Cooking Light — it's what's for dinner
By Mark Czerniec
July 20, 2006 9:18 AM

"To be or not to be" is not The Question. The real, agonizing, impossible Question confronts us every single day of our lives like someone we knew we couldn't avoid running into. It is: "What should we have for dinner?"

There was a time when we ordered carry-out dinners almost every night, turning to our folder of local menus when The Question came up. However, there are only so many soggy French fries and rusty salads you can eat from over-nuked styrofoam containers before you either die or change.

Nowadays, our dinners are mostly cooked at home, usually by Amy. With me working until 7:00 and both of us trying to pinch pennies, we don't go to restaurants the way we once did. Besides, Amy has become such a good cook that many restaurants are disappointments, especially the ones nearby.

Still, knowing how to cook does not guarantee a steady stream of fresh and delicious dinner ideas that can fit our grocery budget, be prepared quickly and easily, combine spices and other exotic touches to satisfy our restless tastebuds, and be reasonably nutritious and non-fattening — especially when, after working all day, The Question arises.

What does guarantee all of this is Amy's subscription to Cooking Light magazine. She pounces on the new issue when it arrives in our mailbox each month, leafing through it, marking pages and taking note of the main themes, then reading specific recipes and how-tos in detail. She takes the magazine with her when she leaves in the morning, and collects the back issues on a bookshelf in our kitchen. This way, faced with figuring out a dinner, she's got a number of answers to choose from.

A great bonus that comes with a Cooking Light subscription is access to the Web site, where years of recipes are available for online browsing, searching, and printing. In the mood for a Mexican-flavored poultry dish? 62 results pop up. What about American beef? 350 of those. Something to cook on the grill? 592 recipes. And so on.

(Update: Cooking Light recipes are now available via MyRecipes.com, along with recipes from Southern Living, Sunset, Coastal Living, Cottage Living, and Health.)

On Monday afternoon, Amy instant-messaged me with The Question just as Wendy Snyder was talking on the air about Taste of Egypt. I answered that I could suddenly go for some falafel. Amy joked that we could drive down to Pita Inn (one of our favorite places, but a 100-plus mile round-trip). Instead, she turned to the Cooking Light search engine and came up with a quick and easy falafel recipe in less than a minute. It was perfect: By 7:10, we were eating delicious Falafel-Stuffed Pitas with tahini-lemon sauce, lettuce and tomato slices — much better than the boxed falafel mixes we had tried a couple of times in the past.

We eat knockout dinners more often than not, and quite a few of them come from Cooking Light. We'll sit down, take a few bites, look at each other and shake our heads, knowing that there's no restaurant around serving food this good.

Amy has saved up a big stack of the recipe printouts, with star ratings and handwritten notes, for repeating in the future. As for me, well, I usually set the TV trays.

Then comes the next Question: "What is there to watch?"