Solving the Problem of Weeknight Dinner
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From The New York Times, you're listening to The Wirecutter Show. Hey, everyone. It's The Wirecutter Show. I'm Kyra Blackwell. I'm Christine Cyr-Clessette. And I'm Rosie Garan. And we work at Wirecutter, the product recommendation site from The New York Times. Each week, we bring you expert advice from our newsroom of 140 journalists who review everyday products that will make your life better. This episode of The Wirecutter Show is called Solving the Problem of Weeknight Dinner.

Hey, Kyra. Hey, Christine. Hey. I'm coming in with a question for you both today. I want to know, how much do you two cook at home? Are you cooking every day? Yeah. Yeah. Too much. How do you feel about it? I hate it, Rosie. I hate it. My pandemic hobby was cooking, but now I'm back in my New York apartment that has no kitchen, basically, and I have to cook for myself because I live alone. I have to do it three times a day. It's become my own personal hell. What do you...

think about that, Christine? What's your perspective? Well, I honestly really love to cook, but oftentimes I don't have a lot of time to cook. So, you know, it's kind of like the 15 minutes before I'm going to go pick up my kids. I'm like, oh, well,

What am I going to make? But yeah, weeknight dinners is not like the funnest time for me. Like I feel like it's not the inspirational fun cooking that I like to do. Yeah, it does get really boring. And for me, I just feel like there's nobody to impress. It's just me. I don't know.

Oh, sometimes I don't even taste that good. It's just I'm trying to get protein into my body. Well, you know, there are some people in this world that their entire jobs are to kind of help think through this issue of weeknight meals. And we're lucky enough to have one of those people joining us today.

Today is a special episode of The Wirecutter Show. We're going to have a conversation with the editor-in-chief of New York Times Cooking and the food section, Emily Weinstein. Woo! Yes! Emily just came out with a new New York Times cooking book, Easy Weeknight Dinners, 100 Fast, Flavor-Packed Meals for Busy People Who Still Want Something Good to Eat. That kind of sounds like me. That sounds like you, too. I think that's a lot of people. Yeah.

Emily writes a weekly newsletter called Five Weeknight Dishes. This is sort of what the book is based off of. And today we're just going to go really deep in how to solve the problem of weeknight dinners. So we'll take a quick break. And when we're back, we'll chat with Emily.

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New York Times cooking is great for when I have something in my refrigerator and I don't know what to do with it. I love sheet pan bibimbap. It said 35 minutes. It was 35 minutes. A weeknight dinner for us. I love the chicken coconut curry. It's a really easy meal. It's super versatile. I can make it a fully vegetarian dish. This turkey chili has over 17,000 five-star ratings. So easy, so delicious.

Doing everything in one pot, even like a grain with the chicken, with the vegetables, helps the flavors, makes the cleanup easier because it's only one pot. The cucumber salad with soy, ginger, and garlic. Oh my God, that is just to die for. If I want to go easy, I can find something easy. If I want to go a little more complex, I can go there as well. The instructions are so clear, so simple, and it just works. Recipes from New York Times cooking are more reliable and more delicious, really.

Hey, it's Eric Kim from New York Times Cooking. Come cook with us. Go to NYTCooking.com. The best pizza dough on earth. Welcome back to The Wirecutter Show. Today we're speaking with Emily Weinstein, who is the editor-in-chief of New York Times Cooking and the editor of the new book, Easy Weeknight Dinners, 100 Fast, Flavor-Packed Meals for Busy People Who Still Want Something Good to Eat.

Emily also writes the weekly newsletter, Five Weeknight Dishes, and is a working mom who cooks regularly for her family of four. And she knows a thing or two about dinner burnout. Emily, welcome to The Wirecutter Show. Thank you so much for having me. So lovely to have you here. I'm really excited to talk about your book today. But before that, I want to talk a little bit about your career at The Times. You...

have this very interesting background where you came in to The Times as a fact checker, right, for the dining section. And you didn't have a culinary background or experience working in restaurants, but you really loved it. And you've been working in various roles on the food team or at cooking for, I don't know, like since 2007 now. Is that right? Yes. Is that not wild? It's wild. But I'd love to hear a little bit about what drew you to this work.

