Oh $#!% What's for Dinner?: No-Fuss Weeknight Recipes You'll Swear By

Praise for Oh $#!% What's for Dinner?: No-Fuss Weeknight Recipes You'll Swear By

TV host Sansone (The Hub Today) debuts with a useful and enthusiastic guide to “quick and dirty” dinners, with an emphasis on meals that will please the whole family. Most of these dishes, from fish tacos with chili and lime to a deconstructed egg roll bowl with fresh ginger, can be achieved in 30 minutes or less. Elsewhere, Sansone draws on her Italian American heritage in recipes for 10-minute spaghetti carbonara and “street-style” sausage and peppers, and follows up the collection’s most time-consuming outing, the long-simmering “Sunday Sauce,” with a quicker take, which she dubs “Monday Marinara.” The author has a few tricks up her sleeve: she favors marinating meats in Ziplock bags to reduce mess, and approximates the flavor of effort-intensive lasagna using layers of frozen ravioli. Most of the time, however, her tip for reducing the effort involved in these classic recipes is simply to rely on store-bought ingredients, from a can of refrigerated biscuits in her personal pot pies to frozen mini-meatballs in the “weeknight wedding soup.” “Don’t be a hero,” she reminds readers, “you can only make so much at once.” Though some home chefs may balk, it’s a reassuring message on a stressful weeknight. This will come through in a pinch. (May)—Publishers Weekly

In her debut cookbook, TV personality and mom Sansone shares 65 dinner recipes for busy weeknights—no appetizers or desserts because who has time for that during the week? Chapters focus on chicken, seafood, pasta, beef, soups and salads, sandwiches, and sides, along with a meatless Monday section. Sansone spent a lot of time in her Italian American grandmother’s kitchen, and some of these recipes reflect her grandmother’s influence, such as Italian-style mac and cheese. There’s also “lazy lasagna” that uses premade frozen ravioli, Easy Cheesy Broccoli Soup, and time hacks such as baked grilled cheese and sheet-pan quesadillas that allow for making a lot of food all at once instead of flipping individually in a skillet. While many of these recipes are accessible and appealing, several are not quick, with hour-long baking or simmering times, pizza dough that needs to be brought to room temperature for an hour, or ingredients like pre-cooked chicken or thawed vegetables. Advance prep notes would have been useful for these recipes. VERDICT Sansone’s book is full of approachable, family-friendly recipes that will likely make it into readers’ regular rotations.—Melissa DeWild, Library Journal