I’ve been deluged lately by cookbooks built around a common mission: to help home cooks put healthy meals on the table regularly, without breaking a sweat or busting the budget. The proposals for accomplishing that feat are often as creative as the recipes.
Some are more realistic than others. Cassy Garcia’s “Cook Once Dinner Fix: Quick and Exciting Ways to Transform Tonight’s Dinner Into Tomorrow’s Feast” (Simon & Schuster, $30) fits this category. The blogger-turned-bestselling author is the creator of Fed and Fit, a popular website for creating fast, family-friendly meals.
Her first book by the same name lays out a detailed 28-day food and fitness plan featuring the type of gluten-free, paleo-friendly recipes she developed for herself a decade ago to combat chronic pain and weight gain. Her follow-up, “Cook Once, Eat All Week,” shows how to streamline cooking time by batch-cooking components of meals to use in creative ways throughout the week.
Now a mother of two young children, she’s simplified that premise further in her latest book, with recipes designed to use leftovers from one meal to produce a totally different meal for another night. Rather than emphasizing one specific diet, she offers a plethora of tips for modifying recipes to suit individual needs.
For one meal series, I roasted two sheet pans of cauliflower florets, and tossed half in an Asian-inspired sweet-and-sour sauce to serve over rice; the next night I coated the remaining roasted florets in a sauce of chipotle and other Mexican flavors, re-roasted them until crispy, then folded them into tortillas with avocado and cilantro.
Other dinner series show you how to remake extras from Roasted Garlic Turkey Breast with Lemon-Dill Quinoa into Spiced Turkey-Potato Soup, or get double-duty out of a batch of freezer-friendly meatballs for Madras-Inspired Meatballs and Minestrone Soup.
Freezing and reheating advice, recipe hacks, and substitution tips throughout can help you customize any meal on a moment’s notice. And if you’re hungry for more guidance, you’ll find plenty at cookonce.com.
Susan Puckett is a cookbook author and former food editor of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Follow her at susanpuckett.com.
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