A WORD ABOUT INGREDIENTS

The simpler the cooking, the more important the ingredients. The dishes in Kitchen Express sometimes feature sophisticated combinations, and the occasional odd ingredient, but at their core they are extremely simple, and they rely on good ingredients (which you’re more likely to find in season).

Even when, for the sake of speed, I call for convenience foods like canned beans, stock, or tomatoes, if you can use homemade or fresher versions, the dishes will be all the better. In any case, all your ingredients should be as high quality as you can find. If fresh tomatoes are real and tasty, use ’em, but whenever they’re not, canned tomatoes are a better option. And whenever you have time to make stock or beans, for example, from scratch, you should—refrigerate or freeze them for future use and your Kitchen Express–style dishes will shine more brightly.

Like many modern cooks, I use extra-virgin olive oil for my cooking fat all the time, unless I want a more neutral flavor (in which case I use grapeseed or another oil), or a different flavor (like peanut), or a higher smoke point (in which case most oils are better than olive). In theory at least, all extra-virgin olive oil is high quality; for other oils, look for those that are cold-pressed or minimally processed.

I use a lot of really fast-cooking ingredients here: boneless meats, plenty of seafood, quick-cooking vegetables, grains like couscous (which is actually not a grain but a pasta) and bulgur (which steeps faster than rice cooks). As a result, as often as not, your rinsing, trimming, peeling, and chopping will take as long as your cooking. (As most veteran cooks know, shopping is the most time-consuming aspect of cooking, so if you keep a well-stocked pantry, you’re miles ahead of the game.)

I’m assuming everything you start with is thawed, your shrimp is peeled, your mussels are scrubbed, your poultry is boned, and so on. The cooking methods I use are the quickest: sautéing (which I often call simply “cooking”), boiling, steaming, and grilling (or broiling; anything that can be grilled can be broiled, and vice versa). And I rely heavily on those convenience foods we don’t think of as such: prosciutto and bacon, Parmesan and soy—these are ingredients that are front-loaded with time and labor so that we can use them to flavor dishes quickly.

Finally, I have tried my best to make these recipes as uncomplicated as possible, and—counter to my inclinations, and to most of the work I’ve done in other books—have avoided spelling out as many variations and substitutions as possible. Every cook with even a minimum of experience will quickly realize that string beans can be swapped for asparagus when the latter is unavailable, or that ground turkey (or even ground salmon, or shrimp) can almost always be substituted for ground beef. (See the table on frontmatter for some more examples of easy substitutions.) You can’t make a roast chicken without a chicken, it’s true, but very few of the ingredients in these (or other) recipes are sacred. The goals are these: Get good food onto the table, fast, and have fun doing so.