Why this book exists
Eating well should not depend on having time
Most of the reasons a household stops cooking are practical rather than culinary: the deciding, the shopping, the hunting for a jar of something at the back of a cupboard, and the twenty minutes of washing up after a meal that took thirty to make. Those are the parts this book removes, and it removes them on purpose — because once they are gone, cooking from whole ingredients stops being an aspiration and becomes the easier option.
Every constraint here exists to make that true rather than merely say it. Twenty minutes from a cold start. One pan or one basket. Four servings. A toddler’s portion out of the same pan, before the salt and before the chilli. None of it assumes more time, more money or more equipment than you have.
Which is why the whole thing is open source. Every recipe, the typesetter that turns them into this book, and the website that publishes them are yours: the recipes under Creative Commons, the software under the MIT licence, all of it at github.com/hackerbay/twenty-minute-table. Take them, change them, translate them, print them for the inside of a cupboard door. Add the dinners your own family actually eats. Nobody needs permission, and that is the point — food this plain should not belong to anyone.
Ten rules for a twenty-minute dinner
- Preheat before you chop. The air fryer or the pan should be properly hot by the time the board is clear. This alone takes three or four minutes off almost every recipe here, and it is the difference between food that browns and food that steams.
- Cut for the clock. Nothing cooking in under fifteen minutes should be thicker than your thumb. Small and even beats big and hopeful, and it is why the meat in this book is nearly always sliced or cut into strips rather than left whole.
- Season twice. Once in the pan, once at the table. The second pass is nearly always acid — a squeeze of lemon, a splash of vinegar — and it is what makes fast food taste finished rather than merely cooked.
- Always add something raw. Herbs, sliced chilli, spring onion, a spoonful of yoghurt. Fifteen seconds of work, and it is the difference between a meal and a plate of cooked ingredients.
- Wash up while it rests. Two minutes with the pan still warm, instead of ten with it cold. Every recipe here is built around one pan or one basket for exactly this reason, and the line at the foot of each page tells you what you are committing to.
- Read it through once first. Thirty seconds now saves three minutes of standing over a hot pan working out what comes next. Every recipe in this book is short enough to hold in your head, which is deliberate.
- Salt the water, not just the food. Pasta, couscous, rice and greens season from the inside if the water they meet is salty. Nothing you add afterwards ever reaches the middle.
- Buy the thigh, not the breast. It costs less, it cooks faster than you expect, and it forgives the minute you lose looking for the tongs. Fattier fish forgives in the same way that lean white fish does not.
- One pan means one pan. If a recipe tempts you into a second, ask whether the thing you would cook in it could go in beside the first instead. It usually can, and the washing up halves.
- Cook the same one twice in a fortnight. The second time takes two-thirds as long, because your hands already know it. That, rather than any shortcut, is where twenty minutes actually comes from.
Ways to get it
The files are free and will stay that way. Buying a copy is for having it on the shelf, and it keeps the project going.