There is no concept more paradoxical than an easy weeknight meal.
Cooking under the influence of stress, exhaustion and hunger can lead to temper tantrums in any household - whether or not you have kids.
I tend to fall into one of two traps: Either I experiment with new recipes that take too long and leave too many dirty pans, or I rely too heavily on a cadre of old standbys that over time have become just that - old.
There is an art to the quick and easy meal that is surprisingly difficult to learn.
Luckily, a booming segment of the food industry is aimed at helping busy home cooks.
The icon of speed cooking - Food Network star Rachael Ray - has turned her 30-Minute Meals TV program into an empire of cookbooks, products and a magazine. Martha has weighed in with her Everyday Food magazine. Even classic culinary periodicals such as Bon Apptit and Gourmet now include regular columns with fast recipes for stressed-out home cooks.
And in bookstores, shelves upon shelves of cookbooks promise to teach you how to make quick, easy, inexpensive and healthy meals in anywhere from 10 minutes to one hour.
It's enough to make you feel like a real chump if it takes you longer to make dinner than to watch a TV sitcom.
Yet, after browsing through and testing out some of these cookbooks, I learned that not all weeknight recipes are equal. Some recipes emphasize time saved over flavor, while others rely on too many prepared ingredients to be economical or healthful.
Nor do all cooks have the same definition of "quick and easy." One cook's idea of an easy weeknight recipe is another cook's special-occasion dinner.
And then there are recipes whose estimated cooking times are just plain phony.
"A lot of recipes really do lie. It sounds rude, but it's true," says Beverly Mills, coauthor of the Desperation Dinners cookbooks and nationally syndicated newspaper column that helps working parents get dinner on the table.
She points out that lots of recipes claim to be fast, but don't count time-consuming prep work such as peeling, chopping and grating vegetables.
"It's very frustrating especially for cooks that are not really experienced. They think something is wrong with them," she says. "But it's not [them], it's the recipe."
