We had a slow summer break with your usual rural events. I caught a tarantula in our guest room. I chased my kids away from an enormous black widow that emerged from beneath the boards of our front porch. I have a thousand pictures of bugs on my phone because we use the Seek app all day every day and there are lots of bugs. I watched Dark Winds and read Tony Hillerman. I planted a three sisters garden with my mom and then installed a big fence to keep out the deer (1-0 me). The deer sneakily ate two saplings when we left them unguarded for 20 minutes (1-1 draw, to be continued). Our internet went out so I had to trek outside for cell service for a week. We watched a wildfire blazing in the hills from our driveway at night. We begged the clouds for rain at home, and then dodged flash floods up the road.

By mid-July, with my mom in town to help out, I was ready to spend a little time in the kitchen to try some new recipes. In the spring, I received two beautiful cookbooks thanks to Clarkson Potter and Ten Speed Press, Cooking the Borderlands by Claudette Zepeda and Japanese Comfort Cooking by Tadashi Ono and Harris Salat.

With these books, I enjoyed approximating some sense of adventure while avoiding the abject hell of air travel. They took me to two places I had never been before—Mexico and Japan—while embracing my inner need for rest and routine. Because if there’s an opposite of wanderlust, I have it right now. Staying-put-lust. And I indulged it.

But let’s be honest. I didn’t go crazy. I chose two chicken meals that made use of ingredients I could source in my decidedly non-urban home area. I entered a flow state in my kitchen. I was home in time for dinner.

Here is my honest take on how these books worked out for me.

Cooking the Borderlands: Spice and Smoke Between Mexico and the States by Claudette Zepeda

The Book

Cooking the Borderlands is a beautiful cookbook with a compelling theme. The author, Claudette Zepeda, has a strong voice and a clear artistic vision for the book and it comes through on every page. Zepeda is a first-generation Mexican American “raised with one foot in each country.”

She’s also chef and culinary anthropologist. Her expertise is clearly strong and her experience is evidently deep. The book is about the food of the US/Mexico border, a fascinating and dynamic space of culinary and cultural exchange. (As a historian, I do love a borderland space!)

The style of Cooking the Borderlands is fun and unique. The photographs range from candid, unaffected snapshots of the people of the borderlands, to pictures of Zepeda’s family and life, to artistic representations of the recipes. As Zepeda notes in the introduction, she and her creative team are cinephiles, and they carry their love into the food photography, drawing inspiration from their favorite directors. It’s truly a joy to flip through.

The book begins with the recipes Zepeda was raised with at home, and then is divided by the various border regions. The chapters move east from the California borderlands where Zepeda grew up and lives, to Sonora, Chihuahua, and finally the world of Tex-Mex.

Cooking the Borderlands includes some recipes you might be familiar with and expect to find in a Mexican American cookbook—tortillas, enchiladas, barbacoa, birria, margaritas, churros—alongside fascinating dishes that I had no idea about. For example, the new-to-me Coyota, a piloncillo-filled pastry from Sonora that I bookmarked immediately. And then there’s a large section on the food of Mexicali’s Chinatown, which Zepeda calls “the most delicious Cantonese and Szechuan food outside of China…where these foods took on Mexican character and flavor.” That’s a fusion I would like to immediately eat.

The book, like you might anticipate, relies on access to Mexican ingredients. As someone not too far from the borderlands, I have cheap, easy access to all kinds of dried chiles, tomatillos, masa, piloncillo, and so on, so it’s not too bad for me. Even then, however, there were some items out of my reach, like hoja santa leaf and dried avocado leaves. Zepeda encourages improvisation in the introduction, but doesn’t offer much guidance in the recipes themselves—I chose to leave them out—so access to ingredients might limit use of this book for some.

In terms of the emphasis, Zepeda’s background undoubtedly, and naturally, influences her culinary focus. The chapter on the California borderlands is the chunkiest and the chapter on Chihuahua the thinnest. As someone who lives within driving distance of the latter, I couldn’t help but notice the scantness of this section.

On top of that, New Mexico, as far as I can tell, is not mentioned a single time in the book. Maybe there’s a good reason for this omission, but Zepeda never seems to say what it is, and for a book focused on the US/Mexico border, dropping a full 25% of the states that make-up that border is worthy of note. (Obviously something more front of mind for those of us who happen to live in New Mexico and are a bit sensitive to its underdog status.)

The Recipes

So the book is a treat to peruse, and an engaging lesson on the borderlands. But cookbooks are also meant to be cooked from, and this book begs not to be a coffee table decoration. It’s jam-packed with practical tips, my favorite being a way to make use of discarded tomatillo husks to tenderize corn tortillas. I am, of course, passionate about food scraps.

As someone with an arguably eccentric idea of fun, for my birthday, I decided to make an elaborate meal from Cooking the Borderlands for my family and me. (And if you’re nodding your head saying that doesn’t sound eccentric at all, totally normal, fun idea, &c. &c, you’re in the right place, welcome friend.)

For the project, I chose the recipe Las Calandrias Caballitos (Chicken Sopes). Sopes, according to Zepeda, take all kinds of different forms across Mexico, but this version consists of a thick masa (nixtamalized corn flour) base that is first pan heated and then fried. After you fry it, you pile it high with toppings: beans, chicken, iceberg lettuce,1 pickled onions, salsa, crema, and cheese.

To give you a sense of why this was a special occasion meal, there were six component recipes I had to make to pull together this one dish: Frijoles de la Olla (Aromatic Stewed Beans)2, Caldillo (All-Purpose Tomato and Oregano Sauce), Tortillas de Maíz (Corn Tortillas), Tomatillo Husk Water, Quick-Pickled Red Onions, and Braised Shredded Chicken. None of it was exactly hard, but it was still a lot.

To bring a little extra fun to the table and use up some tomatillos, I also made Salsa Verde Cruda (Raw Tomatillo Salsa) and Salsa Verde Morita (Cooked Tomatillo Salsa with Chile Morita).

I always hope that when I love to read a book I will love to cook from it, especially when I invest a lot of time. Unfortunately, there were a few small (editing?) issues that tripped me up in this book.

Some examples were that the Caldillo claimed the yield was 2 cups, when my actual yield was little more than a half cup. I’m not sure where the disconnect was, but any sauce that revolves around just two (2) Roma tomatoes will never yield 2 cups of sauce unless you happen to be a salsa Strega Nona. (Maybe it was supposed to be 2 lbs?)

The Braised Shredded Chicken had salt in the ingredient list but not in the method, something I perhaps realized too late, leaving me with under-seasoned chicken as much as I tried to correct it. (I should have realized earlier but also shouldn’t have to.)

Everything else was fine, if a bit underwhelming. I lived off the beans for a few days, eventually stirring in some more seasoning to try and jazz them up. I suspect part of the issue lay in the fact that everything was meant to be seasoned to taste, but with no jumping off point or further instruction.

The stand out was the Salsa Verde Morita, which was excellent.

Summing it Up

That being said, if you have any kind of culinary or anthropological interest in the US/Mexico border and no sense of indignation about New Mexico, this book is worth a read. If you are comfortable adjusting recipes on the fly instead of cooking to the letter, the small editing errors might not bother you so much. I’m sure a lot will be corrected by the next edition, anyway. Because of the assumption of basic technique and vaguer direction, it’s perhaps a bit better for someone comfortable in the kitchen already.

As for me, I’m a little bit of a squirrelly cookbook lover, and I have a hard time returning to a book after a few misses, so we’ll see.

Japanese Comfort Cooking: An Opinionated Guide to Modern, Homey, Classic Japanese Recipes by Tadashi Ono and Harris Salat

The Book

If my access to Mexican ingredients is good to pretty good, my access to Japanese ingredients is extremely poor. My grocery store shelves pretty much have a bottle of soy sauce, instant ramen, and a bottle of Heinz Japanese-Inspired Sauce. (OK, that’s hyperbole, but it’s truly not extensive, and the Heinz sauce is a real thing.)

So I was fairly aware from the get-go that any kind of in-depth exploration of Japanese Comfort Cooking might be out of my reach, and I was absolutely right. This hurdle is, of course, no fault of the book. In fact, it’s the feature not the bug.

The book is meant to be weeknight friendly, in a way straight from Japan. The introduction explains it perfectly:

Tadashi likes to say that traditional food producers do most of the work in Japanese cuisine. What he means is that the process of fermenting soy sauce, mirin, sake, and miso unlocks so much glorious flavor, depth, and umami that you can create a delicious dish without too much cooking effort. That’s a huge difference from Western cuisine. In Japanese cooking you’re not braising something for hours to tease out flavor; the traditional seasonings do that heavy lifting for you. So the cooking here is fast, and most of the dishes in this book qualify for your weeknight dinner rotation. (p. 14)

That means if you don’t have the ingredients, you’re kind of missing the point, and substitutions are not really part of the formula. As always, the authors tell you that if you can’t find the listed ingredients locally, you’re only a click away. But also as usual, there’s little acknowledgement of the added expense, the inherent risk of stocking a ton of new ingredients, and no guidance on where to click. (Do I want to be delving into the world of Japanese ingredients in the shady corners of the Amazon marketplace? Not particularly.)

Nor is there a helping hand around the fact that things like sake and a lot of fresh ingredients—looking at you, burdock and lotus root—can’t simply be ordered online. And then, even if I can find mirin at my local Walmart, is that $3 bottle the kind I should be using?3

The book is divided in a straightforward way, with an emphasis on veggies and seafood. There’s a chapter each on Miso Soup; Rice; Noodles; Salads and Vegetarian Sozai (Side Dishes); Vegetables; Fish; Shellfish; Eggs, Chicken, and Duck; and Beef, Pork and Lamb.

