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.

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.

Covering an astonishing range of ideas about just what dinner can be, Dinner has the kind of unfussy cooking that will make anyone a better and more confident cook.