The Short List

Sixty cozy weeknight dinners. Never more than eight ingredients. Never more than thirty minutes. A picture of every one.

Most cookbooks are written for the weekend. This one is for a Tuesday at six, when everyone is hungry and nobody is going to a second store. So every recipe in it keeps three promises.

1. Eight ingredients, at most. Everything you have to buy is counted, including the rice under the curry and the bread beside the soup. Only cooking oil, salt, pepper and water are free. Forty recipes need eight things, sixteen need seven, and the shortest needs five.
2. Thirty minutes, at most. From cutting board to table, chopping included. Three dinners take 15 minutes, fourteen take 20, twenty take 25 and the rest take the half hour.
3. One ordinary supermarket. Nothing needs a specialty shop or an order from the internet.

Two pages for every dinner

First a picture page for choosing: the dish, why you would cook it, how long it takes and what to buy. Then a kitchen page for cooking: a tick-box list of ingredients, numbered steps that each open with what they do in bold, and short notes on what makes the dish work, what you can swap, what to watch and how long leftovers keep. The kitchen page has no photograph on it, so it prints on one clean sheet, with room at the bottom for your own notes.

Amounts are given in American cups, ounces and pounds with metric beside them. Oven temperatures are in Fahrenheit, Celsius and fan. Every recipe that cooks meat, poultry or fish says the temperature it is done at.

What is inside (154 pages)

• Start here (5 pages): how the book works, how to read a recipe, six habits that make thirty minutes real, the kit, the words the recipes use, and a chart of safe cooking temperatures.
• Pasta & Noodles: Creamy Tomato & Sausage Rigatoni, Lemon Ricotta Spaghetti with Peas, One-Pot Beef & Cheddar Shells, Garlic Butter Shrimp Linguine, Brown Butter Mushroom Fettuccine, Pesto Chicken Penne with Burst Tomatoes, Peanut Noodles with Crunchy Vegetables, Crispy Skillet Gnocchi with Tomato & Mozzarella, Bacon & Pea Carbonara, Sticky Ginger Beef Noodles.
• Chicken: Creamy Sun-Dried Tomato Chicken, Sheet-Pan Chicken Fajitas, Honey-Garlic Chicken with Broccoli & Rice, Skillet Chicken Parmesan, One-Pan Lemon Chicken & Orzo, Weeknight Butter Chicken, Crispy Chicken & Corn Quesadillas, Hoisin Cashew Chicken, Smoky Chicken with White Beans & Tomatoes, Greek Chicken Pitas.
• Beef, Pork & Sausage: Korean-Style Beef Bowls, Beef & Black Bean Tacos, Sheet-Pan Sausage, Peppers & Gnocchi, Pork Chops with Apples & Mustard Cream, Garlic Butter Steak Bites with Mushrooms & Green Beans, Meatball Subs, Egg Roll in a Bowl, Beef & Broccoli, Thirty-Minute Chili, Smoked Sausage, Cabbage & Potato Skillet.
• Fish & Shrimp: Honey-Soy Salmon with Roasted Broccoli, Cod with Tomatoes & White Beans, Chili-Lime Shrimp Tacos, Coconut Curry Shrimp, Crispy Baked Fish with Smashed Peas, Tuna, Lemon & Caper Spaghetti, Salmon Rice Bowls with Spicy Mayo, Shrimp with Tomatoes, Feta & Orzo, Cajun Shrimp, Sausage & Corn Skillet, Brown Sugar Salmon with Green Beans & Couscous.
• Vegetables, Beans & Eggs: Coconut Red Lentil Dal, Loaded Black Bean Sweet Potatoes, Shakshuka with Feta, Mushroom Stroganoff, Egg Fried Rice, Cheesy White Bean & Tomato Skillet, Potato, Pea & Cheddar Frittata, Sheet-Pan Halloumi & Vegetables with Couscous, Stovetop Mac & Cheese with Broccoli, Sticky Sesame Chickpeas with Broccoli.
• Soups & Stews: Creamy Tomato Soup with Grilled Cheese, Rotisserie Chicken Noodle Soup, Sausage, White Bean & Kale Soup, Pesto Tortellini & Vegetable Soup, Chicken Tortilla Soup, Loaded Potato Soup, Ginger Chicken & Rice Soup, Chorizo & Chickpea Stew, Broccoli Cheddar Soup, Potsticker Soup.
• Four weeks of dinners (9 pages): twenty of the dinners arranged into four weeks of five, each week with one shopping list sorted by aisle, with the amounts already added up.
• Reference (2 pages): American ingredient names translated for cooks elsewhere, and measures and temperatures.
• Find a dinner (7 pages): by time, by kind (17 vegetarian, 26 one-pan, 8 that freeze well) and by what is in the fridge.

What you download

Everything comes in two paper sizes, US Letter and A4. Pick the one your printer uses; the pages and page numbers are the same in both.

• The Short List (154 pages): the whole book, in color, with bookmarks and a contents page you can click.
• Kitchen Pages (76 pages): all sixty recipes without the photographs, one to a sheet, then the four weekly plans with their shopping lists and the reference pages, for printing.

Good to know

• Every recipe serves four.
• Print at 100% or "actual size" on the paper size you downloaded.
• The book is not written for any one diet and has no calorie counts. Between them the recipes use wheat, milk, eggs, fish, shellfish, peanuts, tree nuts, soy and sesame.
• Ingredient names are American. A page at the back gives the British and Australian names.
• The pictures were made with AI image tools, each one from its recipe as written, and checked against that recipe's ingredient list. They show what you are aiming for.
• Before you serve anything, make sure it is piping hot all the way through, especially chicken and other poultry.
• Safe cooking temperatures follow the published minimums of the United States Department of Agriculture.