Much like Cooking the Borderlands, there are beautiful pictures of Japan and its cooking and eating culture. The authors are cheerful and passionate guides, and there’s a real sense of authentic heart that runs through the entire thing.

The Recipes

I flipped through the pages hoping I could find something approachable given my current constraints, and landed on perhaps the least traditionally Japanese recipe in the book: Soy Sauce Roast Whole Chicken. I still had to go a bit (three hours) out of my way to get my hands on some sake at a Trader Joe’s, but everything else was easy.

The recipe involves brining a chicken overnight in a mixture of soy sauce, sake, sugar, ginger, garlic, and scallions, which to my inexpert mind recalled teriyaki. After you brine it, you roast it simply.

The chicken was satisfying and the flavor was good. The brine penetrated throughout, and gave the chicken an amazing burnished appearance. It’s a bit more involved than your average roast, but not by much, and satisfying if you’re craving a new flavor profile for a whole chicken.

I paired it with Cauliflower Goma-ae, which my lack of planning turned into frozen broccoli goma-ae. I figured the recipe was more about the sauce anyways, since goma-ae means “dressed with sesame sauce.” The dish involved making a simple sesame seed and soy sauce dressing and tossing it with cooked veggies. I made plain rice to go alongside the chicken and broccoli. I would definitely try this again with roasted cauliflower. It was easy and really tasty.

Summing it Up

And this brings me to just about the sum total of recipes I can easily cook from this book. I think Japanese Comfort Cooking would be excellent with anyone who loves Japanese food or wants to explore the cuisine more. Keep in mind, you are going to have to have a good source of ingredients. But if you do, this book will be incredibly fun and I’m maybe a little bit jealous of you.

Final Thoughts

Both of these books offer lively and candid glimpses into the cuisines of different parts of the world. Cooking the Borderlands is not a weeknight, everyday cookbook, unless perhaps you were already taught to cook on the hip of an abuela. Japanese Comfort Cooking purports to be a weeknight cookbook if you have the ingredients. It’s the Japanese food of the day-to-day grind, according to the authors. Cooking the Borderlands offers slow-braised flavors, coaxing taste from Mexican staples. Japanese Comfort Cooking is hot and fast, leaning on ingredients to do the heavy lifting.

The authors of both books are incredibly knowledgeable and obviously devoted. Lately, there has been a lot of comments about the onslaught of influencer cookbooks, and the accusation of slapdashery. And while I’m a strong supporter of weeknight-friendly, 30-minute, easy-peasy cookbooks (seriously, keep 'em coming!), there’s a certain apathy that can arise with always looking at food meant to keep you scrolling. And there’s an exhaustion that comes with always thinking about food pragmatically.

For me, these books feel like an antidote to the click/rage/attention baiting that comes at you all the time. These are just talented people sharing their considerable talents with the world. For me, there’s nothing like reading a passion project cover-to-cover, completely immersed in the cooking of others, as a way to quiet the brain and soothe the soul. These two books fit the bill.

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Now it’s summer, and the kids and I are off, lazing around and making big messes. So I’m at home more, but still mentally tired, because I’m back to full-time mom.

As such, I have a stack of beautiful new cookbooks on my night table, and very little energy to plumb their depths. Right now, I am prioritizing ease in the kitchen and presence out of it.

I’ve been making dinner as simple possible, and ideally prepping it ahead. Switching back into full-time house management is hard enough right now without adding a ton of food prep pressure. No one needs that version of me, especially not me.

And what’s more, a focus on simplicity means I can cuddle my kids on the porch rocker while they warm up from playing with the hose instead of pushing them to come inside so I can make dinner. Because is there anything worse than trying to spend more time inside in the summer?

Here are some of the best things I’ve made recently, and the recipes that have been on constant rotation as I embrace the slowness and simplicity of the season.

(By the way, nothing in here is an affiliate link in case you feel like clicking on it.)

1. One-Pot Cheddar Tomato Mac by Ali Slage via New York Times Cooking

Any parent out there knows that the idea of a kid-friendly recipe is completely bogus. Kid is not a monolith. Kid is a loose conglomeration of assertive, idiosyncratic, irrational eaters.

Case in point: one of my kids loves a tomato-sauced spaghetti and hates mac and cheese. Yes, mac and cheese, the supposed bulwark against picky eaters everywhere. And the other? The exact opposite. Because of course. Why not.

Enter One-Pot Cheddar Tomato Mac (gift link) by , the Switzerland of my household pasta wars. It’s a little bit tomato and a little bit cheese, with a hefty dose of garlic and smoked paprika to make it interesting for the adults. (A bonus for all my Canadians out there is that it’s reminiscent of putting ketchup on your KD.)

Even better is that it is super simple to cook, very inexpensive, dirties only one pot, and is quick. What I’m trying to say is, it’s my dream recipe.

To make it even simpler, I actually don’t even make the bread crumb topping. I fear it might break our fragile cease fire. It’s still great. I’ve made it a million times with almost every pasta shape, and it’s always a winner.

2. Sheet Pan Chicken

I have been absolutely loving the Sheet-Pan Salt and Vinegar Chicken and Potatoes by since it were posted in January. Or, as it’s known in my house “the yummy chicken with the yummy skin.”

It’s a simple list of ingredients with a huge range of substitutions, making it budget and scrap friendly. So far, I’ve made it every time with sweet potatoes, cauliflower, and parsley, because they’re cheap, easy to find, and I like eating them.

It also has a huge pay-off for such a simple method. There’s a ton of flavor with the layers of pickled, briny, salty things added at the end.

The advantage of most sheet pan dinners, and this one in particular, is that you can separate out all the components after cooking. So my kids get plain chicken and veggies, and I get an actually interesting dinner.

If you don’t happen to subscribe to that particular Substack, another method I love for chicken right now is just roasting it with a simple spice rub. Here’s the one from Thriving Home I use, often with a mix of thighs and drumsticks.

Or try Lidey Heuck’s Baked Chicken Thighs (gift link) from New York Times Cooking, which are also simple and can be prepped ahead of time.

And for anyone out there scared of under-cooking chicken and so you always overcook chicken: I beg you to give bone-in, skin-on parts a try. It’s pretty much impossible to dry them out by overcooking. And drumsticks are one of the cheapest chicken parts money can buy!

For those of you that don’t live in a desert that cools off at night, a sheet pan meal might sound like a sweaty nightmare (been there), so maybe just keep these in mind for fall!

3. New England Hot Dog Buns by Andrea Geary, Cook’s Illustrated (July & August 2026)

I’ll say it: I don’t like grocery store hot dog buns very much. They’re always somehow too soft for me and just boring.

As Jennifer Reese says in my DIY north star, Make the Bread, Buy the Butter, about hotdog buns:

“I found myself reflecting on how bad most hot dog buns are. How we take for granted their badness. How inured we are to their badness. How I always throw away what’s left after the last bite of hot dog because the bread has the texture of foam rubber.”

Yes to all of that. Absolutely agree.

Still, I haven’t been able to find a good hot dog bun recipe. I tried some bread machine options. They were flops. I tried this recipe from King Arthur, and didn’t really like it either.

Then, this month’s issue of Cook’s Illustrated arrived with a hot dog bun recipe, and I figured I’d try it (cf. my America’s Test Kitchen bread journey, below).

Fast forward to now, three weeks later, and I have made these buns three times. Mainly this is because they are delicious. But they have some more things going for them, too. For one, they are straightforward and easy.

But maybe more importantly, they use the Asian baking technique of tangzhong, basically a cooked flour/liquid mixture, to keep them super fluffy and make them last longer. So I can have delicious buns for days! And even though tangzhong sounds fancy and Cook’s Illustrated—in my humble opinion—is great at making things complicated, it’s really quite easy in this case. You just microwave milk and flour for about a minute and add it to the other dough ingredients. It’s a painless step that makes all the difference.

This recipe is not up online yet, but if you have access to a library I am almost certain you have access to Cook’s Illustrated, either through Libby or a physical building where most libraries keep current copies of magazines.

I know for many a hotdog is a meal for those days when you barely want to use a stove let alone bake a pan of buns from scratch. The bun is not the point. And that’s fair. Personally, I’m never making a fish stick from scratch because the succulence of breaded fish is not the main driver of the meal. The 10-minute air fry is.

But if you really like hot dogs and want a delicious bun, try these. Or put something else in them. I like them with this Salmon Salad or with the most sophisticated recipe I know how to make, Grape Jelly Meatballs (please leave all epicurean pretension at the door). Cook’s Illustrated turns them into a shrimp roll. My kids eat them buttered, because suddenly they don’t like hot dogs anymore. (Any inquiries can be directed to my digression on “kid-friendly” above.)

Or make them ahead and enjoy a dinner where you just have to boil water, boiling being the undisputed best way to cook a hot dog, of course.

4. Yellow Cake Cookie bars from Sweet Farm by Molly Yeh

OK, you are going to have to get your hands on a copy of Sweet Farm for this recipe, but it is truly worth it. (My library’s Hoopla has it!) Everything I’ve tried from this book, with the exception of the Soft Sugar Cookie Bars I maybe under-baked, has been not just good but excellent.

And most recently, these Yellow Cake Cookie Bars just truly hit it out of the park. First up, they were not at all hard. In fact, they came together super quickly, even with a sugar-happy, spatula-swiping, very small sous chef. Second, they were the best of all worlds. They were denser than your average cake, but airier than your average bar. The texture Molly Yeh landed on with these, using additions of cream cheese, egg yolks, and almond flour, is extremely delicious.

Another advantage of these bars is they keep well in the fridge for a week, so if you’re not feeding a crowd, you can give yourself seven days of amazing dessert.

Any time you are looking for a celebratory recipe that’s not too much of a project or too big of a dessert, this recipe is an excellent option.

