Life Savour

Time for Dinner

Sandi Richard knows how to make the most of that ingredient we always seem to be lacking in the kitchen – time

Story By Malwina Gudowska  

Sandi Richard leans over the counter at her favourite Cochrane, Alta. coffee shop, Java Jamboree, and squeezes the hand of the pretty young woman working the counter. “How are you?” she asks, lengthening each word, making the most of it, as if she’s only allowed a limited number of words. “I’m going to go for a tea today, believe it or not. What do you recommend?” The girl points toward the back shelf where the teas are on display, and Richard chooses a lime tea because – well – she has never tried lime tea before.

Richard (pronounced ree-SHARD) is wearing a bright purple zippered jacket and black shorts. She’s just come from a workout with her husband Ron, who she affectionately refers to as “hubby.” She’s just as enthusiastic, friendly and warm as she appears on her Food Network show, Fixing Dinner. Only today, without her overly rosy cheeks and the rest of her TV makeup, she’s even prettier. You wouldn’t guess she’s a grandmother.

“You know, this coffee shop has won awards,” she says. Then she describes some of the other attributes of Cochrane, the town about 20 kilometres outside of Calgary where Richard and her husband have lived for nearly a decade. “We just love it here,” she says. Again, she seems to take her time with her words. But it’s the notion of time, or the perceived lack thereof, that Richard has built her career on. A former commercial designer, she is a celebrity to avid watchers of the Food Network and a household name to those who know her four, soon to be five, cookbooks. And for many families, she is a saviour when it comes to cooking on the go.

Her story is well-rehearsed – she has told it numerous times over the years, including in her fourth book, called

The Dinner Fix. But she still manages to captivate listeners with her poignant tone and carefully chosen words as she tells her tale.

She was the breathing, walking example of necessity being the mother of invention, she says. The year was 1984 and, as a mom of two at the time (her brood expanded to seven), she was in a rut trying to balance life in “the era of modern-day women,” she says.

“We get to work, we get to be independent, we get to do all that and we are still caught between generations,” says Richard who recalls her 1984 self as “the chicken finger queen.”

“We are still the nurturers of the children,” Richard says of herself and other working women. “We worry about getting

a good meal on the table and getting our kids to activities.”

One day, after picking her kids up early from school to rush a sick one to the doctor, Richard says she felt like she was going to have a nervous breakdown. At the doctor’s office, she flipped through a magazine only to discover an article about how dinnertime is the most stressful part of the day. Although she felt cheated because the piece was written by a male who, she believed, had no idea what a stressful day really was, she continued reading. “It was my own awakening about food,” she says.

“We’re always looking for this magic solution to life and, really, we are just supposed to eat,” she says recounting what the article said. “We’re supposed to enjoy dinner and we are the only culture that doesn’t. We look at food as being a chore at the end of the day and we don’t embrace it.”

She was struggling with weight issues and had tried several diets. But the food epiphany led her to realize that her diets “never factored in life” and that’s why she continued to yo-yo. She would have to find her own solution to enjoying food again, in hopes that it would lead to a healthier lifestyle.

“I started to get quick recipes, but it was so frustrating because I couldn’t read them. It was 5 p.m. and I was exhausted and they had the ingredients at the top and the instructions at the bottom and I kept going back and forth.”

So she rewrote them and began organizing them with coloured markers. Red and yellow meant the recipes would be ready to eat in 30 minutes; red was less cutting and chopping while yellow was more prep time.

But depending on the night, those 30-minute recipes weren’t always the best choice. If the family had an activity they had to get to, Richard wanted a meal that would be ready to eat in 60 minutes. It would still be a quick prep time, but the meal could be left cooking while the family went out. Those were coded with green and blue markers. Richard set up a binder with all of the different meal plans according to the family’s weekly schedule.

But an epiphany in the doctor’s office and a colour-coded binder does not translate into a popular cookbook. That would come another 15 years, many more kids and numerous ups and downs later when Richard would publish her first book in the Cooking for the Rushed series, Life’s on Fire.

Meal planning became Richard’s passion and finally, in 1995, her husband Ron encouraged her to go for it. The couple started doing research to see how they could set themselves apart, food wise. They didn’t just want to create a book of recipes but a collection of meals families could really use. 

The couple solicited a number of office workers in downtown Edmonton, where they were living at the time, to agree to use their test kits.

Participants would pay for groceries, and every Tuesday and Friday Sandi and Ron would prepare all of the food and bring it back to their offices that afternoon, chopped up and ready to cook. Every six weeks, the participants had to give extensive feedback about the meals.

Although initially the couple thought it would be a one-year test deal, it wasn’t until year three that they had enough recipes for Life’s on Fire.

“Sometimes I think when people are dumb it’s a good thing,” says Richard, referring to the years the couple, discouraged, continued testing recipes. “We just kept on going,” she says. Ron, a schoolteacher, kept his day job while working with Sandi on the venture. (He has since left teaching and works full time with his wife on the business side of things.) The extended test period was a blessing in disguise.