You know, I always loved food. I did not grow up in a household where there was a lot of cooking. You know, my parents both worked full-time, really demanding jobs.

And they loved food, too. And it was sort of culturally important to us. But, you know, it wasn't like there was a big tradition around cooking. There weren't rituals around cooking. I did not learn to cook as a kid. I just didn't have that frame of reference. It wasn't like there was like a stack of food magazines in our home or even really cookbooks.

And so fast forward, I am in my 20s. I live in New York. I am working in journalism that I was always very clear that I wanted to do. I wanted to be a writer or an editor. And I still wasn't really thinking about working in food. And around that time, you know, there was this big surge in interest in restaurants and sort of the culture in the mid-2000s. And that's when I started to get really excited about the idea of food.

I miraculously landed this fact-checking job at The New York Times. It was a freelance job working on the restaurant listings, which is sort of perfect for a person who's obsessed with restaurants in New York. And as soon as I got into the building at The Times and I was in what was then called the dining section—

I just was like, oh, this is what I should do. This is what I should do if they'll let me stay. They let me stay. The thing that draws me to food is that it is endlessly creative. It's endlessly fascinating. It just delivers this intense joy in people. Like there's a social dimension to it that some art is missing. Food does not miss it. It's comforting. It's just fascinating.

It plays all these different roles in people's lives. And it's just fun to explore all the different threads there. I love that. I have two little kids and I find myself thinking a lot about how my mom cooked for our family when we were young. And I'm curious for you what weeknight dinners were growing up and in what ways has that drawn a line to how you think about it?

So when I think about eating as a kid, you know, and I had a babysitter too after school, and sometimes she cooked us dinner. My parents didn't, they just didn't like cooking, which is funny because now my parents are retired and they love to cook and they bake, which is joyous because we all love to do it. But a lot of times my babysitter cooked the food after school. So my memories of that were...

were a lot of repetition, you know, chicken cutlets, chicken with rice, ketchup, like a ton of ketchup with that chicken, broccoli. My brother liked peas, so I liked broccoli. And just very fish, breaded fish. Pasta, for sure. Not a ton of variety, but, you know, I wasn't unhappy. That's satisfying food. My favorite thing we would have would be like

Kraft macaroni and cheese. Oh, yeah. Chicken cutlet and broccoli. That sounds like a meal my kids would actually really want to eat tonight, actually. Yeah, my kids would definitely eat that.

So it was a lot of that kind of food. But when I was with my parents and they were preparing the food, you know, we I grew up in the New York area. So once in a blue moon, we would be near Zabar's, which is a big food emporium on the Upper West Side. My family is Jewish. So Zabar's like culturally occupies a space in our lives.

And I remember we would always double park outside Zabar's. Which they love, by the way. They love when you do that. Double park. And parents would get bagels and lox. And it's probably my favorite food memory with my parents. So when you have young kids or even, you know, your kids now, what do you do?

Are you thinking, let me do my best to balance? Or are you like, because for me, approaching cooking for my kids now, I'm like, I really want to try and get them to love food by at the very least giving them lots of different flavors and maybe lots of different textures. So I'm wondering what that was like for you. I think about it actually the exact same way.

I want them to love food. And I know there are things that are delicious, like the chicken cutlet with the mac and cheese and the broccoli. It's going to work, you know, and why not make that for them sometimes? But I want them to enjoy food. I want them to really eat it and engage with it. I want it to be a healthy, joyous thing for them emotionally.

And I want them to try new things. Yeah. One of the limitations of the way I ate as a kid, and this is not a knock on anybody, but there wasn't a ton of exposure to other foods.

Ingredients, dishes, ideas. And also, frankly, it was like a different time culturally in the United States where people didn't look necessarily to food as a way of thinking about the world. But I want my children to get to a place where they want to try ingredients and dishes from a host of different cuisines, things I never would have had the chance to try when I was a kid. I mean, I didn't even eat spicy food when I was a kid. No.

