Beat dinner doldrums one recipe at a time.
“I’m sick of all the stuff I make for dinner.”
Sound familiar?
I get it. Shopping for the same ingredients and cooking the same meals on autopilot is just easier. Plus, you know your kids like them. Or at least, they don’t hate them, right?
But you’re bored. And you’re dying to mix it up. But who has time for endless searches on Google to find recipes that may or may not work?
The solution is not another complicated meal plan.
No matter how hard you’ve tried, meal plans don’t work for you. Maybe your kids don’t like what’s on the menu. Or your work meeting goes late so take-out is easier one night.
Or you get a last-minute invitation from friends and need to decide…do you go forward with the dinner you had planned or let the ingredients languish one more day in the fridge?
When you want to make a change, I believe it’s best to start small.
I created Mission:Dinner so you can refresh your dinner repertoire one easy idea at a time. And since easy is relative, let me be more specific.
For a full year starting September 2022, I sent out one easy recipe per week. In the early days, I focused on recipes with five ingredients that took 30 minutes or less. After about 20 recipes, I added in those with more ingredients.
I now send out my newsletter less frequently, but please feel free to browse the archives and sign up to get an occasional new recipe.
Who is Kristin Donnelly?
Hi! I’m a cookbook author, professional recipe developer, and former food editor for Food & Wine magazine.
I’m also an elder millennial (or xennial…depending on which article you read) raising a young Gen Z’er. I make dinner for my family most nights of the week but also suffer occasionally from the dinner doldrums.
When I’m in those ruts, I find it’s best just to cook what’s easy and then try one new-to-me recipe per week. (Yup, that’s how I came up with this newsletter.)
I seesaw between being a semi-ambitious cook (toasting and soaking dried chiles for homemade enchilada sauce) and a lazy one (hand me that jar of Rao’s marinara).
Either way, I’m usually a resourceful cook and my favorite meals are those I make when it feels like there’s “no food in the house.”
Because I wrote a book called Modern Potluck, I’m often hired to develop recipes for easy party food. But that’s not what I make every day.
My husband always says to me, “Why don’t you share your easiest recipes for the simple dinners you make at home?”
So now, I am.
Promises, Caveats, and Disclaimers
I promise you won’t have to scroll and scroll to get to the recipe.
I promise to include a well-lit, realistic photo of the recipe.
I designed Mission:Dinner for omnivores, including those who eat meat and fish but also don’t mind a vegetarian meal.
Each recipe will use about widely available ingredients from my suburban supermarket.
I will offer substitution ideas to accommodate dietary preferences when they make sense.
I will write the recipe in a way that explains the why behind the technique so you can use it again.
I promise every recipe will have at least one vegetable and often more than one.
I develop recipes with children in mind (I have an 11-year-old) but some might not appeal to the most picky among us.
I’m a huge fan of sheet-pan and one-pot meals. Some recipes will include more than one cooking vessel but I promise to keep dishes to a minimum.
I promise the easy recipe will require no special equipment, including a food processor, blender, Instant Pot, and certainly not a piping bag! That said, bonus newsletters might have recipes that are a little more ambitious.
Seasoning is foundational to cooking and the better you learn to use salt, the better your food will taste.