5. Oreo Ice Cream Bars by Francesca Zani, Delish

If you want a very good, very easy dessert that involves no baking this summer, might I recommend these Oreo Ice Cream Bars? They are only three ingredients, and the payoff is tastier and cheaper than a store-bought Oreo ice cream sandwich. The addition of melted milk chocolate to the Oreo crumb crust makes these sturdy, and also provides an amazing crunchy/creamy contrast to the whole thing.

That being said, it’s not a perfect recipe and here are a couple of things to note with this recipe if you decide to try it:

1. It does not mention softening the ice cream before spreading, which you certainly should do.

2. Try not to refrigerate the crumb mixture before adding it to the top because it will get hard.

3. You should scatter the top crust as broadly as possible before trying to press it down, because you can’t really spread it around without messing up the ice cream.

4. This says it serves 9 people, which might be true if you enjoy gargantuan servings, and I love that for you and your lactose tolerance. But I would argue for at least 12 servings, maybe even 16, based on how rich it was.

5. The website layout is pretty terrible. If it takes you a year to find the actual ingredients on a desktop, they’re in the left margin.

Keeping all that in mind, this recipe is good for the summer back pocket. I gave them to a group of young people working out in the hot sun in my town, and returned with only an empty pan and a fat head.

My Cookbook of the Season

Do you know those people who only talk about their workout routines? I’m like that but with my bread machine. Just completely insufferable.

Recently, however, my little Hamilton Beach got all scratched up on its nonstick insides. Add to that a paddle that is supposed to detach but no longer does, and I had to put the little guy out of commission while I figure out next steps. The machine has been discontinued and replacement parts are costly, so now I’m trying to figure out whether to save for a Zojirushi bread machine or invest in other modern luxuries, like “gas” and “groceries.”

In the meantime, I’ve been embracing a simpler, old-fashioned bread life. And by that I mean I’ve been using my stand mixer, because I still don’t have the wherewithal to knead with my hands (apologies to the kneading crusaders). As I said, I’m at home a lot right now, so I have the luxury of being able to punch down and shape dough at long intervals.

My stalwart companion on this bread journey is the book Everyday Bread by America’s Test Kitchen. Historically, I’ve been a bit wary of ATK. I’m more of a pragmatic cook than a cook who values optimization. Like, I’m fine if my mac and cheese isn’t the BEST MAC AND CHEESE EVER as long as I don’t have to source 20 cheeses and mix them with gelatin or whatever. I also tire of the long, scientific explanations about how and why it’s a superior recipe. It’s just not my thing.

Little by little, however, I’ve been coming around to more of the ATK-verse (not sure if this is me or them) and I particularly love this book. It’s called Everyday Bread because it’s meant to be approachable, daily baking, not complex project baking.

It has chapters on Quick Breads, Rolls and More, Sandwich Slices, No-Knead Dutch Oven Breads, Pizza and Flatbreads, and Enriched Breads. It’s very visual, really instructive, and an excellent bread resource for pragmatic bread baking. And there are these super helpful visual timelines that help you plan out your baking.

Everything I’ve made from this book as been excellent: White Dinner Rolls, White Sandwich Bread, Easy Sandwich Bread, Oatmeal Sandwich Bread, Whole-Wheat Oatmeal Loaf, and Pita Bread so far. Top of my list coming up are Crumpets and English Muffin Bread. As I said before, the recipes use the stand mixer for kneading, so they’re actually quite simple, provided you block out enough time.

I’ve taken this book out of the library a million times, and I have it out again right now. I actually own the Kindle version, too, but I have to say I think the print copy is vastly superior. The digital table of contents is bad, and there’s no way to easily access the QR code how-to videos throughout.

If bread is something you’re interested in, you should definitely check this one out.

Kitchen Tool Rave

One more thing I have just have to talk about is new favorite kitchen tool, an extra-large sheet pan. These are exactly what they sound like: enormous sheet pans that take up almost an entire standard oven rack. Mine are by Nordic Ware, like this, and I found them at Sam’s Club. They’re 35% bigger than a standard half-sheet and using them means you can bake bigger batches all at once, particularly if your oven doesn’t accommodate two side-by-side sheet pans.

So I can bake more chicken pieces at one time, or two chickens spatchcocked next to each other, or a double batch of granola, or a bunch of cookies. For sheet pan meals, it means everything gets plenty of space to roast up nice and crispy, and the option of throwing in extras or doubling up to eat later in the week. It’s great for big prep sessions and big appetites. I couldn’t love them more.

If you have any thoughts on what else to with big sheet pans, Zojirushi opinions, or any other thoughts please comment. Unless you’re going to tell me that boiling is not the best way to cook a hotdog because I won’t hear it.

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That’s just groceries these days, I guess. I don’t have to tell you prices are spiking. Did you see tomatoes cost 40% more than last year!? It’s not a particular problem for us considering my kids treat raw tomatoes as an affront to human rights, but it is emblematic of my broader woes.

Let’s not even talk about the cost of gas. OK, no, I’ll talk about it. It’s high, and I don’t exactly live in an area with a proliferation of public transportation. I believe our walk score is: lol, don’t even try!

All of this means that I am trying to scrimp and scrape where I can, striking a balance between sensible scrap saving and outright scrap nuttiness.

Because I’m not here to get on my high horse about kitchen waste. Can you eke extra sustenance out of meager ingredients? You sure can! Is it quick and easy and always worth the trade off? Absolutely not.

Transforming your flotsam and jetsam into something new and palatable can quickly turn into a full-time job if you let it. And you can let it if you have the flexibility, inclination, and storage space. I just don’t, really. Not right now.

So, Here are some crumb conservation techniques I use to stave off guilt and make me feel just virtuous enough, but stop short of exhausting kitchen contrition. (We cradle Catholics can never be too careful.)

1. Leftover Bones & Veg = Stock/Broth

Let’s start with the most classic example. Any kind of bone can be used to make stock, but the bones I tend to have and the stock I tend to make are overwhelmingly chicken.

I’ve followed the same method for making broth for years, and I use my Instant Pot. It’s based on a Melissa Clark recipe for bone broth from Dinner in an Instant.

Basically, I throw in all my chicken bones and whatever vegetable odds and ends I have hanging in the freezer for just such a purpose.

Incidentally, this is a great place to also use yellow celery/celery middles, parsley stems, leek tops, green onions you didn’t get through, hairy carrots, and those teeny tiny garlic cloves that are too annoying to peel and chop.

I then add a bay leaf, peppercorns, and a splash of apple cider vinegar, and cover it with water up to the max line. I cook it for the longest possible option on my Instant Pot (240 minutes) by toggling backwards from 0. It takes around an hour to come to pressure, and I allow an hour natural release.

So 6 hours total on the cooking with the result being a beautiful, gelatinous broth. For more basic stock, you can do the same thing and cook it long and slow on the stovetop or slow cooker, or fast and high in the Instant Pot.

So the actual making of stock is very simple, provided you allow the time, though I find the back end of the process the hardest part. You have to strain a huge vat of piping hot broth (usually around 12-16 cups), and, eventually, portion it. Then you have to somehow store it.

With some foresight, you can plan a chicken soup dinner for your stock day, and that helps with the storage. I, personally, split stock making and storing into two to three days if I can.

There are, of course, a million ways to use broth apart from the aforementioned soup. Other options for broth include cooking rice, grains or pasta in it for a flavor and protein boost, or cooking beans in it, or drinking it as a snack. I especially love having it when I’m sick or rundown.

If you’ve ever tried to buy bone broth or collagen supplements, you’ll know it’s unreasonably expensive. Stock in a carton is less expensive, but still more than free. Making it from what otherwise might have been waste truly feels like alchemy.

2. Leftover Bread Crusts & Heels = Breadcrumbs and Croutons

My children do not like bread crusts, but they eat bread and butter like two famished hobbits returning from a epic quest.

As such, I always have crusts. A lot of crusts. I save them up in a bag in the freezer along with any other unused bread product, and when it starts looking too full, I deal with it.

For a long time, I baked these bits into a French toast casserole/bread pudding. Then, my family grew weary of this chicanery, so I moved to bread crumbs.

I stick a huge sheet pan of crusts in the oven when it was on for some other purpose, toast them until brown, and grind them in a food processor. These I use them for breaded pork chops, chicken cutlets, and in meatballs.

But soon, I had more crumbs than I could go through, so I moved to croutons, and this is my current winning strategy. For croutons, I loosely follow Dawn Perry’s recipe from Ready, Set, Cook. I break the bread into bite size pieces, toss them with a good hit of olive oil, salt, and pepper, then bake them low and slow.

Following the baking, they can sit on the counter or in the pantry for about a month. And they are so good. While there are obvious uses for them—soup and salad toppers—our favorite application of croutons is as a cracker replacement.

That is, they are great carby snacks that are easily carried as on errands, added to lunchboxes, or stuck on a plate with cheese and fruit. The advantage is that they are easier than homemade crackers and cheaper than crackers you buy in the store. (Disadvantage: not shaped like fish and/or bunnies.)

3. The Many Uses of Leftover Tortilla Chips and Salsa

Second only to the amount of bread we consume is the amount of tortilla chips. And while I say “we,” what I want you to know is I mean my husband. The extent to which that man consumes tortilla chips is truly impressive and potentially record breaking.

As I’ve noted before, I also make quarts of salsa to further enable this vocation/dependency. The upshot being we always have chip crumbs in the bottoms of bags and jars of salsa in the fridge and freezer.

There are many great ways to use leftover tortilla chips, and I have a couple of favorites. Top of my list are Doug’s Tex-Mex Meatballs from Simply Julia by Julia Turshen (a variation on Doug’s Famous Tex-Mex Meat Loaf from Small Victories). For a vegetarian variation on this idea, I also love these Black Bean “Nacho” Burgers from Melissa D’Arabian.