No, I didn't. I didn't either. It's not a thing in Jewish cooking. So I got to be older and I liked spicy food, but I had to build up my tolerance. And now I love spicy food. So I've started to try to introduce the idea to them that like, hey, if you're open minded and you're willing to try new things, then

There is so much fun stuff we could do together. I'm threading the needle on that now. Not super successful. I have total confidence because my kids are a little older than yours. And I was in the same boat and I was kind of like, are they ever going to stop eating just chicken and white rice? And there was something that clicked. And my older kid, I remember the day that we went to Chinatown and had soup dumplings and Kung Pao chicken. And she was like, I'm sold. Hello.

I love that. I'm in like a funny psychological moment with my baby son where he will ask me, he'll look at me and ask me if he likes something. So he's like, do I like garlic? I'm like, absolutely you do. Of course you do, kid. Absolutely. Do I like this? Yeah, you love spinach. What are you talking about? ♪♪♪

You started this very successful newsletter called Five Weeknight Dishes, and the tagline is recipes for busy people who still want something good to eat, which totally relatable. How did you initially recognize this need that people wanted this in the first place, this solution to weeknight dinners? Were you hearing it from colleagues? Were people walking up to you in the street? Like, who was telling you this, and were you experiencing it in your own life? I was experiencing it in my own life.

So we launched that newsletter right after I came back from my maternity leave with my first child. Something you will hear people with small children say all the time is, well, before I had kids. Right.

Before I had kids, so sad. You know, before I had kids, I would cook really elaborately, like all weekend. I would have like big dinner parties. I would also cook after work. It didn't matter if I started cooking at 8 and we wrapped up at 10, 15. Like, who cares, right? Yeah, they're like the salad days. The salad days. Yeah, you know, if you enjoy cooking, that's luxurious. That's fun. I had a baby.

And everything changed. Everything changes. And well, first of all, you just like straight up have less time, especially if you're a working parent. You know, at that time, it was before COVID. I was just literally not home all day. Even if you're not a working parent, the sort of schedule gets stacked up really, really quickly. Or if you're a caregiver in some other capacity, maybe it's not a child, maybe it's somebody else in your life. Like things are busy. And that sort of

Two hour, like, maybe I'll make blah, blah, blah, you know, vanishes, right? And I really saw that need clearly. Also, you know, with kids, I really started to think about cooking in a really different way. It was way less about dishes and way more about ingredients. I started to think with a lot more intentionality about simple food. And I also, frankly, just rediscovered simple pleasures like cooking.

A quesadilla? Like, it's not like I ever thought quesadillas weren't good, but I wasn't making them at home. At the same time, at the times, we're trying to figure out how to help people with meal planning. This was around the time Blue Apron and some of the other meal kit delivery companies were surging. And we're like, how do we help people with meal planning? Because we had started to hear that people loved these meal kits, but then they sort of wanted to graduate from them. They

They didn't mind doing some grocery shopping. Like, how could they actually cook? And we did all this audience research. You know, we focused in on working parents with young children.

And it was amazing to hear the scope and intensity of the needs for simple recipes and to really focus on them. You know, we had a newsletter then. It's one we still have. It's the Big Cooking Newsletter. Sam Sifton and Melissa Clark write it. And that newsletter certainly includes recipes you could cook after work. But it also has all sorts of other stuff in it. It's got amazing desserts. It's got holiday planning. It's really the big picture of cooking recipes.

on any given day, we needed something that was just explicitly aimed at helping a group of people who loved food. They still wanted something good to eat. They just didn't have very much time to cook it. And once we saw that real need and that sort of like, well, I love NYT cooking, but like, I'm not making pork shoulder on a Wednesday, you know, which I personally would never do that. Then we were able to zero in on

on a newsletter to help them. That really resonates with me. I went through kind of a similar journey as a mom of young children and just having to really simplify things. I'm curious, when you're thinking about the newsletter weekly, how are you curating the recipes that go into it? Like, how do you decide what goes in? I am always looking for a mix of flavors

If I'm doing something that takes a little longer, like bone-in chicken thighs, for instance, there's no way around it. It takes about a half hour just to cook the chicken through. So if I'm doing something that takes a little bit longer, I want to make sure there's something like really fast in there. There are always two vegetarian recipes, at least. I'm also sort of looking for complexity. It's like, is it really simple enough?

