“Gourmet” is an adjective you don’t see often in contemporary cookbooks. The term tends to conjure images of elaborate spreads featuring high-end ingredients and time-consuming techniques beyond the bandwidth of most home cooks.
Meseidy Rivera is all too aware of this, yet she embraces the term anyway. “A great meal and precious time are not mutually exclusive,” the Chattanooga-based creator of the food blog, The Noshery, writes in the introduction to “Weeknight Gourmet Dinners: Exciting, Elevated Meals Made Easy” (Page Street, $21.99). Every recipe I’ve tried thus far from this slim soft-cover volume — each accompanied by a gorgeous photograph she shot herself — backs this thesis.
I started with Spiced Lamb Meatballs and Harissa-Spiced Yogurt Dipping Sauce, subbing ground beef for the lamb as suggested, and paired it with Mediterranean Tomato Salad with Za’atar Pita Chips. This restaurant-worthy feast came together as easily as promised, as did Miso Butter-Rubbed Roast Chicken, baked on a sheet pan with bok choy and shiitake mushrooms.
Rivera launched The Noshery as a hobby blog 12 years ago, mainly to recreate the flavors she and her husband missed in their native Puerto Rico. A few years later she gave up her law career to attend culinary school. Since then, she’s worked as a culinary assistant alongside blogger and Food Network superstar Ree Drummond, aka The Pioneer Woman, and developed recipes for numerous food companies, “all in search of the perfect bite.”
Rivera has a knack for cleverly combining ingredients you may already have in unexpected ways — marinating chicken thighs in bloody mary mix, for instance. She employs an Instant Pot to streamline dishes like Risotto a la Carbonara, and a microwave to bake individual Upside-Down Peach-Ricotta Cakes in minutes.
“Whoever said you can’t make fabulous cake in the microwave?” she asks. If I haven’t said it, I’ve certainly thought it. I’ll see if she can persuade me otherwise.
Susan Puckett is a cookbook author and former food editor of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Follow her at susanpuckett.com.
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