About
Hi, I’m Nora. I write recipes for happy weeknights.
Weeknight Table is a cookbook, a recipe site and a Sunday letter, all made in one small kitchen with a temperamental oven.
TEN YEARS OF TUESDAYS
How a notebook of Tuesday dinners became a book
For years I kept a notebook of dinners that worked on busy days. Short shopping lists. One pan when possible. Nothing that needed a stand mixer or a free afternoon.
Friends started asking for pages, so I put them online. Then came the Sunday letter, and then, slowly, a book: eighty of the recipes people cooked most, rewritten and tested again from scratch.
I’m a home cook, not a chef, and I love cooking most when it’s easy. If a recipe ever trips you up, tell me and I’ll make it better.
In my kitchen
(the temperamental oven, doing its best)
(Mum’s wooden spoon, still in use)
Weeknights, in real time
A Tuesday, start to finish
5:40 pm
Oven on
Coat off, oven to 220°C. Nothing gets chopped until it’s hot.
5:50
One tray
Potatoes and onions go in first. They need the head start.
6:15
Everything else
Chicken on top, lemon squeezed over. Timer on, and I walk away.
6:35
Something green
A bag of leaves, oil and salt. That counts as a salad.
6:45
Dinner
On the table, one tray to wash, on the sofa by half seven.
A note from Nora
“A good weeknight dinner should cost you one pan, forty minutes and no apologies.”
Nora Vale, author of Weeknight Table
Three rules for every recipe
01
Honest timings
Every wait is written into the step, and the time on the page is the real one, washing up included.
02
Short shopping lists
Most recipes use ten ingredients or fewer, and nothing you’ll buy once and never use again.
03
Real kitchens
Normal ovens, normal pans, normal evenings. No blowtorch required.
