One Pan, Two Plates: More Than 70 Complete Weeknight Meals for Two

I recommend this cookbook to anyone who will sit still long enough to listen to me. I originally borrowed it from the public library and loved it so much that I bought my own copy. I purchased it in May 2016 and have cooked exclusively from it and the vegetarian sequel ever since. I had found myself in a cooking rut that even Pinterest couldn't pull me out of. Online recipes are great, but sometimes they wouldn't come out like they were intended to, or pairing a main dish and a side dish was a bit of a chore, or the two of us would get tired of eating leftovers for three days straight. At the place I was in my life, I needed a book I could just cook my way through that did much of the planning for me. There are so many good parts to this cookbook. The flavors are creative and very often jaw-droppingly delicious. I love that they're vegetable-heavy and cook with whole ingredients, sometimes with vegetables that I not only tried for the first time, but are now some of my favorite vegetables because of this book. The majority of them have gorgeous pictures, cook in 30 minutes or less, and serve exactly two people, so there is very little wasted food. Since it's one pan, there are no side dishes needed to round out the meal for either flavor or substance. The author included sections at the end of each recipe with ideas to beef up the meal if you're feeling extra hungry and gave wine pairing recommendations. The back of the book groups the recipes into seasons, so you can cook with what's freshest at the moment. I've doubled recipes and served it to guests. I've experimented on guests with completely new recipes not only without issue, but with many compliments. Seriously, y'all. Praise hands and heart eyes every day for eight months and counting. The only downside I feel I must mention is that there is a fair amount of vegetable chopping required for each meal, since you're cooking with fresh produce. However, I view this more as a natural side effect than a downside. The recipes are vegetable-centric, so to me, taking the time to chop fresh produce is such a small price to pay for the nutritional benefit, and for something so flipping delicious. My spouse and I both work outside the home for 45-50 hours a week, and the lifestyle of cooking daily and eating healthfully has been completely sustainable for the better part of a year for us because of this book. One more tip I'd give to new users, in addition to reading each recipe all the way through before starting to cook and keeping in mind that eating fresh produce means a little chopping, is to cook mise en place. Lay out all your ingredients on the counter, chop your produce, prep your meats, measure ingredients into separate bowls, all before you even turn on the stove. Since the average recipe has you cooking something for less than 5 minutes before adding a new ingredient to the pan, and sometimes for even less than a minute, there is very little time to be chopping produce while you're cooking. We bought a set of little glass bowls here on Amazon that have been so helpful. Eating healthfully with minimal food waste can be fun and interesting and sustainable. I cannot recommend this cookbook enough.

So far so good! I'm using this cookbook to learn more about cooking, and it has not disappointed me so far in that regard. I have made 6 meals, and 5 of them were wonderful. The book takes complicated, technical dishes and makes them easy-to-follow recipes. The book has 76 recipes total. Very happy with this purchase!

This has been my go-to cookbook since we bought it. So far, I've tried the corn cakes, flank steak, Rib-eye Florentine, and several others. They have all been good and not a high degree of difficulty. I wouldn't say this is a beginners cookbook, but if you can follow a recipe then this is perfect. I like how it also gives you tips or other suggestions as well. I will say that it seems a bit intimidating at first when you look at all the ingredients per recipe (5 ingredients or less this is not), but they have all been easy to find and more often than not, they are ingredients I can use in other recipes or things I normally use anyway. Everything so far has been tasty and made me look like more of a cook than I really am. . My husband and I aren't big eaters and have found the portions to more than enough. We typically have food left over. (maybe one more serving for a small eater) However, if you normally don't try to eat small portions, then I believe it to be adequate. Again, the book give suggestions for additions if you find the servings to be small for some of the recipes. My favorite thus far has been the corn cakes. I've made this several times, including when we had guests over. I've doubled the recipe or added a side of meat when it's more than just the two of us. YUM. The only reason I gave it four stars instead of five is that I prefer books that have pictures with every recipe. A small thing, but I like to be able to compare what I made to what it's suppose to look like!

