Mom's Best One-Dish Suppers: 101 Easy Homemade Favorites, as Comforting Now as They Were then [Paperback]

Andrea Chesman (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 1, 2005

Everyone loves old-fashioned comfort food, but a roast with all the fixings can be daunting to organize and difficult to execute. Plus, a sink full of dirty dishes and crusty pans can mar the whole meal for the unlucky dishwasher! Enjoy those traditional tastes on busy workdays by combining them in one-dish suppers that are simpler to prepare, quicker to clean up, and just as delicious and satisfying.

Mom’s Best One-Dish Suppers is designed to help today’s home cooks pare everything down, liven things up, and entice the whole family to the dinner table while minimizing fuss and cleanup. New England Seafood Chowder, Chicken & Dumplings, and Beef Stew get ladled straight from the soup pot to main-course bowls on chilly nights. The simple skillet is every cook’s friend and can be used to produce delicious dinners as diverse as Curried Chicken & Broccoli Pilaf and Stovetop Mac ‘n Cheese with Ham and Peas. Add family-pleasing ideas for Oven-Baked Meals and Salad Suppers—Mexican Lasagna, Chicken Tetrazzini, Oven-Baked Pot Roast with Vegetables, Shrimp & Avocado Salad, Tuscan Tuna Salad with White Beans—and the busiest cook is armed with 101 old-fashioned favorites for every season.

Here are Mom’s favorite flavors, all served up on one plate, guaranteed to please both the cook and the dishwasher!

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Andrea Chesman is food writer and gardener and the author of several cookbooks, including Recipes from the Root Cellar, Serving Up the Harvest, and Pickles and Relishes. A resident of Vermont, she has been a contributing editor for Vermont Life and Edible Green Mountains.

Product Details

• Paperback: 208 pages
• Publisher: Storey Publishing, LLC (July 1, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 158017602X
• ISBN-13: 978-1580176026
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 8 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #502,014 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Andrea Chesman is a food writer and the author of many cookbooks, including The New Vegetarian Grill (Harvard Common Press, 2008) and Serving Up the Harvest (Storey Publishing, 2007). Her book, The Vegetarian Grill (Harvard Common Press, 1998) was nominated for a James Beard Foundation Book Award and received a 1999 National Barbecue Association Award of Excellence. She is also the author of The Roasted Vegetable (Harvard Common Press, 2002) and 366 Delicious Ways to Cook Rice, Beans and Grains (Plume-Penguin, 1998), Summer in a Jar (Williamson Publishing, 1985), and Pickles and Relishes (Garden Way Publishing, 1983), Mom's Best One-Dish Suppers (Storey Publishing, 2005), Mom's Best Crowd-Pleasers (Storey Publishing, 2006) and co-author of Mom's Best Desserts (Storey Books, 2002) and The Classic Zucchini Cookbook (Storey Books, 2002). She was editor of Yankee Magazine Church Supper and Potluck Cookbook (Villard, 1996) and editor of and contributor to the Family Circle Good Cook's Book (Simon & Schuster, 1993). She has also edited numerous gardening books, including The Big Book of Gardening Skills (Storey Communications, 1993). Her work has appeared in Cooking Light, Vegetarian Times, Organic Gardening, Fine Cooking, Food & Wine, The New York Times, Natural Health, and several other magazines and newspapers. She was a contributing editor for Vermont Life for 12 years and is currently contributing editor for Edible Green Mountains.
Andrea Chesman lives in an historic farmhouse in Ripton, Vermont, where the poet Robert Frost boarded. She lives with her husband and two sons. When she is not at work on a writing project, she edits and indexes cookbooks for numerous publishers.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Great book for a beginning cook - not so much for the rest of us, April 29, 2006

By 

Carol Logan Newbill (Birmingham, AL USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Mom's Best One-Dish Suppers: 101 Easy Homemade Favorites, as Comforting Now as They Were then (Paperback)

I bought this book because a) I loved Andrea Chesman's "The Garden-Fresh Vegetable Cookbook," and b) I was writing an article on cooking good meals for busy people. The concept of one-dish suppers and comfort food seemed like a good match.

I have to admit that the book lives up to its title; many of these dishes are similar to ones that my mother might have made: beef stew, chicken and dumplings, mac 'n' cheese with ham and green peas, pot roast with vegetables. There are a few nods to international cuisine, but all in all, I didn't find much in it that was either new or exciting enough to make me want to add the ingredients to my next shopping list. Experienced cooks, and those with adventuresome palates, may not find much of interest in its pages.

On the other hand, it would be a great book for someone new to cooking. Buy it for a niece or nephew going off to college or moving away from home. My copy will go to my daughter, who is just getting interested in learning to cook.

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Great Little Cookbook, June 3, 2006

By 

Susanne Koenig "mynewwritinglife.blogspot.com" (Memphis, TN) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Mom's Best One-Dish Suppers: 101 Easy Homemade Favorites, as Comforting Now as They Were then (Paperback)

I was looking around for a really good cookbook that would give me some quick comfort foods to incorporate into our family meals. This book was a great buy--it is at a great price, and in it you'll find some good recipes and some really good reading, too! Andrea Chesman puts in all sorts of interesting tid-bits about how the meals came to be in the larger context of their original culture.

I also like this book because the meals inside are a lot more exotic than you'll find in most one-dish recipe books, including all kinds of moms--East Indian moms, Cajun moms, Midwest moms, Italian moms--it's a varied selection which is quite refreshing. It also doesn't have the gobs and gobs of butter and condensed soup goop that you find in most one-dish books, a' la Taste of Home, which to me is a relief. If that's what I was looking for, I'd get a magazine subscription or look up recipes at Cambells.com. Of course sometimes I *do* go to Cambells.com--but sometimes I want to cook and assemble a comfort food with the loads of taste that come from not having taken so many shortcuts. That's why I like this book--it gives you a relatively easy meal without compromising on actual cooking, all the while giving you that wonderful one-dish comfort food result. I'd also like to note that although some of the ingredients are not all that common to the average mom's pantry, you don't have to do mail-order to find them.

So four stars and a good buy for the money.

p.s. One dish refers to the fact that only one dish is served at dinner, not one dish to make it. (duh)

p.s.s. As I grew up in Southern Louisiana... um, well... My mom DID make it.

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Don't let the tittle fool you, the recipes inside are not old fashion recipes coming out of grandma's recipe box, February 23, 2006

By 

Tori Bella (Honolulu, HI & LA, CA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Mom's Best One-Dish Suppers: 101 Easy Homemade Favorites, as Comforting Now as They Were then (Paperback)

Of all places where I spotted this book was in a new age shop, while vacationing on the Big Island of Hawaii. I was pretty surprised about the recipes in the book, which are pretty modern recipes because of the cover I was expecting old school recipes. It is a pretty easy, clean, and very simple read on the recipes. The book covers from American to Asian to Italian and other ethic recipes. As a beginner cook, this book has been great. I own the 2nd book, Mom's Best Desserts, and looking forward to ordering the 3rd book that is coming out soon. I have to agree with the previous review that My mother never made any of these recipes but I wish she did.