Being a chef can make you the worst kind of home cook. Either you're too fussy when dinner just needs to be on the table or, as Momofuku chef Dave Chang will tell you about his early years in the industry, you just . . . never cook at home.

But now, with a family to feed, Dave faces the same challenges as any home cook: how to make something as delicious as possible, in the least amount of time possible, with as little mess as possible. It's no time for meticulous searing or searching for the perfect medium rare.

This is his guide to the culinary dark arts of substituting, adapting, shortcutting, and sandbagging, like par-cooking chicken in the microwave before showing you seven ways to blast it with flavor in a four-minute stir-fry or a ten-minute stew, because he is as tired as you are of doing things the hard way.