30 Minutes or Less

Mama used to make us cheese toasts and cinnamon toasts for breakfast. (She would leave the oven door open after making them, so we could warm up on chilly mornings.) We started to play with that for Jack, and came up with these tasty cream cheese sandwiches sprinkled with cinnamon sugar. They taste a bit like a cinnamon raisin bagel with cream cheese, but the crunch of the sugar on the outside and the creamy cheese inside make them way more interesting. Plus the cream cheese adds protein, so they’re heartier than your average serving of cinnamon toast.

Unless you’re Jamie Deen, you probably need to have a kid around to make yourself one of these melty, divine sandwiches. Add banana instead of jam and you’ve got yourself Elvis’s favorite sandwich.

So many kids only want to eat mac and cheese right from the box. We decided to come up with an alternative dish for Jack—one where Mom and Dad are in charge of quality control. Jack always cleans his plate, so we have to be quick if we want to sneak a few pieces for ourselves!

Brooke is a huge Mexican food fan. In fact, when Jack was one week old, Brooke had such a mean craving that we took him out to a Mexican spot near us. So it’s no surprise that Jack has become a big fan, too. And since quesadillas are pretty much Mexican grilled cheese, we make them just to give him a little variety, and use them as an opportunity to get a little avocado (which is chock-full of vitamins and has more potassium than a banana) into his diet.

We’ve never met a kid who doesn’t love grilled cheese—with extra-gooey cheese, please! We like to slip in some tomato, too, which some kids won’t eat otherwise. And let’s be honest here: You may as well make yourself one of these while you’re at it; otherwise your kid’s sandwich doesn’t have a chance.

When we were kids, we would go on camping trips and eat beanie-wienies out of the pull-top can and pretend to be cowboys. We thought that was just the best thing in the world to eat. When your kids try these, they will, too. Nowadays it’s easy to find healthier versions of traditional hot dogs (nitrate-free or turkey, chicken, or soy dogs) and lower-sodium baked beans in most supermarkets. Try a few different varieties and see which ones your kids like most.

Mama is friends with a couple from Indiana named the Moyers, who we like to refer to as Yankees. They taught her how to turn a handful of affordable, simple ingredients into these fried-patty sandwiches that will rock your world.

Bobby may just make the best pimiento cheese there is. This version is a combo of Bobby’s recipe and the classic Lady & Sons’ version. We like to use pimiento cheese everywhere, not just as a dip. Leftovers sometimes find their way onto a burger, and every once in a while, we’ll make a batch just for this souped-up mac and cheese, which we often serve with a nice cup of hot tomato soup.

This is another quick-and-easy way to prepare shrimp that are smooth and buttery, with just the right amount of peppery fire to keep your family on its toes. We usually serve these with baked potatoes and a little bit of green salad on the side. Just pop the shrimp in the oven when the spuds are almost done and bring it all out to the table piping hot.

This recipe was born in the Smoky Mountains of Tennessee where, as kids, we went camping with our parents. We caught fresh trout, and Mama cooked them right up on the grill in foil packs. It was the best-tasting fish we’d ever had. If we’re making this over a campfire, we serve it on its own. At home, it goes well with green beans.

Salmon is something so healthy that we just had to put mayonnaise on it. The lemon mayo gives it a great zesty flavor and oomph—it keeps the fish moist, too. Our lettuce and cucumber salad is a perfect match for this light dish.

In his late twenties, Jamie spent a lot of time eating at his favorite pizza place in Savannah, called Cousin Vinny’s. He became obsessed with their pesto pizza, which uses savory basil sauce in place of the usual tomato. We don’t eat quite as much pizza these days, but we do keep pesto in our freezers for whenever we want fresh garlic and basil flavor. Try tossing pesto with cherry tomatoes and leftover grilled chicken and serve it on top of greens for a main-course salad, or make this easy, healthy recipe, which takes about fifteen minutes and looks as good as it tastes. For a little decadence, try serving it with Cheesy Garlic Bread (page 102).

I decided to make lobster the last recipe in this book so I could give myself the gift of a lobster dinner to celebrate. My father’s family in Montpelier, Vermont, were all passionate lobster-lovers. Being in an inland state, cut off from the sea, only made them more avid for a good lobster dinner, and they frequented The Lobster Pot on Main Street for every kind of celebration. My aunt Marian, after she became a widow, would often stroll down to The Lobster Pot to have dinner by herself, and it was there that she taught me the ritual of eating a lobster—sucking the juices and little morsels of flesh from each leg, and always saving the big claws for the last, because to her they contained the most delicious meat. So, for my treat, I stopped at Citarella’s in Manhattan and asked for a 1 1/4-pounder. The fishmonger held one up to demonstrate for me how lively the little lobster was as it wriggled and pawed the air with its tentacles. I was even asked whether I wanted a male or a female, and of course I said female, so I could enjoy the roe. But when I got it home, there was only the tomalley—the green-gray loose substance that is the liver; there was no roe. I looked in Julia Child’s The Way to Cook and realized that I should have checked first for the little swimmerets under the tail: the male’s are “clean and pointed,” whereas the female’s are “fringed with hair”—a test that is not easy to execute when the creature is wriggling desperately. I have always preferred steaming to boiling, because that way the lobster doesn’t get too immersed in water, and the small amount of steaming water becomes more intense. So I hauled down my largest pot, and arranged a collapsible steamer inside it.

As a child, and well into adulthood, I was allergic to scallops. But little by little I got over it. It can happen; the body does change. So I’ve been making up for my years of deprivation and quite often treat myself to a full plate of carefully cooked sea scallops. I remember Julia Child emphasizing how important it was to use a large pan, so the scallops would have plenty of space to brown. And because they needed to cook over high heat, clarified butter was essential. We were once having lunch at an elegant French restaurant in New York, which will be nameless, and Julia ordered scallops. After her first bite, she put down her fork and proclaimed that the chef hadn’t used clarified butter. As she tucked away most of the flawed dish, she emphasized again the importance of using clarified butter when browning over high heat, although she did admit that most Americans aren’t going to take the trouble to clarify their own butter, and that it was okay for the home cook to use half butter and half light vegetable oil, which would temper the burning. I am always careful to watch the pan, as if Julia is still looking over my shoulder, whenever I make this dish.

This is apt to be a messy-looking pancake. But who cares? It’s just for you, and it’s delicious. I particularly like it with a slice or two of smoked salmon and a dollop of sour cream, or of the creamy top of good whole-milk yogurt. But the pancake goes with so many things.

Here’s a simple Japanese way with cooked rice that Hiroko Shimbo showed me when I asked her one day what she would do with leftover rice. It’s called sushi salad because it’s made with sushi rice. As Hiroko points out so persuasively in her book The Sushi Experience, it’s the rice that makes it sushi, not all the various garnishes or tasty bits that are wrapped—or, in this case, tossed—in the seasoned rice. This is one of those dishes that are subject to variations depending on the season, but it’s hard to improve on the following intoxicatingly delicious summer version.

This is a good way to make use of those unnecessarily large bouquets of parsley that we get at our supermarkets, as well as fennel fronds that usually go to waste.

Stir-frying a combination of vegetables quickly in a small wok gives them a more intense flavor and a pleasing texture, and they benefit from being cooked together. It’s a good way to use small amounts of vegetables you may have stored away. You can mix and match as you wish, aiming for good color and flavor complements. You can even poach an egg on top of your stir-fry (see page 105).