Nothing Fancy

NOTHING FANCY — most dinners are not an event.

Somewhere along the way, a Tuesday became a performance.

The weeknight dinner got "elevated". The four-ingredient supper acquired a miso butter and a pangrattato. And a recipe with fourteen ingredients and three pans is now, with a completely straight face, described as easy.

Nobody actually cooks like that on a Tuesday. Including, it turns out, most of the people telling you to.

Most of what you eat should be unremarkable. That is not a compromise. That is what feeding people looks like.

The good meals are good because the others aren't. If every dinner is an occasion, then no dinner is — and you'll be exhausted by Thursday and eating cereal by Friday, and you'll call that a failure when it was simply arithmetic.

★ FIRST, AND MOST IMPORTANTLY: PLAIN IS NOT THE SAME AS BAD

This planner is not a licence for joyless food. It is the opposite.

A boiled egg with too much butter on the toast. Bread and good cheese and a tomato with salt on it. A baked potato, properly crisp, eaten in front of the television.

These are not consolation prizes. Plain food, cooked properly, is the best food there is — and it's what almost every great cook eats at home when nobody is watching.

Plain means: few ingredients, one pan, no performance. Plain does not mean: bland, mean, rushed, or joyless.

Salt it properly. Use the butter. Nobody here is asking you to eat sad food. They're asking you to stop performing dinner and go back to eating it.

★ THE MECHANIC: YOU SET THE BAR

Page 5. In your own handwriting:

"A dinner is good enough if it is ____, ____ and ____."

Most people write something like hot, enough, on time — and then feel slightly embarrassed, because it looks like such a low bar. And then they realise they've been failing to meet even that about twice a week, while trying to meet a much higher one they never actually agreed to.

That higher bar came from somewhere else. A magazine. A feed. A person with a very clean kitchen and no children in it.

You never chose it. It was simply installed.

So you write yours. And then every single night in this book gets exactly one tick: did it clear the bar?

Not was it good. Not was it impressive. Did it clear your bar.

★ THE FANCY TAX

What an "elevated" weeknight actually costs — itemised. Nobody prints this bit.

The extra shop — an ingredient you don't keep in. +25 min The extra prep — three components, all ready at once. +30 min The extra pans — all of which now need washing. +20 min The risk — you've never made it, it might not work, and it is Tuesday. The audience — somebody won't eat it, and you'll take it personally, because you tried. Tomorrow — you're now too tired to cook, so tomorrow becomes a takeaway. + one lost night.

The bill: 75 minutes, and a night you didn't know you'd spent.

WHAT'S INSIDE — 76 hyperlinked pages

PART ONE · THE BAR — Set Your Bar · The Fancy Tax · Plain Is Not the Same as Bad · The Plain List (dinners that clear your bar and ask nothing of you) · Allergies & Needs

PART TWO · THE WEEKS — 32 weekly plans, all hyperlinked. Seven dinners, one tick each, and a gold line for the one nice thing this week — because plain food is allowed to be lovely, and mostly is.

PART THREE · THE SHOP — The Plain Shop + 16 grocery lists

PART FOUR · THE KITCHEN — 8 recipe cards, plus three of the plainest dishes on earth, all of them magnificent: ★ MUJADARA (Lebanon) — lentils, rice and onions. Fry the onions for thirty minutes, until they're almost black. Three humble things become extraordinary, and every "improvement" makes it worse. ★ THE OMELETTE (France) — two eggs and butter. No milk, no cream, no water. Pale as custard, under three minutes, and the hardest easy thing in cooking. ★ ÄRTSOPPA (Sweden) — yellow pea soup with mustard. Sweden has eaten it on a Thursday for five hundred years. If that isn't an argument for the quiet dignity of plain food, nothing is.

Metric and imperial. Every one of them says the same thing: don't add anything.

UNDATED — start any week.

WORKS WITH — GoodNotes, Notability, Noteshelf, Xodo, Samsung Notes and any PDF app.

INSTANT DIGITAL DOWNLOAD — 3 PDF files. No physical item. Personal use only.

Plain is not the same as bad. It is, most nights, the whole point.

— Arwign Planners