Quinoa egg bowl

Home cooks often put a lot of pressure on themselves to cook a "proper" dinner. Making sure the meal is balanced and that all of the elements are work together can be a chore, adding stress to what should be a pleasurable experience. This doesn't have to be the case, says Melissa Clark in her new cookbook Dinner: Changing the Game. In an excerpt from the books, she explains how cooking dinner can be a dance. 

For most cooks, dinner still encompasses a traditional "meat and two sides" approach. This can make mealtime challenging "because it ignores our evolution as a food culture," Clark explains. "That's not how most of us eat - or want to eat - on a daily basis. Today's dinner can take a lot of different forms. But the conundrum for cooks is that we haven't defined what those forms are. So it has left many of us struggling in a void between what we think a proper meal should be, and what we actually want to cook and eat for dinner," she continues.

There are many ways to change up the mealtime cooking experience. Making a salad topped with burrata, a hearty grain bowl, or turning the traditional meat-and-sides into a simpler, single-sheet-pan affair are all ways to reduce self-imposed dinnertime stress. In her book, Clark offers more strategies to change dinner-making "from a dreaded chore into a beautiful dance". 

Jenny profiled Clark's new book in today's cookbook preview, and will be doing a more in-depth review soon. Watch the blog for a promotion of Dinner: Changing the Game in the next week or so.

Photo of Quinoa egg bowl with pecorino from Food & Wine Magazine by Melissa Clark