Other classic options for chip-and-salsa bits and bobs include the Mexican leftover-tortilla dishes migas (eggs and tortillas) and chilaquiles (sauce and tortillas). There’s a million good recipes for these, so choose your favorite. And note, bigger pieces are better for these uses. I’m partial to the easy Chilaquiles from Bare Minimum Dinners by .

Or use them for toppings for chili and tortilla soup. Tortilla chips can additionally be used as coating for meat and fish if you are feeling experimental or want a gluten free option!

4. Greens/Dairy/Mushy Fruit/Nut Butter = Scrappy Smoothie

Smoothies are one of the simplest, fastest, best ways to make a bunch of random things edible. So long as you don’t go crazy trying to blend your entire compost heap, it generally turns out pretty good, if you stick to a simple formula. (I should note, as a millennial of a certain age, I do have a high-powered blender to make this possible.)

I freeze any mushy (not moldy!) berries, abandoned banana halves, and leftover raw greens. Then, at least once a week, I make a smoothie.

To serve four, I use about 2-3 cups liquid, then add 1-2 cups yogurt or cottage cheese if I have it. I throw in whatever fruit I feel like or need to use, probably 2 or so cups, and a good handful or two of greens. If you have any of that hard chunky stuff at the bottom of your nut butter jar, this is an excellent place for it. You can also toss in seeds, nuts, or oats/oatmeal.

If you don’t like bananas and kale or are really trying to save money, smoothies can be made on the cheaper end if you use things like apples, oranges, romaine, iceberg, and celery. I’ve even been known to use cucumber peels, strawberry tops, and kale/collard stems, too.

A good rule of thumb for a smoothie is that cinnamon and vanilla always help things along, so try that if it’s a bit lackluster. If it’s really hurting, dates and honey or a squeeze of citrus never hurt.

I serve smoothies and pancakes once a week for dinner, which is kind of just a fun version of soup and sandwich if you think about it. It’s easy, inexpensive, and technically contains green things.

6 More Quick Ideas

1. Leftover Meat: Meat is something I have long struggled to repurpose in an appetizing way. (I don’t come from a hash tradition and no one here likes potatoes.) Now, whatever the meat, I bake it into enchiladas. This works with almost every kind of meat and many beans, or even a combination (put different fillings in different tortillas). Recently, I’ve been working through some leftover Christmas beef that I chop small and roll up. For cured and breakfast meats like ham and bacon, I put them into breakfast burritos or egg casseroles instead.

2. Leftover Whey: If you’re doing some dairy making, you might have leftover whey. I like to make it into lemonade or cook it into bread. You can add it to soup, too.

3. Leftover Dairy: If you have dairy that doesn’t work well in a smoothie or if you don’t want to make a smoothie, almost any kind of dairy can be baked into something else. Whether it’s sour cream, ricotta, cottage cheese, or buttermilk, you can find a bread, muffin, biscuit, pancake, or cookie to absorb it and extend its life and purpose a bit.

4. Leftover Vegetables: My favorite application for leftover vegetables is some kind of egg dish, whether a frittata, quiche, or egg bites. But vegetables can also go into enchiladas!

5. Leftover Cheese: Fromage Fort is a great place for leftover cheese, especially if it’s from a cheese plate. And again, quiche/frittata.

6. Leftover Fruit: Other than smoothies, you can add them to baked oatmeal, or cook them down into a quick jam (or chia jam).

7. Leftover Herbs/Carrot Tops/Radish Tops: As a novice gardener, and not a super productive one at that, I try to stretch all my hard-won produce to justify the effort. I use miscellaneous herbs and tops in pesto (usually along with some basil) or in herb dressings (like a Cilantro Vinaigrette) or Chimichurri.

Some Cookbook Recommendations

If you are serious and passionate about reducing waste and using up scraps, there are some really wonderful cookbooks out there. My above examples are really just Scrap Stretching 101. If you are looking to advance your knowledge of the waste-free world, here are some book recommendations:

1. Cooking with Scraps by Lindsay-Jean Hard: an alphabetically organized book of how to deal with all kinds of scraps, from Apple Peels to Zucchini Stems. It’s vegetable- and fruit-forward, but also has ideas for things like bacon and cheese.

2. PlantYou: Scrappy Cooking by Carleigh Bodrug: This is a really thorough approach to all kinds of kitchen scraps, with flexible recipes for breakfast, snacks, entrées, and desserts. One thing to note is that Bodrug is an oil-free vegan, meaning she does not use oil or animal products of any kind in her recipes. So if you’re looking for ways to use up all kinds of plant-based remnants, this is a good book. (Thanks to , who recommended this one to me a year ago!)

3. Now & Again by : I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Turshen is one of the most practical culinary voices out there, and this book is such a testament to that ethos. It’s such a wonderfully unique book in that it’s organized into seasonal menus, but then at the end of each section there’s a page on how to reinvent any and all leftovers. The ideas are creative but never complex, for example, leftover cabbage salad becomes hand pies, leftover scrambled eggs become egg salad, leftover burger buns become summer pudding. It has so many good ideas for leftovers.

4. Bread Toast Crumbs by : First and foremost a bread cookbook, but with a lengthy and creative section on how to use up leftover bread in various forms. If bread is something you always have hanging around and in need of a home, this book is an excellent option. I recently made the below chicken cutlets (in the link they’re adapted from the book, but rest assured they can use plain, dry bread crumbs in place of the Panko) and on the recommendation of and , and they were excellent. More importantly, they were easy, especially if you detest dredging stations (me!).

You Can Also Just Compost Things: A Reminder

Cooking with scraps isn’t hard, but it takes time and thought and planning, and sometimes we are short on one or all of those. I want to affirm that it’s not for everyone all the time. Maybe, say, all the shelves on your fridge door have broken off and now all your condiments also have to live in the main body of an already-too-small fridge, and there is no room for one quart of stock today, let alone—heaven help me—four. (A thinly veiled, hyper specific, very true complaint.)

Or if baking apple peels makes you miserable and strung out, then perhaps the money saved is not worth the grief spent.

And also, sometimes things just mold or rot without you getting around to it. It’s not the indictment on your character that it can feel like.

So sometimes you have to throw out your chicken bones, and that’s fine, too. That’s what Better Than Bouillon is for, friends.

Do you have any go-to waste-saving kitchen moves? I’d love to hear them! (Truly, I need it!)

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Take a time when you have a ton of excess energy/food/budget, store it in your freezer, then use it when you’re depleted of energy/food/budget.

It is such an act of care for your future self, and it can cut back on waste and save money, too.

I’ve been prepping meals for my freezer for over a decade. I’ve prepped for one person, two people, and now four people. I’ve prepped in small freezers and big freezers. I’ve prepped on tight budgets and, well, tighter budgets.

I’ve bought, borrowed, and browsed every freezer or freezer-adjacent cookbook I could find.

So here I’ve tried to distill all my knowledge by compiling some of my favorite freezer books, resources, and recipes and a touch of advice and encouragement.

Freezer meals are often advertised to those expecting children or with many children already. And it’s true, they are absolutely great for those situations. But they can be useful for a million other reasons and seasons including:

1. Cooking for one or two: cook in batches and freeze in individual portions

2. If you routinely come into an onslaught of food for any reason, like a garden, sale, etc.

3. Fill a freezer before you leave for a big trip, which does double duty of using up everything in your fridge and giving yourself the gift of not having to make food when you come home

4. Not a morning person? Freezer breakfast.

5. Hate packing lunches for you or family? Freezer lunch.

6. If you have guests coming and don’t want to spend all your time in the kitchen, including around holidays, do as much freezer component prep as possible.

Prep in a Way That Makes Sense For You

Basically, there are a few main ways to freezer prep:

1. A huge prep day, which works great if you have a chest freezer, an open weekend, and stamina.

2. Dedicated freezer prep time when you have the energy and time, but not a huge chunk of it—maybe an hour or two.

3. Squished into your normal schedule by doubling up on recipes you are already cooking. Something to keep in mind is that this sometimes can add time to prep, depending on the recipe. For things like soup and sauce, doubling up takes no extra effort. For things that have to be individually prepped, like burritos, it will take more input.

Know Your Freezer-Meal Type and Know Thyself

Freezer prep can be less of a pain if you know what you want and need. I would say there are two types of freezer meals:

1. Cooked and ready to go straight from the freezer, with most of the work on the front end.

2. Assembled but requiring cooking after thawing, meaning most of the work is on the back end.

So think about when and where you can do the work, and your less likely to resent the process.

OK, now that we have that covered, here’s what I love and why:

Favorite Freezer Cookbooks

1. From Freezer to Cooker by Polly Connor & Rachel Tiemeyer

Best for: anyone looking for healthy-leaning, big-batch recipes and families

Favorite recipes: Blueberry French Toast Casserole, Adelyn’s Sticky BBQ Drumsticks, Fiesta Lime Chicken Bowls, Hawaiian Chicken, Pesto Chicken Sammies, BBQ Pulled Pork Sandwiches, Mix-and-Match Mexican Shredded Pork, Greek Pulled Pork Pitas, Weeknight Meaty Marinara Sauce, Chicken Parmesan Pasta, Veggie-and-Bean Stuffed Burrito

Description: The premise of this book is prepping freezer meals that can then be cooked in either a slow cooker or Instant Pot, so it’s kind of a double whammy of ease. A lot of the prep is fast and fairly simple. Because it’s slow cooker and Instant Pot focused, it lends itself to a lot of shredded-meat type recipes. The book offers solid ways to use your freezer to get ahead on prep. Most of the meals need work on the back-end, so they’re not ideal for the busiest of times, but they’re good for your average hectic night.

