Zero to Dinner

A cooking course in a book, for an adult who cannot really cook yet.

If you live on takeout, ready meals and the two or three things you know how to make, this book starts where you are. It assumes you know nothing: not what a simmer looks like, how to hold a knife, how to tell when chicken is cooked, or what “season to taste” is asking you to do. It teaches those things one at a time, and then you cook dinner with them.

How it works

• Ten lessons, each teaching one skill: heat, the knife, water, seasoning, browning, chicken, the oven, one-pot cooking, getting a whole plate ready at once, and cooking without a recipe.
• Twenty-four dinners, cooked in order. Each one uses the skill you just learned plus everything before it. Dinner 1 is scrambled eggs on toast. Dinner 24 is a roast chicken dinner for four.
• Not yet / That’s it / Too far. Most of cooking is knowing when to stop, so wherever the right moment is something you can see, the book shows it in photographs beside the moment just before and the moment just after: butter at low, medium and too hot, onions at four stages, garlic pale and garlic burnt, chicken underdone and done, pork at 145°F and overcooked, and many more. There are more than 130 photographs.
• Every dinner has two pages. The first is the plan: what to buy, the kit, a tick-list of everything to get ready before any heat goes on, and a bar chart of what happens when. The second is the cooking: numbered steps, each with the burner setting, roughly how long, and a “look for” line that says what you should see, hear or smell when the step has worked. Then what to do if it goes wrong, how long the leftovers keep, and how to change it next time.

By the last page you will be able to

• Control the heat on your own stove, and brown food so it tastes of something
• Use a knife quickly and safely: dice an onion, mince garlic, cut a pepper
• Cook pasta, rice and eggs properly
• Season food by tasting, and fix a dish that is flat, too salty, too sharp or too thin
• Cook chicken, pork chops, steak, ground beef, sausages and fish all the way through without drying them out, using a thermometer
• Roast a whole dinner on one pan; make a stew, a curry and two soups
• Get a main, a starch and a vegetable to the table hot at the same time
• Make dinner from what is in the fridge, with six formulas instead of a recipe

The 24 dinners

1. Soft scrambled eggs on toast
2. Crispy bean & cheese quesadillas
3. Big chopped salad with chickpeas & feta
4. Potato, pepper & onion hash with fried eggs
5. Spaghetti with tomato & garlic sauce
6. Rice bowls with jammy eggs & avocado
7. Lemony broccoli pasta
8. Smoky black bean soup with lime
9. Egg fried rice with peas
10. Ground beef tacos
11. Sausages with peppers & onions
12. Creamy garlic mushroom pasta
13. Chicken thighs with lemon pan sauce
14. Golden chicken cutlets
15. Chicken & broccoli stir-fry
16. Sheet-pan chicken thighs with potatoes & broccoli
17. Roasted salmon with lemon & green beans
18. Baked meatballs in tomato sauce
19. Beef stew
20. Coconut chicken curry
21. Minestrone
22. Pork chops, mashed potatoes & green beans
23. Steak night with roasted potatoes
24. Roast chicken dinner for four

Plus eight basics you will make for the rest of your life: a fried egg, boiled eggs by the minute, rice, a house salad dressing, a two-minute pan sauce, roast-any-vegetable (with a table of cuts and times), mashed potatoes, and green vegetables in one pan.

Also inside

• Before you cook: how to read a recipe page, the 23 pieces of kit (shown and numbered, and bought in two rounds), the 14 staples to buy first, how to measure, and kitchen safety on one page.
• The fix-it chart: ten ways a dish can taste wrong, and what to add for each.
• Reference pages: safe cooking temperatures, how long leftovers and raw meat keep, 50 recipe words in plain English, US-to-metric conversions and American ingredient names for cooks elsewhere, a find-a-dinner index (fast, no meat or fish, one pan, freezes well, for guests), and a progress page to tick off.

What you download

• Zero to Dinner (98 pages, PDF, US Letter): the whole book, in color, with bookmarks and a contents page.
• Print Pages (12 pages, PDF): the pages meant for the fridge door or a kitchen drawer, pulled out so you do not have to hunt for them: kitchen safety, safe temperatures, leftovers, the fix-it chart, eggs and rice, roasting times, mashed potatoes and green vegetables, the six formulas, measuring, conversions, the dinner finder and the progress page.

Good to know

• Amounts are in American cups, spoons, ounces and Fahrenheit, with grams, milliliters and Celsius beside them. Ingredient names are American, with a page of British equivalents at the back.
• Safe cooking temperatures follow the published minimums of the US Department of Agriculture, and every recipe that cooks meat, poultry, fish or eggs says the number. You will need an instant-read thermometer from Lesson 5 on; the book explains which kind and how to use it.
• Most dinners serve 2 or 3, with a note on cooking for 4. The stew, curry, soups, tacos, meatballs and roast chicken serve 4.
• Eleven of the 24 dinners have no meat or fish. The book is not written for any one diet and has no calorie counts. Between them the recipes use wheat, milk, eggs, fish, soy, sesame and coconut.
• The pages are US Letter size. On A4 paper, print with “fit to page”.
• This is a PDF download. No physical book is shipped.