For easy cooking, Melissa Clark has ideas for 'Dinner in One' meals

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Melissa Clark and NPR's Ayesha Rascoe pose with the cheesy baked pasta. Shannon Rhoades/NPR hide caption

Melissa Clark and NPR's Ayesha Rascoe pose with the cheesy baked pasta.

Editor's note: This story was originally published on Sept. 4, 2022, and has been updated to include a podcast episode from NPR Life Kit.

In Melissa Clark's kitchen — which she calls "messy," but is actually beautiful — cooking dinner is fun, not fussy, ideally done while listening to the B-52s, and best when it takes as few dishes as possible.

Clark, whose New York Times column is called "A Good Appetite," has written dozens of cookbooks. In her latest — Dinner in One — Clark offers 100 recipes that can be made in a single container, be it pot, bowl, skillet or slow cooker.

"Imagine like writing a haiku," Clark says. "You want to express the biggest thought with the fewest amount of words. ... The end goal was when I'm finished cooking, there's like three things in the sink."

There are recipes in this cookbook for miso-glazed salmon with roasted sugar snap peas, cheaters chicken and dumplings, even one-bowl cakes.

NPR wanted to put Dinner in One to the test, so Clark chose a recipe to try out: cheesy baked pasta.

When Melissa Clark cooks, it's 'Dinner in One'

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Dinner in One Linda Xiao/Clarkson Potter hide caption

"Normally when you make a baked pasta, you boil the pasta in one pot, you drain it in a colander, so therefore messing up two things already," she explains. "But what I'm doing here is I'm going to cook the pasta ... right in the sauce."

First, Clark lines up all of the ingredients on the counter including pasta, tomatoes, three kinds of cheese, sausage, and spices and herbs from not one but three jam-packed spice drawers.

"Here's another thing," she says, pulling out oregano, red pepper flakes, fennel, garlic and bay leaves. "You can leave half of these herbs out. It's going to taste the same."

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That's the thing about this cookbook — it's not one bit fussy, and all of the recipes are flexible. If you want to add vegetables to this dish, Clark suggests tossing in spinach. If you're lactose intolerant, Clark says add more sausage and cut out the cheese. Hate slicing garlic? Use some from a jar!

"If it tastes good, it's not bad," she says.

Before she was the winner of multiple James Beard awards, Clark was a coat-checker and a hostess at a restaurant called American Place. That job was her first peek behind the scenes at a professional kitchen.

"I knew I wanted to be a food writer at that point," she says. "This was right at the beginning of food blogs coming out on the internet. ... And I thought, along with a lot of other people, hey, you know, I want food to be my lens for looking at the world. I want food to be how I tell my story and how I tell other people's stories. ... To really understand someone, to understand their soul and their mind, I really feel like you need to see what they eat."

So what does her soul say?

"Definitely says I grew up in Brooklyn," Clark says. "Especially if you catch me on a bagels and lox Sunday."