2. Seriously Good Freezer Meals by Karrie Truman

Best for: anyone looking to produce large batches of food with gluten-free options; leans family friendly; good for holiday prep

Favorite recipes: Breakfast Burritos, Perfect Freezer Pancakes, Creamy Cilantro Chicken Taquitos, Pizza Dough

Description: this book has chapters on breakfasts, appetizers, soups, various mains, side dishes, desserts, and sauces, so it’s good for entertaining. It’s not perfect—I’ve had some recipes I probably would not make again, and I’ve had to adjust the pizza dough to work properly. But I use this book incredibly frequently, making enormous batches of pancakes and pizza dough in particular. It also has a cool little feature with each recipe that shows you how to batch everything from 1-5 batches, saving you from having to do all the math. The front, additionally, has detailed prep sessions for 7, 30, or 50 (!) freezer meals in a day. It is fairly comfort-heavy food.

3. You have it Made by

Best for: health-focused freezer food, anyone who has a need for nutrition facts, cooking for one or two

Favorite recipes: I think I’ve just about cooked this whole book with good success, but I especially like the Broccoli Cheddar “Quiche in a Bag,” Beef and Bean Burrito, Chicken Puttanesca Pasta Bake, Turkey Sausage-Stuffed Pizza Pockets, Individual Mac and Cheese Cups, Portobello Pizza Pockets, White Bean Burrito Verde

Description: this book is actually a mix of freezer food and some food that you can prep ahead and refrigerate, so it includes some things like salads. It can be a bit labor intensive, so there is more work on the front end. But the instructions for prepping ahead are detailed, and Ellie Krieger is seasoned cookbook author, so it’s all well-tested and reliable. And in the pantheon of freezer meals, these are about as healthy as you can get.

4. Freeze Fresh by Crystal Schmidt & Eve Kilcher

Best for: anyone who wants to preserve an excess of produce without canning it

Favorite recipes: I’ve made heavy use of the tomatoes, cucumbers, potatoes, and greens chapter

Description: this book is about how to preserve food using your freezer. It is organized by food, and each chapter has instructions on how to preserve it in the freezer, and then recipes in which you can use the frozen food. It’s great if you have a garden or hit a really good sale, leaving you with an excess of a certain food. If you’re deathly afraid of botulism (who, me?) or just don’t have the stuff or desire to can it, you can freeze it instead! This book is great for using your freezer to reduce waste.

Best Cookbooks with Freezer Chapters/Sections

5. The Pioneer Woman Cooks: Dinnertime by Ree Drummond

Best for: big-batch, down-home comfort food, singles and couples who eat a lot of tacos and nachos, families, ranchers probably (?), people who like freezer food flexibility

Favorite recipes: Ready-to-go Freezer Meatballs, Ready-to-go Grilled Chicken, Ready-to-go Chili Packets, Ready-to-go Beef Taco Filling, Ready-to-go Taco Chicken, Baked Ziti

Description: there’s a chapter in this book called Freezer Food that I love so much my book is falling apart. It’s great because there’s a bunch of big-batch recipes and then ideas for how to use them. For example, you make 125 Freezer Meatballs, and they can be transformed into Sweet-and-Sour Meatballs, Swedish Meatballs, or BBQ Meatballs. Or you can make a bunch of taco meat and save it in portions that makae sense for your needs. Then, there’s also enormous casseroles, which you can make in one big pan to feed a crowd, or do like I did before kids and break them up into a bunch of different pans. I used this book to stock my sister’s freezer before her first child came along, and she reported that the chili and chicken breasts kept her alive. The recipes range from easy to more involved on the front end, but if you put in the work, the output is significant and hearty.

6. Make it Easy by

Best for: freezer cooking with dietary restrictions, including gluten free, dairy free, and grain free as well as for low-carb freezer folks

Favorite recipes: Make-Ahead Meatballs, Teriyaki Meatballs, Cheesy Nacho Sauce, Chicken Tinga, Banoffee Bites, Savory Sausage-Chive Breakfast Muffins

Description: this is primarily a meal prepping book that contains 15 weeks of meal plans, including grocery lists. In the back is a section each on pantry meals, breakfasts, and desserts. There are instructions for prepping ahead for the week, as well as freezer instructions for anything that can be frozen, batch recipes, and directions for multiple cooking methods for many of the recipes. It’s a meticulous resource for prepping, and I’ve always had a lot of success with Danielle Walker’s recipes. Her cookbooks are always so thoughtful. If my kids were a little less, ahem, particular, I’d probably use it even more.

Favorite Online Freezer Resources

7. “22 Healthy Freezer Meals (That You’ll Actually Love)” by Pinch of Yum

Best for: veg options, two or more people, anyone who doesn’t like the taste of cooked-then-thawed freezer meals

Favorite recipes: Baked Chicken Meatballs, Beef Stew, Cauliflower Walnut Meat, Chicken Tinga, Creole Chicken and Sausage, Lasagna Florentine, Sheet Pan Chicken Pitas

Description: one notable quality of all these recipes is that they are all assembled and frozen without any cooking at all. The cooking is done entirely on the back-end. Some are baked, but for the rest there are both slow cooker and Instant Pot instructions. Because there is no cooking, the front-end investment is very quick and easy. On the other hand, it means you cannot freeze in individual portions, making it less ideal for smaller households. That being said, I’m a huge fan of Pinch of Yum and a bunch of these recipes are in my regular rotation.

8. The Eat Goood Newsletter by

Best for: one or two people who want to prep breakfast and lunch, weekend meal prep warriors, people with dietary restrictions, the protein-focused, those who need to eat more vegetables, anyone on a budget

Favorite recipes: Broccoli, Cheddar, and Chicken Breakfast Biscuits; Cheesy Pork, Pepper, and Onion Breakfast Biscuits; Weeknight Honey-Garlic Turkey Skillet; B;ack Bean & Cheddar Breakfast Burritos; Sheet Pan Chicken Sausage and Veggies with Cashew Sauce

Description: I discussed this in my year-end roundup as something I was excited about, and so far I’ve loved my subscription to this newsletter. At the beginning of each month, Jenn Lueke sends out a meal prep plan for all breakfasts and lunches for the entire month. It’s not all freezer food, but it includes freezer options so you’re both prepping for the month and adding some backup food to your freezer. The recipes pack in a lot of nutrition, and the prep is not too onerous. The prep plans themselves are designed for one person, and Jenn offers a ton of swaps, making them really easy to either customize or work on a tight budget. And they taste good, to boot!

Favorite One-Off Freezer Recipes

9. Crispy Bean Burritos by (paywall, though)

These bean burritos were the single best thing I put in my freezer before my second kid was born. In the haze and starvation of those newborn days, these were a true comfort. Highly recommend.

10. Turkey Ricotta Meatballs from Small Victories by

If you haven’t heard of these, I am so grateful I can introduce them to you. But let’s be honest, you’ve almost certainly heard of them. Freeze these easy meatballs in their sauce and then thank yourself later because they are excellent.

11. Chocolate Peanut Butter Oatmeal Muffins by Molly Yeh

Most muffins are very good muffins for your freezer. But these are an especially good option.

Freezer Recs I’ve Already Mentioned

I’ve written about a bunch of my favorite freezer resources before, and I didn’t want to be too redundant. For more on my freezer faves, you can read about how I use Ready, Set, Cook by Dawn Perry and Meal Prep Magic by Catherine McCord, the burritos I make from Fix, Freeze, Feast by Kati Neville and Lindsay Tkacsik, and 1 Hour Freezer Prep by Thriving Home.

If you have any freezer recipes, books, or resources you love, please, please, please leave them below. I live for this sort of thing.

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A cookie is an everyday dessert, not just a company or holiday dessert. It’s as good on a Monday as it is cut and decorated for a holiday. It’s as appropriate at 2 pm as it is at 6 pm (and 9 am, if its a weekend/play date/solo parenting day/you just read the news). Cookies dip and dunk, snack and dessert, pack and ship. They are tops.

It is because I am so emphatically team cookie, I was thrilled to receive Cookies by Vaughn Vreeland this past fall thanks to Clarkson Potter.

Cookies is a compilation of cookie recipes from the work of The New York Times Cooking.

If you don’t know it, the Cooking platform is its whole own thing, not just a section in the newspaper. It’s a discrete and prolific media venture and app. To the endless gripes of readers like me, Cooking requires a whole separate subscription from the basic trim level of The New York Times. With that, you get only measly original news reporting from across the country and around the world by skilled and trained journalists.

For cookies, you must pay extra.

And pay I do. But for some reason, I have not baked many a cookie from the app. I had always been meaning to, though, so I was ready to dive in when the book came.

Off the bat, I have to acknowledge that this book is tricky to talk about. The reason being that it is a collection of 100 recipes from the deep bench of the New York Times recipe team. The recipes, then, are written by different authors.

Writing a review of a compilation book is not a fair exercise. When the recipes are written by a team of 32 (at my count) contributors, it’s impossible to apply the results of one recipe to all the rest of them.

If you’re a scholar writing a review of a collection of articles, it’s best practice to read each of them so you can speak to the whole. When you have a book of cookies, it might be best practice to bake one from each contributor so you can speak to the whole. And if I could make the time and find a venture capitalist to fund the butter needs, believe me, I would.

But I can’t and I don’t. So my qualification before jumping in is that the results of a Melissa Clark recipe don’t tell us anything about an Eric Kim recipe and vice versa.

Instead, I have to settle for speaking broadly about the whole with a few choice examples and maybe to the editorial rigor of The New York Times. The introduction claims all recipes are “foolproof” and promises uniform reliability. So a pick-and-choose approach can at least tell us something about the NYT Cooking system as a whole.

App vs. Cookie Book vs. Essential New York Times Cookbook

As I consider the usefulness of this book, I think it’s helpful to put it alongside the other cookie-containing New York Times products.

