I think the authors say it best: "Never underestimate the healing power of macaroni and cheese at the end of a day from hell."Both authors, partners in The Splendid Table's highly-regarded radio productions, including years of "Weeknight Kitchen" podcasts, consider weeknight cooking both a family necessity and a pleasure, a respite from the pressures of long workdays. Their delight comes across in every recipe with informative headnotes explaining why the dish is special. Tips about ingredients, equipment, or technique abound in almost every recipe and on almost every page.Moreover, dozens of mini-tutorials are scattered throughout: everything from a guide to olive oils (with brand names!) to surfing the Indian grocery. The Kindle formatting is excellent: everything is clickable: TOC to chapter headings, chapter title pages to recipes, embedded recipes and Index. Some, but not most, recipes have color photos. There is an "Essential Equipment" chapter.Ingredients are extremely accessible to anyone with a good supermarket (even to me, with an itty-bitty grocery store in the middle of nowhere) or who amazons ingredients such as tamarind concentrate. Although the authors make their own stocks, these recipes call for canned/boxed for soups--and they taste-tested a few dozen brands of chicken and vegetable broth ("every broth we could find in our area") and tell us which brand names they preferred and those they did not--and then tell us exactly how to improve them by adding a few ingredients. Thank you! They use canned beans and admit to using take-out chicken. They taste-tested 28 brands of canned tomatoes, both whole and diced, and tell us the brand names of their winners. They call for frozen puff pastry and boxed pasta (again, giving us their favorite brand names). They occasionally suggest substitutions. The types of seafood are readily available.Recipes are, as promised, simple and straightforward. For example, "Oven-Crisped Pork, Peppers, and Greens" cuts down cooking time by cutting up pork or lamb into smaller pieces before roasting. There are a lot of recipes here: I counted 102 basic recipes plus many more with the variations and improvisations that are frequently suggested.My one quibble with the book is that the stated "prep" times (typically 5-15 minutes) are understated given the number of ingredients needed to be peeled, chopped, sliced, scrubbed, zested, pitted, juiced, dried, and/or toasted. I counted at least a dozen recipes for which this appears to be true.However, I'm not nicking a star because the active times are still very short and perfectly workable for a weeknight meal: who cares if 5 minutes is actually 15? I made the "Almond-Turmeric Potatoes" -- which were delicious and lived up to the authors' appeal that "if you cook no other potato recipe in your lifetime, you must try this one." I carefully timed my prep, worked as fast as I could (I'm fast), and did nothing extraneous (just threw peels etc. into the sink instead of the trash) and the "5 minutes" turned out to be 12-15, depending on whether I included the intermittent peeking and shaking called for by the recipe. The dish took 58 minutes from start to finish, not 5 minutes prep + 20 minutes stove, but both the active and elapsed time are still very workable for a weeknight, and the leftovers were spectacular with scrambled eggs the next morning.So many cookbooks promise easy, everyday weeknight meals and then fail to deliver, presenting time-consuming recipes, impossible-to-find or expensive fresh ingredients, or all of the above. Not "How to Eat Supper." The authors not only present exactly what we hope to find in terms of recipes, but it's a great cover-to-cover read for anyone who loves to cook and wants to soak up all of their extremely valuable tips.