking sense to make flavorful food in a flash.

Gone are the days of mystery "can of soup" casseroles.  Dinners in a Dish or a Dash is filled with ides for modern, imaginative, and heathy diners.  Those casseroles make a classy comeback in such dishes as Persian Lamb Pilaf with Mint, Lemon and Zucchini ans Scalloped Corn, Ham and Sweet Peppers.  There's a group of simple sauces that can be prepared while the pasta water comes to a boil- try Fusili, Green Beans, and Tomatoes with Two Cheeses or Creamy Spinach Sauce. No punching up the seasonings, you can bring long-simmered flavor to favorite soups and stews such as Spanish Black Bean Soup and Zip-Quick Country Captain in a fraction of the time.  Hot-weather blues? Whip up a cooling, no-cook Salmon and White Bean Salad with Tarragon Vinaigrette or Chicken and Rice Salad with Pesto Dressing.

Dinners in a Dish or a Dash even shows how to equip your pantry, refrigerator , and freezer with the indipensable and "useful extra" groceries that make quick cooking a breeze.  And taking a trip from busy restaurant kitchens, you'll learn how to "prep" chopped onions, minced garlic, chooped parsly, broccoli florets, and other essentials to have waiting in your refrigerator for impromptu meals.

These one-dish time savers are so great, you'll enjoy making and eating them even when you're not cooking against the clock.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1237302 in Books
• Published on: 2000-08-01
• Released on: 2000-08-08
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 384 pages

Amazon.com Review
Dinners in a Dish and/or a Dash helps today's cooks achieve that most timely of goals: to cook fast. The book's strategy? Use prepped homemade and store-bought food, cook dishes that require a single pot or pan only, and take advantage of the microwave for part of the cooking. The casseroles, stir-fries, skillet dinners, main-dish salads, and savory pies and tarts Anderson presents--250 one-pot recipes in all--exemplify this approach. Beginning with a list of pantry necessities and comprehensive storage tips (on the best ways to freeze food, for example), the book then offers recipes such as Pasta Shells with Sausage, Peas, and Portobellos, Tuscan Vegetable Ragout on Grilled Polenta, and Thai Shrimp with Snow Peas and Peanut Sauce. Recipes for more familiar fare are also present, such as Caesar Salad and Chicken Pot Pie. Anderson's main-dish salads, such as Curried Crab Salad and Tabbouleh with Toasted Walnuts and Feta, make particularly attractive everyday entrees. Throughout, Anderson's food notes and tips ("toasted pine nuts are a staple I always keep on hand" is one) are endlessly useful, as are her extensive dish variations. The comprehensiveness of Anderson's approach, as well as the accessibility and good taste of her recipes, assure the appeal of the book, which novice cooks and more practiced hands alike should find themselves consulting often. --Arthur Boehm

From Publishers Weekly
Anyone who's faced with preparing dinner night after night will welcome this newest from Anderson (The Food of Portugal, The New Doubleday Cookbook, etc.), who presents a thoughtful, discriminating collection of recipes that relies on technique and high-end convenience foods to cut the time it takes to get a meal on the table. Anderson is shameless when it comes to using prewashed salad mixes, broccoli florets and other ready-to-use fresh vegetables, packages of frozen peppers and chopped onions, refrigerator biscuits and pizza dough, and rotisserie chickens, not to mention prepared pasta sauces, salsas and tomatoes. Once she outlines what a well-stocked pantry looks like, she moves on to the recipes, which offer a variety of tastes and traditions. Selections show Chinese, Japanese, Thai influences as well as Mediterranean, French, Middle Eastern, traditional American, Eastern European and Hispanic. There are whole-meal salads like Middle Eastern Salad with Crackly Bread and Yogurt-Mint Dressing as well as kid-pleasing Taco Salad and a curry-scented Madras-Style Chicken. There are soups and stews such as Shortcut Cioppino ("the classic fish muddle") or Thai Coconut Milk Soup with Chicken, Lemongrass and Cilantro. And what could be more comforting than Chicken and Mushroom Soup with Cornbread Dumplings? Stir-fries feature interesting ingredients such as mango slices and soba noodles. With so many skillet dinners, casseroles, traditional pot pies, quiches and pasta selections to choose fromDnot to mention recipes specifically developed for the microwaveDthis book ought to be a pantry staple itself.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
Anderson, author of more than a dozen other cookbooks, is also the former food editor of Ladies' Home Journal, and a monthly column of "short-order dinners" in that magazine inspired her latest title. Here she offers main-dish salads and soups, stews, casseroles, pot pies, and other one-dish meals; most are indeed easy, but many of them have long ingredient lists and are not necessarily quick to prepare. The recipes rely on convenience foods such as bell pepper stir-fry mix, frozen hash brown potatoes, and frozen snow peas (odd, since the fresh peas take only a minute or so to cook), even canned chicken and green beans, and a number of them seem pedestrian at best (Reuben Pie, tortilla soup made with barbecue and tomato sauces, Tuna Tetrazzini). Buy for demand.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Customer Reviews

Dinners in a Dish or a Dash
I think that Dinners in a Dish or a Dash deserves a premier place in every busy cook's kitchen; I'm so glad I have it in mine and so is my family! I've found so many imaginative recipes that offer a wonderful variety of quick and easy dishes that I can use year 'round. The chapter called Getting Set gave me dozens of new wrinkles on do-ahead items like the Dumpling/Biscuit Topping Mix or Mushroom Paste ( gives a fabulous boost to soups and stews). I particularly like the Notes and Tips that accompany many of the recipes; they really save me prep. time and make the recipe come out perfect every time. I've found that this new cookbook not only saves me valuable time but the recipes are foolproof and not run of the mill at all. Last but not least, I give "thumbs up" to whoever thought to print the ingredients in a different color to the method ... it sure helps to read the numbers more easily (and quickly) when the book is nearly 3 feet away from my eyes on the kitchen counter.

better than you might expect
I have to say, I kind of expected this book to go on the shelf with all my other "one-pot meal" books and get used maybe once or twice a year. But I think I'll be using it much more often, for inspiration as well as recipes.

Two things that impressed me most: first, Anderson's tips for weekly pre-prep of ingredients you'll be using throughout the week, i.e. rice cooked just enough so that all you have to do is steam it when you're ready to serve it (or add it to a hot stew); minced garlic kept in a little ramekin; a jar of lemon juice you squeeze yourself that will keep for a week in the fridge. (There are many more tips than this!) I like to cook when I come home from work, so I'm not one to do "once-a-week or -month" cooking, but I have to admit that recipes with lots of juicing or mincing or simultaneous pots of boiling water sometimes put me out of the mood to cook anything! And these tips remind me of restaurant cooking, where you have your essential ingredients prepped & at the ready (mise en place). It just makes good sense.

Second: I no longer feel guilty about wanting to make good meals with ground beef! I like to use ground beef, sometimes more than steaks or fillets, because I don't always feel like slicing raw meat or waiting for chunks of roast to brown. Ground beef really is a time saver; the only problem is that I've been getting really tired of the regular old ways to fix it (enchiladas, pizza, pasta, meatloaf, even cabbage rolls & casseroles). Anderson finally brings to the forefront some really good and interesting recipes for ground beef, including some classics that have been adapted to utilize this type of meat (carbonnade and paprikash, to name two). Hooray! And thanks for putting my ground beef woes to rest.

Easy but Great Recipes
A friend put me on to Jean Anderson's cookbooks a few years ago and now they're the only ones I use. I never have failures with her recipes--and now "Dinners in a Dish or a Dash" tops them all. After my first run through of the book, I must have about 30 post-its marking the recipes I want to make immediately.