All of the cookies in Cookies can be found on the Cooking app. None of them are exclusive to the book, nor do they claim to be. As you can see below, it’s possible to link all of them to their online source. So if you are someone who makes good use of the app, the book might be redundant to you. Similarly, if you are seeker of novelty, the app has over 300 cookie recipes to the book’s 100, including the most up-to-date recipes. If that’s you, you might find this collection too limited.

If you are looking for the best of the best of all time, that is what The Essential New York Times Cookbook by (2010 & 2021) is for. That book contains an astounding 1,200 recipes, including about 45 cookie recipes. Those recipes are pulled from the huge archive of The New York Time and date back as far as the nineteenth century. Notably, it does not have any of the gloss and visual appeal of Cookies, existing more as an encyclopedia of cooking.

Cookies overlaps only a bit. It contains a few of the more recent greatest hits, including the Supernatural Brownies by Julia Moskin and the famous New York Times Chocolate Chip Cookie by Jacques Torres and .

Cookies, then, is neither a comprehensive collection nor a complete best of. It’s something in between. Perhaps it’s best thought of as a product of the modern NYT Cooking, which reached its present-day form around 2017, while the Essential is more a product of the old Food section. As such, it has lavish food photography and a lot of panache.

Cookies is a curated selection of recipes that are varied and also on-trend as of 2024. It’s less overwhelming than the app or the Essential. It sifts through and pulls out choice recipes. It has something for everyone and covers all bases. It brings together the more contemporary recipes that have thousands of five-star reviews online.

As someone who prefers books and finds apps overwhelming, this particular approach appeals to me, though I’m aware it does not apply to everyone.

That being said, the way the book is put together, it’s not quite timeless and not quite up-to-date—for example, none of the recipe’s from 2024’s Cookie Week are in it. It’s more representative of what people want and like in cookies in a very particular moment.

The Book

The physical book is cute. It’s compact. It stays open when lying flat. It has a nice font. I love the styling of the cover and the spine.

The stylistic finesse that comes with the backing of a media behemoth continues inside. This book has some really awesome features for selecting recipes. First, it has a traditional table of contents.

The book is divided into eight chapters, including an entire chapter on various chocolate chip cookies, and an entire chapter on holiday cookies. There’s one chapter with nostalgic cookies—peanut butter blossoms, snickerdoodles, brownies, lemon bars, etc.—and one on project cookies. The rest of the chapters are flavor driven: chocolate, fruity, and nuts.

Then, there are then two other thoughtfully added tables and visuals for choosing the cookies. The first is a “Need Help Deciding?” table with options like “Dough to Done in 30 Minutes,” “Especially Fun with Kids,” “My Go-To Freezer Doughs,” “Wow, I Made This?” and “One Bowl.”

Even more fun is an excellent visual “Table of Cookies” with a picture of each and every cookie laid out side by side. For anyone who is a visual person (I am, admittedly, very much not) this is a great way to pick your treat, and its good for having any pre-readers help you choose a recipe, too.

The main character of the book is Vaughn Vreeland, a voice familiar to anyone who subscribes to New York Times cookie week. He is, presumably, the brains behind the operation. Vaughn is the compiler and MC of cookies here, introducing every section.

The Recipes

Up first I baked the Iced Oatmeal Cookies by Jerrelle Guy. As promised, they were quick and easy and looked great. When my husband heard I made oatmeal cookies, being of the chocolate chip cookie persuasion, he was indifferent. Then he saw and ate them, and was converted. Such is the power of icing. I liked these a lot. They were one of my favorites from the book.

Next up were the Snickerdoodles by Samantha Senevirante. They came together lightning fast and taste as snickerdoodles generally do: fine.2

Sometimes, however, rolling balls of cookie dough is a bit too much for the coddled (me). At those times one needs a bar cookie, and I opted for the Chewy Pumpkin Chocolate Chip Bars by Jesse Szewczyk. These were incredibly simple to put together, but I found them too sweet, even though my sweet tooth is no shrinking violet. No one else in my family seemed crazy about them either. So I gave them to the team working on our bathroom renovation. The contractors subsequently disappeared before finishing the job. Coincidence? You decide. I’ve decided these aren’t repeats for me.

Ahead of a visit from a guest who did not eat gluten, I made the Gluten-Free Chocolate Chip Cookies by Erin Jeanne McDowell. They are an almond-flour based cookie that are easy and don’t require any specialty ingredients. As a devoted member of the almond flour fan club, I loved these. They disappeared pretty fast so I would wager everyone else agreed. Even though no one who regularly lives here eschews gluten, I intend to make them again (and again and again…).

I also used this book to dive headlong into Christmas cookie season. I made the Hindbaersnitter (Danish Raspberry Slices) by Alexa Weibel for a holiday potluck at my husband’s work. These were like a giant bar version of an Empire Cookie (my favorite cookie) or a big Pop Tart. They were somewhat finicky and a tiny bit of a project. They involved baking two rolled out sheet of dough, and then sandwiching them around jam, frosting, and slicing. The dough cracked more than I would like, and the sandwiching operation was a bit harrowing. But I enjoyed the result. More of a special occasion cookie, for sure.

I then made the Gingerbread Latte Cookies by Vaughn Vreeland. I don’t know if my espresso powder wasn’t the best, but I didn’t love these so much. The taste of powdered coffee overwhelmed, and did not seem to work in tandem with the gingerbread spices. And many of them spread a lot. I think this one was very popular a few years back, so maybe it’s just me.

Continuing on my gingerbread kick, I made the Gingerbread Blondies by Melissa Clark. They were very simple, but much like the pumpkin bars, were too cloying for me. The fudgy blondie texture, combined with the heavy gingerbread spices felt altogether too much. Not my favorite.3

Continuing through the sugar marathon of the holidays, I made some gift boxes for my neighbors that I conceptualized as a color theme. So I chose to make Sohla El-Waylly’s Fruity Meltaways alongside the Fruits of the Forest Liqueur and Pâtes de Fruit from America’s Test Kitchen. The recipe calls for any freeze-dried fruit—great for the parents of small kids—and I used all strawberries. These were easy to work with, nice to look at, and pleasant enough to eat, though a bit underwhelming. Maybe a more complex mix of fruit would punch them up.

Christmas, of course, comes to an end, but cookies are eternal. So, to bribe my kid into cooperating for back to school after Christmas break, I promised a celebration cookie.

I made good on my promise with the Rainbow Rave Cookies, also by Sohla El-Waylly. These cookies are an explosion of sprinkles and colorful chocolate candies, so just what the doctor ordered when you have to return to the real world. Unfortunately, I did not watch them closely enough in the oven, so they spread really big and baked up too brown and rock hard. A night in an airtight container softened them nicely, and afterwards they were maybe a little too easy to eat. Our stock depleted quickly. I think, however, the listed cook time is a bit long, and these need a careful eye.

Final Thoughts

Overall these recipes were successful and reliable, if in need of a bit of tweaking. Some were not to my taste, others were excellent.

If you cook regularly from The New York Times Cooking app, you very likely do not need this book. If you want the best of all New York Times recipes ever, this is not the place either.

If, however, you like things filtered down and made analog, then this book is for you. If you’re new to cookie baking or the NYT Cooking world, this is a nice, varied collection, with an encouraging guide in Vaughn Vreeland. It’s thoughtfully composed, thoroughly tested, and fun to use. It also is a nice representation of the work of some of the most talented and popular recipe writers.

It has definitely earned a place on my shelf, even if I did not find all the recipes to be keepers for my family. There is much more in here that I am excited to try, and I bet I’ll personally use it more than the app. It makes me think I should cancel my app subscription.

Just kidding. My millennial craving for novelty and desperate food FOMO will absolutely not allow me to. Marketing wins again.

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So believe me when I say, I don’t take it lightly when I have to say goodbye to another year, even a really tough one. Still, in this moment, I am ready to put 2025 behind me, hoping someday, when I revisit with nostalgia, its sharper edges will be smoothed. I dream, in the longview, it appears momentous for all the right reasons and none of the wrong ones.

If I take it at its domestic total, I can say that 2025, for me, was a period when I had to reassess my kitchen and general home routines. I added outside work back to my responsibilities, and everything had to shift around to accommodate that. We had scrambled egg night once a week for dinner. More of my breakfasts were a frantic bowl of cereal. I bought more marinara sauce and yogurt than I made. I cultivated a tight rotation of easy and pleasing meals. My threshold for novelty decreased substantially. I used my bread machine constantly.

My cooking, in sum, faced the average challenges of anyone feeding a family and maintaining the sundry responsibilities of life. So without any more preamble, here are the recipes and books that kept us all fed and—dare I say—even happy on occasion.1 They are in no particular order and based only on the shoddy tool of memory, but they are the fullest account I can muster. (Excepting our staples, which I’ve detailed extensively before, and still largely rely on.)

As a note, nothing below is an affiliate link if you feel like clicking on it.

New Books I Use Often & Like: Every Day with Babs by Barbara Costello, Spend with Pennies Everyday Comfort by Holly Nillson, and Salsa Daddy by Rick Martínez

By far the new purchase I’ve used the most for family cooking is Every Day with Babs. The table of contents felt personally curated to appeal to me, including sheet pan meals, one-pot meals, batch cooking, thrifty cooking, and slow cooker recipes. Of course, this fact means I’m perfectly basic in my interests and needs, but I’m not mad about it.

Everything was as easy and good as promised. The Maple-Lime Salmon Bowls with Coconut Rice required only one sheet pan to cook everything including the rice and it was very delicious. Another sheet pan meal, Samuel’s Chicken Shawarma with Roasted Cauliflower, was similarly excellent and easy.

