Zealously comprehensive and practical, Dinner’s mission is to help anyone—whether a novice with just a single pan or the experienced home cook—figure out what to make any night of the week, without falling back on what you’ve eaten before. Each recipe in this book is meant to be dinner—-one fantastic dish that is so satisfying and flavor-forward it can stand alone--maybe with a little salad or some bread on the side.

Organized by main ingredient—chicken, meat, fish and seafood, eggs, pasta and noodles, tofu, vegetable dinners, grains, pizza, soups, and salads that mean it. Dinner covers an astonishing breadth of recipes; there is something for every mood, season, and the amount of time you have. This book is all about options; inventive, unfussy food with unexpected flavor: a sheetpan chicken laced with spicy harissa; burgers amped with chorizo; and curried lentils with poached eggs, to name a few. It’s also about adding easy flourishes that make dinner exceptional—stirring charred lemon into pasta, tossing a Caesar-like dressing on a grain bowl, adding fresh ricotta and demerara sugar to stovetop mac and cheese, and lavishing a dollop of chili paste just about anywhere. Dinner has the kind of unfussy cooking that will make anyone a better and more confident cook.

Melissa Clark is a staff writer for the New York Times where she writes the popular column “A Good Appetite,” and stars in a weekly complementary video series. The winner of James Beard and IACP Awards, she is a regular on Today and NPR (The Splendid Table, The Leonard Lopate Show). Melissa earned an MFA in writing from Columbia.