I don't want to include recipes that use more than like two big pieces of equipment or pots and pans to wash because cleaning up is a part of home cooking. And I'm just feeling like maybe we haven't helped you that much if you have to spend 45 minutes cleaning up after dinner on a Monday. Also relatable content. I do have a question because we were having a debate yesterday when you add in the chopped onions, the chopped vegetables. Does that all bake into the cooking time for you?

Yes. And you know what? The way we used to calculate cooking time at The New York Times was it started from step one of the recipe. It didn't include the prep, which is madness, especially when you think about a recipe like stir fry, for instance, where the cooking is lightning fast, but you might be chopping several vegetables or preparing other ingredients before you start cooking. It just felt inaccurate. So we have started moving towards including prep time in recipes.

You know, so people really understand, hey, what does this require from you? Your mileage may vary. Maybe a really slow chopper. Yeah. Which is fine. Or a fast chopper, you know. And that's part of why the Times didn't used to do it. It's like, well, everyone's got different skills. And it's like, well, I still think we could probably be a little more helpful than that. ♪

What are the common questions, concerns that your readers are coming to you with? What are you hearing from people? What are their largest issues when approaching cooking for their families, cooking for themselves on a weekly basis? You know, a big part of it is figuring out dishes that will sort of feed everybody at the table, right? And it's not even necessarily about pleasing everybody, right?

especially when you're thinking about little kids. It's more literally like, will they eat this without a fight? And sometimes it's also about special diets. So you're not talking about a young child who just doesn't want to try something new. You're talking more about legitimate changes you might have to make to your meal plan to feed somebody who is celiac. So I get that a lot. It's like, how do you solve that puzzle? And just planning overall, like how do I make the week work?

Sometimes they're really specific about ingredients. I think the most common complaint I get in my inbox is that NYT cooking loves chicken thighs. Yes. Why don't we do more boneless, skinless chicken breast?

And it's true. Like, we have a strong chicken thigh bias. Well, they're affordable. And they taste better, more importantly. They taste better. So there's more fat, so there's more flavor. And also, they're more forgiving. It's very easy to overcook white meat, you know, that dried baked chicken. And then it gets sort of cottony, and it doesn't taste good. Chicken

Chicken thighs, you got a lot more leeway. You're just starting from a place of like almost guaranteed tastiness. So that's why we do that. Do people ask if you can sub in chicken breast for thighs in recipes? Yeah. And, you know, for the most part, you really can. You just have to adjust the cooking time. Yeah. Emily, I want to talk a little bit about the book. It's called Easy Weeknight Dinners, and it is filled with so many great recipes. I've been really enjoying flipping through it the last couple of weeks. Yeah.

A lot of these recipes have obviously come from New York Times Cooking, and you featured them in the newsletter. I'm wondering, what was the litmus test for making it into the book? Because you have an embarrassment of riches on the site and from your six years of doing the newsletter. How did you decide what would go in the book? Was it the length of time the recipe takes? Was it the ingredients? Walk us through that.

So, I mean, there are 100 recipes in the book. And I just want to say right off the bat, we could have filled the book several times over not repeating a recipe. I started with the recipes that I love the most.

It has an idea, that spark of genius, that clever twist, that technique you might not have thought of before, you know, the magical ingredient. To me, those are like the NYT cooking recipes, the strongest example of what we do. So I started with those. And then I start to build from there. What are the recipes I love and cook at home? I mean, we really have hundreds of recipes that fit the bill for this book.

I use the same standards I use for my newsletter. So not too much cleaning up. Less than an hour, although I don't even think anything takes an hour, and certainly less than 40 minutes. For me, in a perfect world, I'm really psyched if I see a 20-minute recipe, a 25-minute recipe. And we have some in the book that are faster even than that.

And I really wanted to get a good mix of cuisines and ingredients. You know, I just want to give people a lot of ways into this kind of cooking. Like, weeknight cooking doesn't belong to any one cuisine or way of thinking about food. The thing about me is that I'm like an NYT cooking super fan. I use the app.

And, you know, these are all writers that we brought into the fold because we love them. Right. And it's broken down by ingredient each chapter. And it's organized from the shortest recipes to the longest. Right.

