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• America's Test Kitchen,

Our editors spent a full year developing 195 foolproof recipes specifically designed for just 2 servings.

In Cooking for Two, the test kitchen’s goal was to take traditional recipes and cut them down to size—to serve just two—with tailored cooking techniques and smart shopping tips that will cut down on wasted food and wasted money. Great lasagna starts to lose its luster when you’re eating the leftovers for the fourth day in a row. While it may seem obvious that a recipe for four can simply be halved to work, our testing has proved that this is not always the case; cooking with smaller amounts of ingredients often requires different preparation techniques, cooking time, temperature, and the proportion of ingredients. This was especially true as we worked on scaled-down desserts; baking is an unforgiving science in which any changes in recipe amounts often called for changes in baking times and temperatures.

Just because you’re cooking for two doesn’t mean that dinner can’t be fresh, flavorful, and exciting. We’ve provided a wide range of meals from simple skillet suppers, pasta dishes roasts, and soups to special occasion dinners with more complex flavors like Pan-Roasted Duck Breasts with Dried Cherry Sauce and Roasted Rack of Lamb with Whisky Sauce. You’ll also find entire chapters on outdoor grilling and barbecuing, and lighter meals with included nutritional information.

Some of the recipes were surprisingly hard to cut down to size. Our classic Herbed Roast Pork Tenderloin recipe called for butterflying two separate pork tenderloins, rubbing an herb spread in the middle, then sandwiching them together, which kept the herb butter in place. To make this dinner for two, we needed to cook only one tenderloin, making this technique obsolete. The solution was pounding one tenderloin out flat, then rubbing it with the herb butter, and rolling up the meat tight, keeping the butter and the flavor inside, which also had the added benefit of creating a perfect spiral of herbs when sliced.

Other scaled-down recipes required a change in cooking equipment as well as a change in ingredient amounts. For our Blueberry Crumble, we thought we could just use a smaller baking dish. But when baked, the blueberry filling bubbled out and over. By adding a thicker, heavier layer of our crumb topping, we kept the blueberries at bay. And when we substituted a standard casserole dish with a smaller loaf pan, our scaled-down Baked Lasagna made just the right amount for two, not a whole tray for ten.

With Cooking for Two, smaller households can create satisfying and delicious meals that are perfectly proportioned for one or two diners. Just making one or two meals that use up extra ingredients you have in the fridge, or prevent leftover ingredients in the first place, will more than pay for the price of the book itself. As you’ll see, saving money and eating well at home can easily go hand in hand- with the right recipes.