Cooking is something I really enjoy and I cook 5-6 nights a week after long days at work. I buy a lot of cookbooks and find that I make one or two recipes out of them and then they get shelved. This book, however, has been amazing. I've basically been cooking through it, choosing one recipe from each section for each trip to the grocery store I make. I also have celiac, and therefore must eat gluten-free, and these recipes are easily adapted if necessary for those with dietary restrictions (she does point out those that are vegetarian or that can easily be made vegetarian). And there's wine pairings. The book is amazing. Things I like about this book: 1) Most of these dishes can be made in 45 minutes or less, including prep. I may cook a lot, but it still takes me a while to prepare my mise en place. 2) Meat and vegetables. Occasionally starch/carbohydrate. Perfect and healthy. 3) Excellent size portions - some can be quite large, so a third portion can be saved for lunch during the workweek. 4) Many of the recipes use similar ingredients (carrots, onion, celery, etc.) and you can easily plan to make 3-4 meals to use up all the produce before it goes bad. 5) No dessert section. I'm so tired of cookbooks that claim to have so many recipes but 40 of them are for sugar-laden treats. Yay, actual food. This book basically cooks meals like the ones I enjoy at my most frequented, favorite restaurants. The recipes are easy to follow, she offers little tips to increase the ease and for substitutions, and seriously, once you've heated the oil in the pan, delicious food meets your plate in minutes. I really hope more books like this come to market.

I found this book at an out-of-the-way bookstore while on vacation in our RV. Instantly, I recognized the kind of cooking that doesn't use every pot in the kitchen (and only one burner) and is good, healthful food for the road. In the year since I bought it, this cookbook has become my mainstay, even at home. The flavor combinations are delicious, the instructions are very clear and appropriately detailed, and the variety of recipes is great. In my tour through the book, I have learned some new techniques that have transferred to other cooking projects as well. The portions are fairly large, so I agree with a previous reviewer that you often get one extra serving for leftovers. Many of the recipes are accompanied by an attractive photo of the dish. The Index is excellent, arranged both by ingredient and by season of the year. The general layout of the book is brilliant and usable. I use a 12" Calphalon "everyday pan," which has two side handles, rather than a large skillet with only one long handle. Fits in the oven better and is safer for me to lift.

I absolutely love this cookbook! I bought it when I started trying to do more cooking at home for myself and my boyfriend, and I was having so much trouble finding recipes that didn't leave me with a month's worth of leftovers. There's only so much space in my freezer! I have made at least 10 dishes out of this book, and they have all been good, if not great. I love that these meals are well-balanced with plenty of veggies, and I love that everything cooks together in one pan. Fewer dishes to wash! There is usually enough for one serving of leftovers for lunch the next day, if one of us isn't especially hungry that night. Instructions are clear and easy to follow, and the suggestions for wine pairings are fun to incorporate. There have been a few instances where cooking times recommended in the recipe have been a little off, but I think that has more to do with my stove/oven than the recipe itself. Either way it's an easily correctible problem. I highly recommend this cookbook for anyone looking for delicious, smaller quantity recipes!

Most of the recipes I've tried so far have been seriously delicious and fairly easy to make. However, there are other recipes I've shied away from because they don't seem so easy. The book's title and synopsis make it seem like you only need one skillet to cook all the recipes. However, what they don't state is that sometimes you might need to put that skillet in an oven (which I don't have!), or have to use the skillet to cook different things separately at different points of time during the recipe - which, in the interest of saving time, means that you're better off using more than just one skillet/pan/pot at the same time. So, a bit of false advertising there! Also, quite a few recipes use rather 'exotic' and hard-to-find ingredients which I've never heard of. Even if I could find them in a supermarket here in Southeast Asia, I doubt they're going to be at very affordable prices, so it's not very user-friendly in that sense. That and the fact that there are also recipes which have weird ingredient combinations (ingredients I like paired with ingredients I don't like, including very specific types of fish I've never heard of, etc.) means that I'm somewhat limited with what I can cook using this book!

Having recently become empty nesters, my established cooking repetoire no longer seemed appropriate and I was struggling to get motivated to cook. Toasted sandwiches anyone? (I know you're supposed to cook for four as usual and put half away for another day, but that really doesn't appeal to me.) So it seemed worth adding another cookbook to my collection and this one has turned out to be just right. Good mix of recipes, with varying preparation times, use of fresh ingredients, and clever approach to use of utensils to avoid lots of dishes. I've made two recipes so far - pork cutlets with couscous and salmon with cauliflower and they have both turned out really well. My one caveat is that the cooking times seem to be too short - the pork would have been seriously undercooked and so I put that in an oven dish to continue baking while I made the couscous, and the salmon which I thought would have been cooked in the time she suggested was still raw in the middle so I popped it back in the frypan for a few minutes. Minor quibble and I can obviusly make the necessary adjustments. Note also that this is not low fat cooking and butter, cheese, oil and cream all feature - not a problem as far as I'm concerned, but it may be for others. I'm looking forward to trying the rest of the recipes over the next couple of months.