How Chef Vivian Howard Juggles Dinner When Time is Tight

Plus, the one change that’s really made a difference in her grocery spending.

I love hearing about the dinners that cooking pros actually make on repeat at home, when the cameras are off and they’re not fine-tuning recipes for a cookbook.

For North Carolina chef and cookbook author Vivian Howard, whose latest public television show is called Kitchen Curious, the answer these days is chicken and rice, which she starts by boiling a whole chicken.

After a little more than an hour, she’ll pick the tender meat off the bones, add rice to the broth, then return the meat to the pot and stir in some spinach at the end.

“Sometimes I’ll put some salsa on top and some herbs,” she says. “Once you have that basic chicken and rice canvas, you can do a lot to it and kind of customize your bowl.” Vivian likens it to a Southern cousin of congee; it’s great topped with an egg and chili crisp.

Sometimes she’ll reserve half the meat to use in quesadillas or a casserole later. “By boiling that chicken,” she says, “you can set yourself up for several meals.”

That prep is crucial in a time crunch—at 7:30 each morning, Vivian and her son head out for the 40-minute journey to school, and he often has basketball until 7 p.m. “It’s a struggle,” she says. “Living where I live, there are not a lot of takeout options. You know, if I can’t make dinner, there’s not a lot out there for me to tap into.”

She tries to lean into meals (like that chicken) that can wear different clothes on a second day, but says that she’s not a big meal planner overall.

There’s a reason Vivian opts for same-day dinner strategizing: “I want to be excited to cook it and eat it,” she says. “Sometimes when I plan ahead, I change my mind.”

It’s a perpetual juggle that many of us share—a more structured dinner system can be supportive when time is tight, but it can also distance us from the pure delight of leaning into our cravings. You’ve gotta adjust the dial as needed. (If you want to hear a few varying viewpoints on this, I recommend these conversations with Gena Hamshaw, Jenn Lueke, and Meera Sodha. And I’d love to hear how you do it in the comments below!)

In this week’s podcast episode, Vivian also shares the one thing that really made a difference in her grocery spending, plus lots of practical tips from a career in professional kitchens. If you’ve been storing packages of chicken on the top shelf of your fridge, listen up!

Scroll down for Vivian’s go-to dinners, her cookbook recommendations, and her recipe for Eastern North Carolina-style biscuits that are perfect for stuffing with sausages.

Win Vivian’s books

We’ve got a special giveaway this week—one winner will receive a copy of each of Vivian’s two cookbooks: Deep Run Roots and This Will Make It Taste Good.

There are two different ways to enter:

• 🥇 Sign up as a paid subscriber to this newsletter by end of day Sunday, February 8, 2026. That’s all you need to do. Signing up as a paid subscriber also gives you full access to the 99+ Dinner Ideas list and this winter dinners edition.

• 🥈 Free subscribers can still enter the giveaway. Just send in a “what’s in my pantry/fridge/freezer right now” voice memo for us to play on The Dinner Plan podcast. An upcoming cookbook author guest will come up with a dinner idea just for you based on what you have around. Follow the instructions here by end of day Sunday, February 8, 2026.

Giveaway winner will be alerted by Substack DM and email. 18+, U.S. addresses only (sorry!). Giveaway not sponsored or administered by Substack. Ends Feb 8, 2026. This newsletter includes affiliate links; a small commission from your purchase helps to keep this newsletter going.

Vivian mentioned:

• Chicken and Rice

• Frozen Burritos

• Stewed Collard Greens

• Blueberry Barbecue Chicken

• Little Green Dress

• Red Weapons

• Fridge-Cleanout Okonomiyaki from Perfectly Good Food

• Bow Tie Pasta Bake

• Bacon Fat Salad Toast

• Edna Lewis’s The Taste of Country Cooking (used on Thriftbooks here)

• Ada Boni’s The Talisman of Happiness

• Sohui Kim’s Korean Home Cooking (used on Thriftbooks here)

From the ad break:

• Rouxbe Online Culinary School: Save 30% on any course over $50 with code DINNERPLAN30 at Rouxbe.com

• Find LaBelle Patrimoine chicken at Whole Foods or GrownAsPromised.com

• Find Brami’s made-in-Italy protein pasta at Costco or wherever you shop. Learn more at EnjoyBrami.com

• Society Insurance: Find your local agent at SocietyInsurance.com

• Made In Cookware: Head to madein.cc/dinnerplan to unlock your discount offer.

