Excerpt
The Quick Fix Kitchen
FIXED KITCHENWhat Is Quick Fix?
quick adjective \ ‘kwik \
acting or capable of acting with speed: such as fast in development or occurrence done or taking place with rapidity fast in understanding, thinking, or learning
fix verb \ ‘fiks \
to repair or put in order
The fact that you’re reading this book means you want to cook, and I am PROUD. OF. YOU! If cooking isn’t your thing, start small and get comfortable with your kitchen, knife skills, tools, and equipment. Familiarize yourself with the flavors that keep you going back to your favorite restaurant. Talk to the things in your kitchen like people talk to plants, why not? If anything, you’ll get a hearty laugh out of it. A spatula will never talk back, so it’s the perfect audience for a vent session!
Most people who shy away from cooking are scared that people will scoff at their food. I assure you right here and now, there’s no need to impress anyone or be perfect. That fear is a stumbling block holding you back. Kick that block to the curb, and spread those carefree wings of yours. I am not going to teach you how to use tweezers to garnish a dish gently. No way. That is not my jam! I like making things look pretty, but you don’t need to be an artist or executive chef with Michelin stars to serve a meal your family enjoys. Heck, you don’t even need to be a chef! All you need is the willingness to seek out quality ingredients and put them together for whatever masterpiece works in your household. This may sound corny, but it is more important to serve love than a French dish that took you three days to make. Cooking doesn’t have to mean concocting elaborate meals like that. It can also mean blending a smoothie or tossing greens together for a salad. That, believe it or not, is cooking! Cooking is also an act of unwinding, loosening up, and singing as loud as you can while using your therapy spatula as a microphone!
If you’ve seen
Tia Mowry’s Quick Fix, you know my style is a little bit of skill stirred with what’s available, back to basics cooking, so it’s easy (and enjoyable) to put dinner on the table even with a crazy life. I want to make that task accessible and enjoyable for everyone. I am a busy mommy and value my career, but the kitchen connects me daily to the people close to my heart. Since we need to eat, dinner is the natural means to integrate togetherness into our daily hustle. I couldn’t do it with overcomplicated, laborious recipes! Therefore, I achieve that togetherness by sticking to the easy stuff and adding a bit of my personality.
As you can probably tell, I am very inspired by my mom. This book is, too. She rarely meal planned or jotted down extensive grocery lists. She made do with whatever was in the kitchen because she’s an on-the-fly superwoman. She floated around with little means and never complained about it. Remember that show
Door Knock Dinners where chef Gordon Elliott went into people’s homes and assembled a marvelous banquet with whatever tidbits they had in their pantry and fridge? It’s that type of improvisational cooking my mom did for our family: learning which herbs and spices go together, knowing standard roasting times, laughing at blunders, and appreciating whatever ended up on the plate. Our kitchen was that basket from
Chopped: What can we make right now with canned green beans, frozen chicken breasts, and gummy bears? Voilà! A feast! As I’ve grown into my own cooking style, I’ve mingled my mom’s ingenuity with my own. I lean on whole ingredients and try my best to eliminate additives, preservatives, and all the icky stuff in processed foods. Because of this, I do find meal planning a vital piece to the puzzle. Doing so keeps me organized with only one trip to the grocery store a week. By having my passion and process in place, I can fulfill weekly meals more efficiently.
Again, food is our means of survival. Back when our ancestors had to hunt and gather, the tribe sat together to partake in the bounty brought to them. Eating sustained their bodies. While we don’t go to such extremes to eat nowadays, it has become difficult to assemble the tribe and give our bodies wholesome foods. To accomplish both, I focus on whole foods and recipes with easy‑to-follow steps. Take lasagna: Instead of boiling the noodles, laying out the noodles, and trying to keep them from sticking together while I’m wrangling my daughter, Cairo, I use ravioli (cheese inside a noodle pillow) and put everything in a baking dish without all those steps, but with the same delicious result.
Quick Fix is playful. It aims to transform what might be a chore into something you adore. And if you already find pleasure in cooking, it’s a way to amplify that love. Cooking is therapeutic to me. I’m either fully present when measuring ingredients or letting go of stress by concentrating on vigorously chopping herbs. Look, I’m no Mary Poppins. My purse isn’t filled with a playground of necessities to make life effortless, but I do have some tricks up my sleeve and that inner Mary Poppins song and dance.
Quick Fix finds balance for your family and the food you eat, and (you know me) sparks fun while doing it. Rather than watching the water come to a boil as the clock ticks down, I put the music on blast and cook like no one is watching! If your kid is by your side, play “Let It Go” for the thousandth time and yell that song for the neighbors to hear. Getting a noise complaint is just a minor setback. Find your groove! Some days it feels like there aren’t enough hours to accomplish everything. But when I’m with my family in the kitchen and around the table, time seems to disappear.
Splash sauce on these pages. When you pass it down to your kids, they’ll see memories in those spills, and whether or not they remember it as a mistake or remnants of a special meal, I’m sure they’ll smile. Let’s open up the cabinets, spruce them up a little, stock them with the necessities, and reveal the gems of your kitchen!
The Importance of Food
My food choices supply me with the energy I need to get from morning to night, tackling all the duties in between. When eating, the body breaks down food molecules so they can be easily absorbed and converted into energy. Those vital nutrients and minerals then travel throughout this complex machine of ours to build muscle tissue, sustain organs, and power the body’s survival mechanisms that are necessary to thrive. To be the best mom I can be, the wife I want to be, the friend I hope to be, the daughter, the sister, the colleague, and the writer of this book, I need to eat, and eat well, for my body and mind to function. My children also need to eat to grow and develop into people who give to the world. The great thing is, food is enjoyable! Food is GOOD! It’s a delight to the palate, heart, and soul, and it’s a significant component of human existence.
Modern-day life is fast-paced and requires a quick response. Time is often limited, but that doesn’t erase the fact that food is yummy fuel. With short attention spans and rapid-moving schedules, a quick fix is a great way to supply us with life-affirming needs. So, when I say “quick,” I mean quick. The clock is always ticking, and while people say we all have the same number of hours in a day . . . do we really? Some days, it certainly doesn’t feel that way. That’s when I put on my speedy cape and do all I can to finish the job fast and easy! Since time is of the essence, these pages honor those precious minutes by helping you better understand the basic foundations of cooking—holding a knife properly and learning flavors—and cutting back on prep and cleanup to give you more time around the table. Each recipe is to the point because if I ever see an ingredient list longer than movie credits, I keep walkin’! And while I enjoy making exotic dishes every once in a while, scouring the city to find a rare root powder isn’t something I can do all the time. Nor are those specialty ingredients accessible to everyone.
I use “fix” to help you get your kitchen in tip-top shape so you, too, can float through it like me and my mom. Yes, these recipes are designed for quick preparations, but the book itself is a fix that makes cooking approachable. If you and the kitchen aren’t buddy-buddy quite yet or you don’t have time to cook but desperately want to use it as a tool of engagement with your friends and family, this is a fix. And if you just need a boost because you’re scraping the bottom of the barrel for new, healthful recipes suitable for your schedule, then here’s the fix for that, too! If you feel like the quality of your meals has gone down as your responsibilities have grown, this is a fix. Throughout this book, you’ll discover quick fixes and little pearls of wisdom I use daily. This is my recipe box of home cooking with the little notes from my journey: advice from my mother, mentors, other cookbooks, friends, and the ever-present trial and error!