And again, like we're really aiming for the shorter recipes. The longer ones are still less than an hour and they are outliers. I love that you have 15-minute recipes in this book. You've got that in the fun index in the front. And I think that's so great because sometimes you really do need to just...

Go fast. I can't even imagine a 15-minute. Is it just a salad? How do you cook something in 15 minutes? It's like a sandwich salad. Caitlin Roper, who's an editor at The Times, also a working parent, and she loves to cook. And right off the bat, she's like, we need a few handheld dinners. So we've got a really great grilled cheese in this book. We've got a tuna sandwich. It's like the best tuna sandwich you're ever going to have. Yeah.

They're potato chips in the sandwich. That is 100% right. Five-minute crunchy tuna fish sandwich, done. I'm doing that at home. Yeah, I might try that tonight, actually. It's really good. What's your relationship with the comment section of the New York Times cooking app? I love the comment section.

I don't develop recipes. So it's a little easier for me to love the comment section like unreservedly than I think it would be for somebody who's seeing the comments coming in on their recipes. But I can say broadly speaking, like at NYT Cooking, we love the commenters. We love that there's a community there and they have valuable insight on the recipes. So I actually almost always read the comments before I cook a recipe from NYT Cooking that I've never made before.

I'm just curious how people altered it, what they did. If somebody says double the sauce on any given recipe, I'm a sauce person. So I'm like, okay, I'm going to double the sauce. They're also threaded through the book, too. Yeah. Which is so cool. We brought those reader comments, like, into the actual book. So there are these voices on the pages with the recipes that they're not my voice, not the recipe developer's voice, but a commenter.

We're talking to Emily Weinstein, the editor of NYT Cooking and author of Easy Weeknight Dinners. We'll be back after a quick break.

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Welcome back to The Wirecutter Show. We're talking with Emily Weinstein, editor of New York Times Cooking, about her new book, Easy Weeknight Dinners.

This entire episode and your book is all about how to solve the monotony of weeknight dinners, right? People know the things that they can usually cook, but it's just, it gets boring. I want to know how you deal with those ruts as the pro from New York Times Cooking. Sometimes I deal with the ruts by taking a break from cooking. Nothing wrong with that. And for me also, like taking a break from cooking also includes like frozen prepared food and

And it's the kind of stuff I always have. Like, I always have dumplings in my freezer. And if I'm feeling like I don't want to go the extra mile, I don't want to make something from scratch even simple, that's what I'm doing. I'm not a huge takeout person. So take a break, number one. Number two, like, go to the grocery store, which might feel a little counterintuitive. But if you are somebody who genuinely likes food, let alone loves food...

And you're kind of out of ideas. I'm assuming you still have to buy things like coffee, tea, milk, bread, whatever. So you're going to the store. Just wander around a tiny bit. Pick up something that you're like, oh, that sounds good. It could be a new condiment, cheese. I find that that kind of gets me excited. And then, frankly, recipes. I know maybe that's really obvious coming from me, but...

If I'm in a rut, every once in a while, a recipe will catch my eye that'll get me really excited to cook again. What's your go-to, I need to eat but nothing seems good right now, meal? It always starts with carbs. Hmm.

I can always eat a bowl of rice, a bowl of noodles, a bowl of pasta, toast. I find if I can start with the carb, the tasty carb, I can always kind of get to a place to layer on top. And sometimes it's a non-carb ingredient that I'm excited about. But if I'm really feeling lackluster...

You know, if there's like a bagel in the freezer, if there's rice in the fridge and then we have an egg and then I can fry the egg and put it on the rice and put on some, you know, chili crisp or some hot sauce, then I'm getting to a place where I'm like, OK, I could eat that for lunch. That sounds good. Yeah. I mean, this has come up on this podcast before. I think that chili crisp is the answer to life. I put it on everything. When my kids were little and I felt particularly harried at dinnertime,

I would often rely on some kind of pre-made ingredients. Like I would keep some pre-made gnocchi from Trader Joe's in my freezer and finish that off with maybe some vegetables, maybe an egg, maybe some kind of protein. Are there pre-made ingredients that you really rely on? Like you just mentioned dumplings that you like to keep in your freezer. Are there other things that kind of like halfway there and then you can finish them off really quickly at home?

