What does Caroline Chambers cook when she doesn’t feel like cooking? That’s what I wanted to ask her after reading her brutally honest and heartwarming essay from our series The Fourth Trimester, all about postpartum meals. In it, Caroline writes about finding herself as a cook after giving birth to her first son. Now she has added three more kids to the mix and is navigating a wild blend of family, work, and life, yet showing up with incredible authenticity and humor. Read our conversation below—and make it to the end for the cover recipe from Caroline’s latest book.
Chris Morocco: Our team loved your first book (for readers who don’t know, we named it one of our favorites of 2024) and eagerly awaited your second. How did you decide on time as the theme for your next title, Make It Fast?
Caroline Chambers: I think that a huge, huge part of why cooking dinner can feel like such an absolute hellscape is that we simply do not have the time. We’re overbooked, overworked, we’re trying to make time to be good parents and good friends and somehow get in a few minutes of exercise in. At the end of the day, cooking yet another meal usually feels like the absolute last thing on earth that you want to do. So knowing exactly how much of a time investment you are going to have to make feels really good. Being able to flip through the 15-minute chapter and think, OK, I can freaking do this! Or the “walk away” chapter and know that, with under 30 minutes of prep time, you can throw something in a pot to simmer away, or in the oven to slow roast, while you go about your day.
You made the bold choice to incorporate all ingredient prep in your recipe instructions, so your active times actually include how long it takes to chop every onion and shred every carrot. Very few recipes do this! How did you arrive at this practice?
Like Bon Appétit, I have years of hearing directly from my readers via my Substack, What To Cook When You Don’t Feel Like Cooking. When something takes longer to chop than I thought it would take them, I hear about it. And this is a wonderful thing! I can adjust, learn what their pain points are, and help educate them about ways to do it with more ease the next time. But I’ve definitely learned that people do not like to be bamboozled by the prep step being included in the ingredient list. They want to be told exactly when to do it. Plus, when I lay out exactly when they should prep each ingredient, I can help maximize their efficiency in the oven. Mince the garlic while the chicken sears. Chop the herbs while the pasta cooks. Without spelling it out for them in this way, a novice home cook might mise-en-place it all out at the beginning, and that adds a lot of time. And time is of the essence with this book, we ain’t got time to spare!
What are the ingredients you can’t live without that save you time in the kitchen?
I freaking love a bagged salad. I had this series on Instagram once all about how to make bagged salads taste better. I need to bring that back. Taylor Farms Caesar is a regular staple in my household—it’s just an honest-to-God delightful Caesar salad. We’ll have that and steaks for dinner at least a couple of times a month. I know that isn’t really an ingredient, but it sort of is? Other staples: lemons, rice (I cook a huge batch and freeze it in individual portions), those frozen garlic and ginger cubes, Better Than Bouillon (I’m a low-sodium chicken gal but I dabble in the fun ones too, like “sofrito” and “sautéed onion”), I always have a jar of Trader Joe’s salsa verde (poach chicken thighs in it, shred, dinner is served), I love many types of chili crisp for instant flavor but Red Clay’s southern chili crisp with peanuts and shallots is King.
During my time in food media, I have seen a trend of the most popular recipes in the zeitgeist getting simpler and easier. Is there any hope for people wanting to roast a chicken again, or has the prevalence of rotisserie chickens in supermarkets made such recipes obsolete?
I have a theory that cooking is really hard for everyone right now, not only because none of us have the time to do it, but also because none of us were taught how to do it. Our mothers and fathers were the first generation of parents where it was really widespread for both parents to be in the workforce. Mom wasn’t home cooking and teaching her daughters how to cook. She was at work! So a lot of people simply never were taught fundamental cooking skills. Like how to cut an onion! If you don’t know how to cut an onion, or mince a garlic clove, you’re instantly pissed. The second you start cooking a recipe, and it tells you to cut an onion, you instantly feel like you suck at cooking and it takes forever.
So…I don’t know, Chris! The irony of my entire brand, “What To Cook When You Don’t Feel Like Cooking,” is of course, that my readers do feel like cooking. Instead of ordering DoorDash, they’re willing to give my newsletter and cookbooks a try. They want to want to cook!
I know, and you know, that people feel so proud of themselves when they cook a delicious meal. So I do think that the more people can nail really simple, easy recipes, and learn to cook from those simpler recipes, the more incentivized they are to try things that intimidate them—like roasting a whole bird.