During the three years, the couple began figuring out what families ate and didn’t eat during a work week. Fish was an example of a not-so-popular dinner. Every time the Richards proposed fish for the next meal, many of the participants would opt out of that day. And this included everyone from families with children, couples without kids or single people.

“It was a big eye-opener,” says Richard. “As we were going through the kits, it shocked us what people didn’t want.” So they began to ask questions, and the answers gave them precious data that, at the end of the day, other companies offered to buy. (The Richards declined.) The test kitchen was in operation for a further two years and, although it seemed like an eternity, they were finally ready to go.

They included grocery lists in the book so that readers could easily get the ingredients for an entire week’s worth of dinners. They released Life’s on Fire in 1999. Three more books followed: Getting Ya Through The Summer, The Healthy Family and The Dinner Fix. The fifth book, Dinner Survival, comes out this month. The Richards published the first three themselves, but the fourth and fifth are backed by industry heavyweight Simon and Schuster.

Each book builds on meal plans with different recipes and grocery lists, but sticks to fundamentals, being quick, easy-to-prepare and healthful. And each recipe always factors in life.

Four years ago, the Food Network launched her series, Fixing Dinner. In each 30-minute show, Richard helps a different time-strapped family plan meals, walking them through recipes, grocery shopping and even organizing their kitchen.

Kim Rezazadeh, her husband Ali and their two young daughters,

Sarah and Setareh, participated in season one. Their episode, “Cultural Cooking Clash,” dealt with the family’s desire to incorporate more ethnic Persian food because of Ali’s Iranian background. The catch, of course, was that they had little time. Kim also wanted to add more fish, raw veggies and fruits to the meals. “She had quite the challenge trying to incorporate both of those into our meals,” says Kim. “And I have been to Iran three times and although the food was not exactly authentic, it was pretty damn close.”

Four years after Richard came into their kitchen, for the most part, the Rezazadehs still use Richard’s techniques. Kim can even create weekly Richard-style grocery lists based on other recipe books. And, even for Ali, Richard’s touch is lasting, says his wife.

“When we are trying something new, my husband knows right away when it’s Sandi’s recipe,” says Kim. “He thinks her recipes, although simple to prepare, are not simple in taste.” Rezazadeh says Richard is different from her Food Network counterparts because she doesn’t focus as much on technique but rather on practical solutions to de-stress busy families.

Each episode of Fixing Dinner finishes with Richard saying: “Remember, fixing dinner is not only about food. It’s about family.” And that was always a rule in the Richard household. The family of nine would make it a point to eat dinner together. It was time to catch up on the day and even find out, for example, that a cranky daughter had just had her heart broken, Richard says.

But although Richard has always advocated bringing the family back to the table, her method has been to do it quickly. In The Dinner Fix, little icons of clocks tapping their feet, arms crossed or hands on hips, signify short preparation times, but they also evoke a sense of finger snapping, instant meal preparation.

Of course, some critics might say that families should try to slow things down in an already rushed world. Richard says she wishes it was that simple. 

“If I had my way, everybody would leave work at 4 p.m., take their time, have a glass of wine, have some tea, laugh, sing with their kids and get dinner on the table,” she says. “It’s a great thought and it’s a great place to try for but… you have to realize it’s not happening.”

And Richard’s popularity is a testament to what the masses want: an easy, quick solution to meal-making. In addition to her fifth book, launching in Canada this month and in the United States in January, Richard will begin filming her second TV series, Double Duty Dinner, this fall. It focuses on turning one meal’s prep time into the groundwork for a second, later meal. The show will be taped in the Richards’ new house located between Cochrane and Calgary.

But, in addition to the success, there has been some major change in the couple’s lifestyle. The Richards are now empty nesters. Their 19-year-old daughter and youngest of the brood recently moved out. Although they had to stop cooking for an army, the couple still continues its meal-planning routine, including eating forwards, something that Sandi encourages everyone to do. “Eating forwards means you know what you are going to have for dinner so you can balance your eating during the day,” she says. “If you knew you were going to have lasagna for dinner, you probably wouldn’t choose it for lunch, now would you?”

Richard doesn’t shy away from typically rich meals such as macaroni and cheese or butter chicken, but she substitutes ingredients so that the recipes might have onl y a third of the fat as a similar dish in a restaurant. Plus, she says, all her recipes have to be “moanable” (so good, it makes you moan).

The Richards are both “Alberta fanatics” when it comes to food. “Some of the produce and the meat we produce is world-class,” she says. “I don’t know if you have tasted some of the asparagus from around here?” asks Richard, closing her eyes and smiling. “I am shivering,” she says, and she puts her hand on her cheek and gives her shoulders a theatrical quiver.

And just then “hubby” walks in, declaring that he has to make it to the post office. Sandi keeps talking about the evolution of her books, but it’s obvious Ron is nervous about the time. He looks a bit like one of the little iconic clocks tapping its feet in the margins of her books. Ron apologizes but says it’s time to go.

If only we had a little more time. 

Sandi Richard's recipes

Apple Feta Pizza with Spinach Salad

Slow-Roast Beef with Roasted Ratatouille