Oh $#!%, What’s for Dinner?: No-Fuss Weeknight Recipes You’ll Swear By

TV host Sansone (The Hub Today) debuts with a useful and enthusiastic guide to “quick and dirty” dinners, with an emphasis on meals that will please the whole family. Most of these dishes, from fish tacos with chili and lime to a deconstructed egg roll bowl with fresh ginger, can be achieved in 30 minutes or less. Elsewhere, Sansone draws on her Italian American heritage in recipes for 10-minute spaghetti carbonara and “street-style” sausage and peppers, and follows up the collection’s most time-consuming outing, the long-simmering “Sunday Sauce,” with a quicker take, which she dubs “Monday Marinara.” The author has a few tricks up her sleeve: she favors marinating meats in Ziplock bags to reduce mess, and approximates the flavor of effort-intensive lasagna using layers of frozen ravioli. Most of the time, however, her tip for reducing the effort involved in these classic recipes is simply to rely on store-bought ingredients, from a can of refrigerated biscuits in her personal pot pies to frozen mini-meatballs in the “weeknight wedding soup.” “Don’t be a hero,” she reminds readers, “you can only make so much at once.” Though some home chefs may balk, it’s a reassuring message on a stressful weeknight. This will come through in a pinch. (May)