I batched up Grammie’s Chicken Cutlets and stored them in the freezer. The cooking method required a bit of tweaking—I used parchment paper and flipped them partway through cooking—but otherwise they were a really good breaded chicken that cooked quickly and were handy to have prepped. The Salsa Verde Fish Tostadas involved simply cooking white fish in jarred (or homemade) salsa verde and piling them on tostadas, and my kids both ate them with minimal complaint, as did I.

The slow cooker Broccoli-Cheddar Soup was rich, but it was very easy to throw together and quite good. Similarly, the Dad’s Away Sausage, Egg & Cheese Skillet was fun, with eggs and tater tots cooked together. When my kid found an errant bell pepper that migrated to the wrong side of the casserole, the jig was up, but prior to that, everyone seemed happy with it.

I didn’t use Spend with Pennies as broadly, but I perhaps used it more frequently. I made the Easiest Ever Tomato Soup at least monthly, if not weekly. Essentially doctored up marinara sauce, it lived up to its name, requiring only about five pantry staples to make. The Six-Ingredient, One Pot Tortellini Alfredo was also on standby, and required only cooking tortellini in some cream and broth. My generally mac-and-cheese-hating child accepted this one. I am in the thrall of the entire chapters in this book devoted each to ground beef and chicken breasts, which I always have on hand in abundance. I’m sure there’s more in this book to mine, and I plan to do so.

In the category of unexpected surprise and/or book I would not have picked out for myself is Salsa Daddy by Rick Martínez (thanks to Clarkson Potter for sending it). I mean no offense to the book, I just probably would have assumed a book devoted to a single condiment would be beyond my current cooking time and energy. But, as I wrote in my full review, this book is beautiful, creative and—most importantly for me—practical. I’m happy to have it.

Most Used Survivors: Pizza Night by Alexandra Stafford, What To Cook When You Don’t Feel Like Cooking by Caroline Chambers, Bare Minimum Dinners by Jenna Helwig, and My Mexican Kitchen by Eva Longoria

I’ve written pretty extensively about all these books in my last New Year post, and individual reviews (Pizza Night, What to Cook, My Mexican Kitchen) and various roundups. So here’s a note just to say I’m still using them.

New into the rotation from What to Cook are the Sheet-Pan Sliders, Caroline’s take on the King’s Hawaiian roll pull-apart sandwich idea, which I make regularly because my kids will eat them, they are simple, and my husband loves hamburgers. I leave all cheese and toppings off of one half, per child dictum, and they are a great size for small hands to grab and dip in huge puddles of ketchup. Additionally, I’ve made the Bo Ssam, a big hunk of pork cooked slow, multiple times for guests. (Great for crowds with dairy free/ gluten free/low carb folks!)

It might not actually be fair to say I often cook from My Mexican Kitchen. Instead, I make Fideo Soup from memory, measuring nothing, tasting as I go, swapping as I need, blissfully sleepwalking to dinner. Still, this is the source book so it only seems fair to cite it. (I do use other recipes occasionally, too!)

I’m always making the dough recipes from Pizza Night, and I even finally tried a non-pepperoni topping. It was great! Check off that resolution from last year.

Bare Minimum Dinners continues to save my life all the time. Most recently with some Tortellini en Brodo, but most frequently because I use the fish stick taco formula, which ingeniously recommends sour cream, hot sauce, and sauerkraut as toppers.

The Book I Baked from the Most: Snackable Bakes by Jessie Sheehan

I added a lot of good baking books to my roster this year, including Sweet Farm by Molly Yeh, Sally’s Baking 101 by Sally McKenney, Sweet Tooth by Sarah Fennel, and Cookies by Vaughn Vreeland (review TBD?). But by far the one I baked from the most was Snackable Bakes by . After taking it out of the library and maxing out my renewals each time, I caved and bought it.

I made the Peppermint Stick No-Churn Ice Cream Sundaes for Christmas dessert, complete with Dad’s Hot Fudge Sauce and Extremely Special Whipped Cream. They were absolutely perfect and just as simple as promised. As proof, I made them with an active fever and two kids Christmas-addled kids, and it was no issue.

To my continued appreciation, Jessie employs semi-sweet chocolate chips throughout the book, which I buy cheaply and in bulk, and are used to great effect in her Chewy, Fudgy Brownies. My four-year-old and I whipped up the Brown Sugar Snacking Cake with Salted Penuche Frosting on a whim using the barest of essential pantry ingredients, and it was an excellent counter cake that was practically alchemy.

Similarly, I stirred together the Secret Ingredient Crispy Rice Cereal Treats and Sparkle Plenty Peanut Butter Marshmallow Fudge in spare moments to great effect. I actually don’t generally like Rice Krispie treats, but I did enjoy Jessie’s sweetened condensed milk version more than others.

I am all about quick and easy these days, and I am grateful that this book helps me bake delicious treats, even with very limited time.

Miscellaneous Standout Recipes of the Year that Went Into the Rotation

Here are some gems that stand out in my memory.

It is still my intention to write a review of Everything’s Good by Toni Chapman, but for now let me say the Pizza Supreme Dip was excellent as were the Garlic Parmesan Chicken Thighs and Potatoes.

The degree to which my family devoured this super simple dish, Sheet Pan Chipotle Chicken Thighs With Broccoli, from the Real Food Dietitians made it an instant keeper.

My husband, who does not find preparing recipes particularly enjoyable or easy, added this Instant Pot Spaghetti from Pinch of Yum to his rotation with great success as he took over some more dinnertime duties this year.

These Crunchy Baked Pork Chops (paywall) from America’s Test Kitchen admittedly require a bit of input, but they can be made ahead. My meat-suspicious children love these, and their pork-chop-ambivalent mom finds them pretty good, too. They’re a good use for anyone with a proliferation of bread crumbs from cutting off untold numbers of PB&J crusts.

In exchange for a cute mug, I’ve been testing out recipes for Delish and providing feedback. One of the best I’ve made is the Slow-Cooker Creamy Lemon Herb Chicken (paywall) by who, to my eternal sadness, rarely posts on Substack anymore. But you can still find her at Delish! One of my kids called it the best chicken ever. Admittedly, it’s not a rare use of the superlative, but it’s still a positive reaction.

The Chicken Pesto Meatballs (gift link) by Dan Pelosi at the New York Times were a quick summer staple, though they required about 15-20 minutes of baking time in my experience rather than the written 10. Word to the wise: they are not as good with turkey subbed in for the chicken in my opinion.

The Salted Chocolate Chunk Whole Wheat Snack Cake from Sweet Farm by Molly Yeh is definitely the best sweet I’ve made this year, and it was extremely easy to boot.

Resource I’m Most Excited for Looking Forward

Recently, the meal prep plan by was brought to my attention via the What to Cook newsletter. And while I’m pretty good at planning dinner, my lunch and breakfast game has been weak in the past few months, leaving me eating more cheese strings and crackers for meals than I care to admit.

I used to rely on leftovers for lunch, but with two small folk growing ever bigger and the need to pack lunches, the leftovers are a diminishing resource. Then there’s my New Year’s resolution to eat more vegetables (always and forever). So this plan, which lays out breakfasts and lunches for a week with a simple, outlined prep session seems to fit my needs perfectly right now. I have yet to try it, but fingers crossed!

A Fun Recipe I Will Never Make Again

Another Delish test recipe: How cute are these little Pizza-Stuffed Pumpkins?! They are the cutest. But I am not doing the work to make them ever again if I’m honest. Cute and finicky is not my cooking personality.

Favorite $1 Find

I found an original copy of Entertaining by Martha Stewart at my library charity book store for $1 in April. I knew it was about to have a re-release because the originals were in high demand, so I was thrilled to find it hanging out on the shelf.

I don’t see myself giving fancy parties for 50 any time soon, but stranger things have happened, so I won’t rule it out.

Favorite New Kitchen Tip

For the first time in my life, I am subscribed to Cook’s Illustrated, and thus I properly feel like a grown up. In one issue, I read that if you wash your berries in one part white vinegar and three parts water, dry them well, and store them with a paper towel (I use a cloth napkin) they will not mold. And it works so well. I have had blueberries stay pert and tasty for three weeks, and even when fruit goes off, it just goes a bit shrivelly, so it can still be made into smoothies, baked goods, or jam. I’ve only seen a moldy berry once or twice with this method. A miracle!

So Happy New Year! May your berries stay fresh and may your hope stay alive.

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It is probably because I’m so stubbornly set in my ways that Stella Drivas’s blog, Hungry Happens, which launched in 2013, never made it onto my radar . My radar, however, seems to be the odd one out, because Drivas has about 5.2 million Instagram followers.

So my first introduction to Stella was when I received a copy of her new book, Hungry Happens Mediterranean, free from Clarkson Potter (thanks!) in exchange for a review at an online retailer. As such, I promptly got to work figuring out her internet and book presence. After all, I take my unpaid and meagerly compensated job as a retail-website reviewer seriously.

If you, like me, are not familiar with Stella, I think the most important thing to know about this book is that it has a split personality. In part, it’s a low-carb book and a clear out-growth of the Paleo blog from which it sprang. On the other hand, it’s a Mediterranean book, with an inflection on Greek food, reflecting Stella’s heritage and—I’m inferring here—the marketability of a Mediterranean diet.

But never the twain shall meet.

Which is to say, the Mediterranean bits aren’t generally low-carb, and the low-carb bits aren’t generally Mediterranean.

Stella, in the introduction, admits to cycling through every trendy diet out there, and I think that confusion really permeates the pages. As someone who has had to follow a low-carb diet for medical reasons in the past, I am fully aware picking up this book would have proved frustrating as it shape shifts through the chapters. And I don’t think I would be the only one.