On that note…favorite thing to do with a rotisserie bird?
I have an entire section in What To Cook about what to do with a rotisserie chicken, but the honest answer is that I mostly just eat it straight up! Chop it up for the kids, throw a leg to the baby in his high chair, slice up the breasts and serve them with a salad. I had some leftover rotisserie tonight, in fact, and fed it to the boys with baby broccoli, and made a version of the kale and quinoa salad for my husband and brother and his girlfriend (they live with us!). It’s so good—from the new book!
My other favorite thing to do with a rotisserie chicken is to keep it in the front seat for the drive home from the store and tear it apart with my hands like an absolute animal. If anyone ever sees me eating a chicken leg while cruising on the 1, no you didn’t.
I have two kids with such different tastes in food. Sometimes I think they exaggerate their preferences just to show the world how different they are, which is fine when it comes to hairstyles and shoes, but a bummer with dinner. Is it challenging for you to find meals that all your kids will eat?
Chris. Yes. These kids kill me. I have four boys—7, 6, 4, and 14 months. Those little turds will tell me ribs are their favorite meal, that they dreamed about ribs (!), and then I’ll make the exact same ribs recipe I cooked the last time, and half of them will tell me they’re too spicy. I’m with you—I think kids use food preferences as power. It allows them to have their own opinions and their own say. It absolutely kills me. I recently instigated a very strict and probably absolutely not child-therapist-approved two-bite rule. They have to try at least two bites of dinner, and if they truly do not like it, I’ll make them a PB and J or hummus and veggies. Most of the time, my 7 and 4 year old wind up eating the entire thing. My 6 year old very, very rarely does. That guy is eating a lot of PB and Js right now. And just FYI, the PB and J is: Dave’s Killer Bread 21 Whole Grains, Ground Up Honey Sea Salt peanut butter, Bonne Maman Strawberry Jam. I can’t really blame him, it’s delicious.
After a day working on recipe development, when you have been elbow-deep in pasta and dishes since 9 a.m., do you ever think to yourself when dinner time rolls around, oh heck no! Is that just me? What do you cook when you don’t feel like cooking? And what’s your go-to takeout?
HELL YES. The cobbler’s kids get no shoes, as they say!!! We live kinda in the country, so our takeout options absolutely suck. My takeout option is steaming frozen dumplings and broccoli florets at the same time in a steamer basket, and making a peanut sauce while they’re steaming. Everyone absolutely devours this meal. Except for my six year old, of course. But the good news is that the peanut butter is already out for his dinner.
You have two pieces of advice in Make It Fast that I absolutely adore: “Lay corn flat on its side to cut it,” and “salt and pepper are not married.” I guess that isn’t really a question, just wanted to say thank you! And if you have any other sage advice like this, I want to hear it.
Oh my gosh, thanks for noticing those! I’m a self-taught cook, meaning that America’s Test Kitchen and the Bon Appétit Test Kitchen are responsible for so much of my early learning. So that means a lot to hear from you. I read this book called Eight Flavors about the eight major flavors in American cuisine many many years ago. One of the chapters is about black pepper and to absolutely butcher her beautifully done research and writing—the common use of salt and pepper together, in every single freaking recipe, basically boils down to really good marketing when spice traders first introduced black pepper to America. Salt and pepper are not married!
A few other pieces of advice from the book, for people who do not feel like cooking:
- Cook once, eat twice. Always cook more than you’re going to eat. If you don’t need leftovers the next day, freeze it! Make extra roasted sweet potatoes, and freeze a little bag of them! In two weeks or two months, you can thaw them and throw them on a bagged salad to make it more interesting. Always cook an extra pound of meat for lunch the next day, or dinner later in the week. Don’t think of them as leftovers, think of them as prepped ingredients.
- Related: Keep a roll of masking tape and a Sharpie in the kitchen drawer to label your leftovers with what they are (and a date, if you don’t love playing the sniff test game).
- You don’t need to buy a huge fancy knife block full of knives. You’re never going to use them. All you really need is a chef’s knife, a paring knife, and a serrated knife. And you’ll use the chef’s knife 95% of the time.
- Have a stack of compostable plates for the nights when you absolutely cannot. Being able to just throw away the plates at the end of the meal is bliss.
Cook from the book
All the comfort, none of the layering.
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