About Spice & Simmer

Spice & Simmer is a recipe library for one specific kind of cooking: dinner, on a weeknight, in one pot. We’re obsessive about that constraint because it’s the constraint that actually matters in most home kitchens.

The one-pot promise

Every recipe on this site uses a single primary cooking vessel — a deep skillet, a Dutch oven, a wide saucepan, a sheet pan, or a pressure cooker. We do not publish recipes that ask you to brown something in one pan, transfer it to another, blanch a vegetable in a third, and assemble it in a fourth. That’s a Saturday recipe. It is not a Tuesday recipe. We publish Tuesday recipes.

What “weeknight” means

The recipes here are designed for the kind of evening where you’re cooking after a workday, between school pickups, or with a hungry person already orbiting the kitchen. Our active cooking times are honest — if it takes thirty minutes, we say thirty minutes. We don’t hide the chopping, the resting, the “while that simmers” gap-fillers.

How the site is organized

You can browse the full library three ways: by category (chicken, beef, pasta, vegetarian, seafood, and more), by cuisine (American, Italian, Mexican, Indian, Thai, and so on), or by ingredient. Every recipe is cross-linked, so a chicken thigh recipe also shows up under chicken, under whatever cuisine it belongs to, and under every ingredient on its list. That cross-linking is the whole point — it’s how you find dinner instead of searching for it.

Where the recipes come from

The initial library is sourced from TheMealDB, a free, open, community-maintained recipe database. We adapt names, descriptions, and category framing for the one-pot weeknight angle, but the underlying recipes — ingredients, steps, photos — are the work of the contributors who maintain that database. We’re grateful for the open data; you should be too.

Contact

Spotted a typo, want to suggest a recipe, or just want to say hi? Drop us a line on the contact page. We read everything, and we update recipes when readers point out something that could be clearer or better.