Sara’s Weeknight Meals: Season 02

I’ll be honest with you: Although I loved the idea of five ingredient mains – the fewer the ingredients, the faster dinner gets on the table – the execution of it was murder for me. I know, of course, that plenty of cuisines operate on the assumption that a few excellent ingredients, excellently prepared, are all you ever really need. But I’ve never rolled like that. I felt like I was in a straitjacket. It was truly difficult for me to limit the number of ingredients in a recipe, and even so, you’ll notice a little cheating in the garnish department.

In the end when five ingredients work, they really work. Taste-wise, the exercise helped me to relearn an old lesson: Sometimes less is more. Timewise, it confirmed the obvious: Less is always better.