What I Learned in a Year of Weeknight Cooking

These same cooks also embrace recipes they already know and love — but a little different, with a twist. So you can imagine my delight when a cookbook called “Food You Love but Different” recently landed on my desk. Published by Page Street in August, the book is filled with recipes like cacio e pepe, but made with Gorgonzola and gnocchi, and chicken soup made with hominy, poblano chile and a generous garnish of avocado and Cheez-Its.

I called the author, Danielle Oron, a chef who lives in Atlanta with her husband and 2-year-old daughter. “I found that over those past two years I really wanted to simplify my cooking just to get it done so I could see my family,” she said, “and also do it in a way that was a little more exciting.” She did it by taking the dishes she already made in her routine and tweaking them, cross-pollinating ingredients from different parts of the world, as is the modern way.

For busy cooks, it’s a way to change their routine while still remaining routine-adjacent.

Dawn Perry, the food director for Real Simple magazine, described it as “I’m going to try the animal-print trend, but just with a belt” — a way to dip a toe in. “Most people don’t want to try a whole new recipe every single night,” she added.

Ms. Perry, who has worked in magazine test kitchens and for a meal kit delivery service, has deep experience in the weeknight-cooking game. She’s also on maternity leave with her second child. “It’s a total hustle to get dinner on the table,” she said.

She is writing a cookbook on pantry cooking, which brings to me to something else I’ve learned: how essential it is to stock your pantry well. Boxed and canned ingredients like rice, pasta, rice noodles, chickpeas, black beans, coconut milk, tomatoes and tuna make it possible to cook fast and flexibly. (Read Melissa Clark’s love letter to canned foods if you need more persuading, or ideas.)

Ms. Perry, who lives in Brooklyn, described her weeknight cooking as a “pantry-based program”: She keeps her standard pantry items in stock, and augments them with a rotating cast of animal proteins and seasonal produce, combining them in different ways each night. (Cooking pasta with one kind of vegetable is not terribly different from cooking it with another.)

This enables her to avoid doing something she dislikes: meal planning.

“I don’t believe in meal planning, and I think it’s kind of mean to suggest that people do it,” she said. “I think it takes a certain kind of super-organized person.”