And I think a lot of the best recipes in this book rely on those kinds of ingredients. I mean, that's one of the keys to great weeknight cooking is to lean on ingredients that already have a ton of flavor. And some of them are like Chili Crisp you mentioned, store-bought gnocchi, noodles, like noodle packs, etc.

Go for flavor blends that already exist. Old Bay is a spice mix, and it brings so much to everything, right? Hot sauce. Like, don't just think of it as something you put on at the end. You can cook with hot sauce, and it's great.

Allie Slagle has a recipe where she uses shrimp and butter and she tosses the butter with the hot sauce to make like basically an instant sauce for shrimp. Wow, wish I'd thought of that. It's so delicious.

Emily, there are a lot of sheet pan recipes in your book, and I know that you have a special relationship with the sheet pan. When did you first start sheet pan cooking? What's the love affair? Sadly, it is a love affair. So maybe about a decade ago, Melissa Clark, who's an amazing cook, writer, recipe developer, video host,

And she proposed that we do a recipe, a column, in which we cook a whole meal on a sheet pan. You know, and I knew what she was talking about. It goes by different names. It's like a rimmed half sheet, technically. In restaurant kitchens, they use those pans all the time for everything, but they're much bigger. So technically, the version we use at home is half. She proposed we do that. And it was chicken and broccoli rabe and a sweet potato, and she made a little sauce on the side. And...

It was just kind of a moment like, oh, we should do more of these. And she kept going and going. And then it just grew and grew and grew. Everyone's looking for one pan dinners. And the sheet pan just opens up all these different possibilities. And critics of the sheet pan will say you can cook all the ingredients at once on the sheet pan, but it doesn't cook them all perfectly the way they need to be cooked.

To which I would say, it's Tuesday. Yeah. Does dinner need to be perfect or does it need to be tasty and done? Yeah. What's the saying? Don't let perfect be the enemy of the good. I use that saying a lot. Yes. Yes. Don't let perfect be the enemy of the good. And we've got, honestly, just genuinely delicious sheep pan recipes in this book. And...

The more people wanted them and the more people came to rely on that and the more we saw this truly insatiable demand for one pot, one pan recipes, we started to lean on the sheet pan more and more. I did our first review, Wirecutter's first review of sheet pans, and I think our

Our pick from then, it was like 10 years ago, was the Nordicware. And I think the thing that I realized with sheet pans is that actually getting a good one can really help. I think a lot of people have these like flimsy cookie sheets in their kitchens. And that's what I had always used until I started using these half sheet pans. And they are actually much more durable. And I've had mine for a long time now. And they are so great. And they cook a little bit more evenly, too. It's not going to burn things like a thinner cookie sheet. So big fan of those.

You know, it's funny. As part of our mini book tour for this book, I went to D.C. with Eric Kim, who's another fabulous recipe developer and member of our team. And people were asking us for equipment recommendations. And normally we stay away from that. We leave that to you all at Wirecutter. But, you know, we were like, well, there's this brand that we love for sheet bands, and it rhymes with schmordekschmeier. Right.

But now I'm in the world of wire cutters. So I can just come out and say that, yes, I totally agree. I have Nordic wire sheet pans myself, and it's a great piece of equipment, especially for how much it costs. And it's one of those things that you keep for a really, really long time. Like I've not ever...

ever had to get rid of one. And that's the sort of stuff I'm always looking to bring into my kitchen. Like, I would rather spend like $10 more now and never have to buy another one again. Well, I kind of want to bring us back to this idea that you said earlier. It's Tuesday and who needs perfect when you can have good? I feel like I've taken that a bit too far, though, because I live alone. There's nobody to impress. Between you and me, my food looks like dog food. Yeah.

I just keep mixing stuff in the pan. But I have seen that in your book, you do have this section in the index that's easy recipes to adapt for a single person. What's your best piece of advice for people who are living alone or cooking for themselves? This is a question we get a lot. Yeah.

