Weeknight Cooking Tips From the Test Cooks Behind Our 30-Minute Recipe Cards

Most recipes featured in Cook’s Country magazine get a full page or two in layout, but these 30-minute supper cards only get a quarter of the page. Grab our latest issue, flip to pages 10 and 11, and you’ll find Alli Berkey’s recipe for Chicken Shawarma. Then turn the page and you’ll find a two-page spread for Matthew Fairman’s Fried Chicken Tenders—a recipe inspired by a recent visit to Puritan Backroom in Manchester, New Hampshire. In addition to developing these popular feature recipes, Alli and Matthew also comprise the test cook duo tasked with creating the recipe cards.

In addition to having to create short, succinct recipes that take up less room in the magazine, Alli and Matthew must make sure every card contains no more than 10 ingredients and three steps. They also have to be cooked in 30 minutes (or less!) and considered a full meal (unless it’s a sandwich). Not to mention they must be creative and—most importantly—foolproof and downright tasty.

Whether it’s limited time or ingredients, or the desire to shake up your weeknight repertoire, these recipe cards solve challenges that are posed to home cooks every night. I sat down with Alli and Matthew to learn more about their experience developing these weeknight recipes, plus the discoveries and tips they’ve learned that can help you serve a well-balanced meal—packed with just as much flavor as our feature recipes— in just 30 minutes.

Alli and Matthew find inspiration in many places, but here are their top two: existing Cook’s Country recipes and the supermarket.

They start by looking at our own recipes and trying to figure out ways to alter them. For example, take one of our pork tenderloin and jelly glaze recipes—they’ll keep the method to cook the tenderloin because they know our methods are foolproof, but they’ll alter what we’re flavoring the pork with or switch around the side option.

The supermarket is useful for inspiration because they’re able to see the top products everyone has access to nationwide. “When I'm at the grocery store, I look at the convenience products and condiment aisles. I’ll look for something that has a flavor profile—like a jar of salsa that can replace five separate ingredients,” Matthew says.

Takeaway: If you have a favorite recipe, put a slight spin on it—change the sauce or side dish—to help avoid falling into a recipe rut and make a familiar recipe feel new. And to expedite prep time, look for convenience products that can play the role of several ingredients.

There are a few ingredients Alli and Matthew always come back to when creating these 30-minute meals. Some ingredients, like lemon, help add flavor to the dish. Other ingredients, like spice blends, help replace multiple ingredients that you normally don’t have the time to “freshly” put together when preparing a weeknight meal. Here’s a list of other ingredients you’ll see repeated in our weeknight recipes—and ones you should work into your weeknight cooking.

Since every minute matters when you’re designing a recipe that can be prepared in only 30 minutes, Alli and Matthew are always looking for ways to streamline recipe steps. This has resulted in some time-saving, flavor-boosting discoveries.

1. Use the Pasta Method for Rice: Boil the rice like you would with pasta and dump off the water when the rice is cooked. Instead of taking 45 minutes, this is done in 12 to 15 minutes. It also gives you a more versatile rice than something like sticky rice.

2. A Better Way To Cook Pork Tenderloin: Simply pound it into a much thinner piece of meat with a meat pounder. Pork tenderloin is so lean that it easily dries out when cooked. Pounding it flat allows for it to cook quickly and evenly without sacrificing the meat’s juiciness, and it allows you to get a much better crust on the outside. Cook it on each side for a total of four minutes, let the meat rest, and you’re ready to eat.

3. Just Toss It In A Bag: When developing his recipe for Spicy Fried Chicken Sandwiches recipe, Matthew wanted to bypass the traditional (and fussy) three-step breading process that often precedes frying. He discovered that we could do it in two steps by dipping the chicken in a small amount of seasoned mayonnaise and then transferring the pieces to a zipper-lock bag with flour and cornstarch. Seal the bag, shake it vigorously to coat, and voilà, you have breaded chicken in far less time.

After developing dozens of weeknight recipes, Alli and Matthew have a handle on what it takes to put together meals that are quick and delicious. Here are their six best tips for weeknight cooking.

1. Grilling Is Your Best Friend: If you’re someone that wants to get a quick meal out to friends and family, grilling is your go-to method. The grill adds a lot of flavor to food that you just can’t get on the stovetop. Whether you’re making our Grilled Pork Tenderloin and Summer Squash with Chimichurri or grilled veggies that you toss into a salad, the grill is always going to be your quickest and easiest way to get a dish with great flavor.

2. Streamline Batch Cooking: Most of the time, we're proponents of batch cooking—that is, cooking food in small batches because it avoids having too much moisture in the pan and helps verify that every little piece of meat gets perfectly browned. But for weeknight cooking, we've found that you can get similar browning in less time by coating the meat in two key ingredients: sugar and cornstarch, both of which expedite caramelization. This allows you to cook everything in the pan at once without having to do it in time-consuming batches.

3. Don’t Be Afraid to Use High Heat: Get comfortable with using high heat, especially when it’s something that’s quick-cooking, like thinly cut steak or pork. The high heat creates flavorful browning and you can get dinner on the table in minutes, like with our Steak and Broccoli Stir-Fry.

4. Shop For Convenience Items: Keep your eye out for things that combine ingredients you already need in the grocery store, such as salsa or pickled peppers.

5. Add Glutamate-Rich Ingredients To Boost Flavors In Your Dish: Ingredients you probably already have in your kitchen—such as tomato paste, Parmesan cheese, and soy sauce—will help add more complexity than you can imagine to a dish. For instance, if you’re going to use store-bought broth in a soup, use one of these flavor boosters to make it taste like the broth has been simmering on the stove for hours.

6. Add Fresh Herbs: They do a lot for a dish. For instance, marjoram, a member of the mint family, pairs well with poultry, lamb, or vegetables and is best used as a finishing herb to these dishes. Or take tarragon, a slender-leafed herb called “little dragon” because of its fiery quality. It also complements fish, egg, and chicken dishes—but make sure to use it sparingly. (See “Getting to Know: Fresh Herbs” to learn more about how to use fresh herbs in your weeknight meals.)

 View all of our 30-minute recipe cards here and if you’re looking for more weeknight tips, check out this article:

• 5 Weeknight Cooking Tips to Make You a More Efficient Cook