Maggie mentioned:

• Potatoes with rosé from The King Cookbook (catch the authors on The Dinner Plan here)

• Salade Lyonnaise

• Every Single Cookbook Recommended on The Dinner Plan

• Talisman interview on Everything Cookbooks

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A NOTE FROM OUR SPONSOR

You know LaBelle Patrimoine for their exceptional heritage breed, pasture-raised chickens. But did you know they recently introduced Ancestral Blend Ground Chicken, which which mixes in a little organ meat for even more savory depth?

Try it in meatballs piled on a sandwich or pasta, or cook it up with goat cheese and aged cheddar for a delicious cheesy dip.

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Photo: Rex Miller

ENC-Style Buttermilk Biscuits

Excerpted from Deep Run Roots by Vivian Howard. Copyright © 2016 by Vivian Howard. Photograph by Rex Miller. Used with permission of Voracious, an imprint of Little, Brown and Company. New York, NY. All rights reserved.

Makes 10 biscuits

Traditional Eastern North Carolina Biscuits are different. Not poofed up in a zillion layers or bready, they’re flat under a timid dome, crispy on the bottom, and porky-smelling. Because my mom baked high-rising canned biscuits, I thought the squat biscuits I ate at Byrd’s diner, the B&S Café, the Tyndall Family Restaurant, and Pleasant Hill Grocery were baked only in restaurants…till I met Lillie Hardy, my friend and home-cook mentor.

Lillie gave me a lesson on biscuit making, and beforehand I thought she was going to show me something I already knew—how to measure, gently knead, roll out, and cut big fluffy biscuits. Instead, she showed me how to fashion the biscuits that I had thought only a scowling magician toiling hunchbacked behind a swinging kitchen door could craft.

Because these are flat, they don’t make great bookends for stout combinations like bacon, egg, and cheese or the very popular fried-chicken biscuits with pickles I keep seeing on menus. This is a one-stuffing kind of biscuit, a happy home for a link of sausage split lengthwise or a naturally slight slice of country ham. Lillie and most people around, though, eat them just as often right out of the oven with molasses.

The instructions make them seem easier than they actually are. Don’t think you’re gonna wake up hungry Saturday morning and whip out a perfect batch of these biscuits the first time you try; you’d better have a plan B. It takes practice. At least it did for me.

½ cup lard plus more for greasing the pan
2½ cups all-purpose flour
4 teaspoons baking powder
⅔ teaspoon salt
1 cup buttermilk

1. Preheat your oven to 375°F. Using your hand as both a scoop and spatula, grease a baking sheet liberally with lard.

2. Sift the flour, salt, and baking powder into a large bowl and make a deep and wide well in the center. Add ½ cup lard followed by the buttermilk, taking care to keep both contained in the well for now. If you’re right-handed, take your right hand down into the lard-buttermilk goop and start bringing that together with your fingers. You want to make that as much of a homogenous mixture as you can without bringing too much flour into the fold just yet.

3. Once you get it together, start moving the wet mixture back and forth, to and fro in the flour. Turn it over and do the same. Turn it over again and introduce more flour with each movement. Once I get going, I like to do a little motion that feels like a one-handed knead, using my thumb as if it were the other hand. It’s all real gentle, but it pushes new flour in with each movement. Continue introducing flour until the dough is not sticky but still very soft and tender. You will have about ½ cup flour left in the bowl. I could give you an exact measurement for flour, but there are a lot of factors in play here, so I’ve chosen to do it as Lillie would.

4. Pull off a large golfball-size piece of dough and roll it up with your hand, pinching the bottom together. Put it in the corner of the greased baking sheet and press it down to ½ inch thick. Follow with the next biscuit. All sides of every biscuit should be touching other biscuits. It’s okay if you don’t fill the entire tray; it’s more important that they be crowded.

5. Slide the tray onto the rack in the lower third of your oven and bake for 18 minutes. Rotate the tray to the top rack and bake an additional 7 minutes.

6. The biscuits should be golden brown and crisp on the bottom, a little less brown on top. Let them cool if you can for 2 minutes before eating.
   

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