Cook to please yourself, right? Obviously. What an amazing thing. I would say get really comfortable with your freezer because there are a lot of ingredients that freeze well. Like, for instance, if you do want to buy a pack of chicken thighs, but you don't need all four at once. Maybe you want to cook one. Maybe you want to cook two. You're going to eat both that night. You're going to take one for lunch tomorrow.

Talk about an ingredient that freezes perfectly. So get to know your freezer, have a freezer strategy, buy a Sharpie, whatever.

You know, wrap your stuff up, label it. Labeling is actually really helpful. Get to know your freezer. And then also there are just things that you're going to cook that freeze really well. So it's not even just that you're freezing the ingredients. You know, if you like ever have a deep craving for soup, a lot of soups freeze brilliantly. You can make that soup, put it away in the freezer. Okay.

I want to flip the script a little bit and talk about when you have to cook for others. And you touched on this a little earlier about when you're cooking for, you know, people with a variety of food restrictions or maybe you have some picky eaters and they could be children or maybe they're not children. But I'm wondering if you and the folks at cooking have some favorite, either favorite strategies or favorite recipes for teachers

tackling that problem when you've got people who either have food restrictions or who are picky? You know, I do tend to start with an ingredient that's going to work for everybody for the most part. Chicken, pasta, like what's sort of the baseline that's going to work for everybody? And then I find that if you can identify recipes that let people customize your

You're okay. And everyone thinks that's fun, too. It's like a make-your-own-Sunday bar. That's why we eat taco night for that reason. Taco night's a great example. Or also like a lot of pasta dishes. You can make pasta that's really pretty plain.

Then if somebody wants to toss in vegetables, you could have those vegetables cooked on the side. You can have some mushrooms like bacon. Amazing for that. Fry up some bacon, cut it into bits, and people can like finish their dish with like a little smoky, crunchy hit. And I find that that works really well for people who, you know, if you really are trying to feed a variety of people.

Well, Emily, we usually ask one final question of our guests. What's the last thing you bought that you really love? But we're going to put a spin on it for you. If you had one meal that you could cook for the rest of your life, which meal do you think would take the longest for you to get tired of?

So basically, this is like my desert island. Yeah, your desert island meal. It probably would be, I know it came up earlier, but bagels, like a toasted bagel with cream cheese and lox and some scrambled eggs on the side and maybe like a little salad, you know?

Yes, it's like cooking, but like it's pretty easy. And I think those, to me, those combination of flavors are home and they're always delicious. You're ending on a political statement. You're toasting the bagel? I know.

I know. Emily. I never used to toast the bagel. I used to only be fresh bagel. Yes. Well, how fresh are the bagels that you have access to? I think that's the question on a desert island. I don't know. That's exactly right. Also, I have come to appreciate the crunch you get from a trip to the toaster. Wow. Emily, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you so much. This was fun. Thank you.

Our guest today was Emily Weinstein. Her book is called Easy Weeknight Dinners. If you're looking for some gear to help you get those easy weeknight dinners on the table faster, the experts at Wirecutter have reviewed tons of helpful kitchen items. There's rice cookers, sheet pans, blenders, food processors, instant pots. Christine has reviewed slow cookers. Kyra has reviewed air fryers. And don't forget the freezer and the microwave. They're your friends.

As always, you can find links to our coverage at nytimes.com slash Wirecutter or in the podcast show notes. And real quick, if you like this show, we would really appreciate if you gave us a follow. You'll get new episodes automatically downloaded every Wednesday. You can do this wherever you like to listen. That's it for us. Thanks for listening.

The Wirecutter Show is executive produced by Rosie Guerin and produced by Abigail Keel. Editing by Abigail Keel. Engineering support from Maddy Maziello and Nick Pittman. Today's episode was mixed by Katherine Anderson. Original music by Dan Powell, Marion Lozano, Alisha Ba'itup, and Diane Wong. Wirecutter's Deputy Publisher and Interim General Manager is Cliff Levy.

Ben Fruman is Wirecutter's Editor-in-Chief. I'm Kyra Blackwell. I'm Christine Cyr-Claisset. And I'm Rosie Guerin. Thanks for listening. Bye. Was I supposed to say bye? No. Okay. Bye. That was cute. That was really cute. I feel like I never sang bye at the right moment. Kyra's like, bye.