If you are interested in eating a Mediterranean diet, then some of the recipes will appeal to you, but not all.1 Same for anyone in the market for low-carb, or some variation thereof—grain-free, Whole30, Paleo—you’ll find some options here, but others will not be suitable.

So what is the diet this book covers? The answer, I think, is that this book is for anyone aiming to eat under some vague, imprecise, always-changing banner of “wellness” or “healthy” as defined by the almighty algorithm in the last few years. If you pay attention, the book uses “healthy” all over the place to market itself, without explaining what that means, And that word means so many things in this day and age of media silos that it is almost meaningless.

Is that harsh? It might be, but I also think it’s the only way to grasp the slippery concept of the book if you have never encountered Stella outside of it. And it doesn’t mean it’s bad. I actually found it highly approachable and quite cookable. I’ve already made 12 recipes from it! It just makes it harder to pinpoint who it might be for and how it might be used.

The Book

The book is divided into eight chapters: Mornings, Sunset Mezzo, Hungry in a Hurry, Go Greek, Mediterranean Meals, Carb Light, On the Side, and Sweet Spot. They’re all fairly self-explanatory, if discordant.

“Mornings” has basic Americana breakfasts for a book billed as Mediterranean, like Chocolate Chip and Banana Breakfast Cookies, grain-free pancakes, a cocoa dutch baby, and pumpkin muffins. “Sunset Mezze” has Greek shrimp fritters beside carb-free Cheeseburger Bites.

“Hungry in a Hurry” is largely fast, Mediterranean-inspired dinners. “Go Greek” leans into slow cooking with classic Greek dishes. Italy dominates “Mediterranean Meals,” so think pasta. “Carb-Light” is Mediterranean-ish, I suppose, in that there are two grain-free pizzas (a meat-crusted and veggie-crusted version), but also a more eclectic gathering of tostadas, tacos, nuggets, and non-Med salads, like Cobb.

“Sweet Spot” has an Orange Phyllo Cake next to a very online, grain free Peanut Butter-Banana Chocolate Chip Bar.

As I said, it’s somewhat jumbled.

The Recipes

If you can look past the incoherence of the book and aren’t really looking to follow a specific diet, I think the recipes are quite good. (I’m sure having the experience of Lukas Volger on board couldn’t have hurt!)

Also, I should confess I would eat ye olde proverbial shoe if it were mixed with olives, so Stella’s heavy hand with those salty little delights made me partial to a lot of the dishes. Incidentally, the same variable made my kids less-than partial.

I made several of the breakfast recipes. The Banana-Oat Bread was a lightly sweetened batter of oats, eggs, bananas, and cinnamon, dumped in the blender, and liquefied together. It came together easily and was tastier than I expected. I think this is a great little healthy, easy breakfast option.

Elina’s Pumpkin-Chocolate Chip Muffins were very good. Stella recommended topping them with tahini, and that was a delicious suggestion. These muffins can be made gluten-free and use olive oil and maple syrup. A wholesome, tasty muffin is a category of which I never tire!

Then, I took a shot at Baba’s Grain-Free Pancakes with Easy Fruit Compote. As someone who has lived through intense pancake cravings at the same time as having gestational diabetes, I am—not to brag—somewhat of an expert in the low-carb pancake arena. And while I’m not currently gestating a human under draconian carb limitations, I didn’t enjoy these. I thought they were bland and too eggy, oddly omitting salt. My kids didn’t fare much better.2

Moving on to dinner, I really put this book to work.

I made the Easy Lemon-Garlic-Parmesan Chicken, which involved marinating chicken thighs in mix of lemon juice, olive oil, garlic, parmesan, and spices. It came together fast, could be made ahead, and was very flavorful. I liked these a lot.

I paired them with the Leek & Zucchini Scarpaccia, a savory vegetable tart with cornmeal, flour, olives, and vegetables. Unfortunately, this recipe was less successful. The flavor was fine, but the texture was off. Stella says in the headnote it should have a “crusty exterior” but mine was nowhere near crisp. Actually, it was soggy. I think the problem is sautéing the zucchini for only 6-8 minutes as directed. It definitely needed more.

The Crunchy Baked Beef Souvlaki Tacos were excellent. Nominally a fusion, they were only tenuously Mediterranean with some olives, souvlaki-leaning spices, and a side of tzatziki. But still, they were great and I would (and will) make them again.

The Coastal Baked Cod, cooked in a briny bed of olives, capers, and cherry tomatoes, was very good, as well, and came together fast.

The Loaf Pan Chicken Gyros, tasted good, but I’m unsure of the purpose of cooking them in a loaf. It made prep and cooking fairly easy, I suppose, but it did not make slicing them any different. They just fell apart once out of the loaf pan. Still, the taste was solid, and the prep can be done ahead.

I paired the gyros with the Yogurt Flatbreads from the book. These are fairly standard as far as yogurt flatbreads go, but they tasted great and kept well, and I enjoyed them for a few days.

The Broccoli-Feta Pasta Bake was Stella’s take on the viral feta pasta, swapping in broccoli and olives for the usual tomatoes. I loved this version, and if I had easier access to feta, it would definitely be a regular in my house! For my kids, the components were simple to separate, with the broccoli and olives on the side of cheesy pasta, making the whole thing an easier sell.

Dipping into the carb-free side of things, I chose to make the Low-Carb Chicken Nuggets. Call these nuggets all you want, but they were just baked, cheesy meatballs. Anyone foregoing carbs with a nugget craving would not be super satisfied by this version. And any kid with a strong love for a nugget (or “nubbit” as they’re adorably known around here) will not be fooled. Even if I classed this as a meatball, however, my conclusion would be a resounding “fine”.

Another side dish I tried was the Smashed Broccoli Chips. I found the cooking time a bit off on this one. The broccoli didn’t cook enough by the time the parmesan was about to burn. On top of that, it called for sprinkling garlic and onion powder over everything which only made for acrid and burnt tasting garlic and onion powder on he finished product. I thought maybe my one kid who is a devotee of parmesan might be convinced to eat broccoli, when in reality both my kids just peeled off the cheese. So they won that round. Another strike against it was the blanching before baking. Truth be told, it’s a lot of work for a side.

Finally, I made the Flexible Peanut Butter-Banana Chocolate Chip Bars. This is kind of your basic, healthified, de-sugared, bar concoction. As an addition to the genre, it was about on par. If you want a solid recipe that fits those parameters, this is a decent version, with lots of variations to play around with.

Final Thoughts

The book has full nutrition facts at the back, if that’s important to you.

You might like this book if you already know Stella Drivas and want her greatest hits compiled in a book. Or, if you love trendy recipes, but hate cooking off the internet. Maybe you just kind of vaguely want to eat healthier. If so, this could be a fun book for you!

Overall it is a reliable book for broadly health-focused recipes, and I really appreciated how quick and easy a lot them were. The flavors were great, we enjoyed most of them, and there were a few keepers. The recipes are, on the whole, written precisely and accurately, and many of the ingredients are easy to source.

If, however, you are looking for a strictly low-carb or more traditionally Mediterranean and/or Greek book, you may want to look elsewhere.

Another important note, something that I know is a dealbreaker for many (but not me!) is that a lot of these recipes are republished from Stella’s blog. At my count, that number sits at about one quarter, maybe more, so if you have a fleeting interest, you can probably get a sense of how much you’ll like the book from checking out the website.

On an existential level, maybe it’s unfair to expect one complex and varied human being to fit into a single genre of cooking. Maybe this book is an authentic representation of self in all its glory and messiness, and I’m being a scold for no good reason. On a cynical level, maybe this book is just trying to maximize views and purchases by being “healthy” in as many ways as possible and sticking Mediterranean on the front.

Or, maybe the incoherence is a reflection of how everyone is in their own online echo chambers, and the healthy food of the moment depends on who you follow and where you click. It doesn’t always make a lot of sense and it changes rapidly; it caters to our monkey minds. But I do fear that in a year or so, it will start to feel like an outdated feed you can’t refresh.

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My cooking style, accordingly, has had to adjust. This kitchen crunch is not my first. But I wouldn’t say the dinner life I’m living is particularly exciting. We are working first from a place of pragmatism. Noodles abound. Breakfast for dinner cycles through at least once, maybe twice a week. I thank the powers that be for finally making my kids like chicken nuggets.

At the same time, I have fallen into a rhythm for lunchbox staples. As long as I have these few things on hand, I can scrounge up a lunch and snacks during the week with fairly minimal effort.

Here are the recipes I am leaning on these days for packed lunches.

1. The Easiest Bread Possible

The other day when I was complaining to my mom about being tired she gently suggested I let some things go, like making bread from scratch. That’s a fair and level-headed piece of advice, but I have not heeded it. It’s not like I make all my bread and bread-adjacent products from scratch. I keep store-bought loaves in the freezer. I try to keep a prepper-level supply of various crackers on hand. I stock flour tortillas.

But I still make bread because it’s easy and cheap and a solid component of frequent PB&Js—well, sunbutter and jams—I churn out for the lunchbox. And I buy flour in 25 lb bags.

Still, I’m not one of those skilled bread people—you know the ones. The hobbyists who attend lovingly to sourdough, and talk of hydration, and know what’s going on with a dough by feel. They use words like poolish. This type of baking is very intuitive, which is to say, not my wheelhouse. Right now, I need to put as little mental energy into my food production as possible.

Keeping these constraints in mind, I’ve been dabbling in super easy ways to make bread so I can still get what I want and not once think about humidity or what have you. (Yes, I do have a sourdough starter languishing in my fridge. RIP probably.)

My first method is my bread machine. I still love my bread machine. I use it one to two times per week. Ever since getting The Bread Machine Book by in July, I’ve been using it regularly. I have yet to venture much beyond the first chapter, “Everyday Classics,” but I’ve made his Half-Wheat Sandwich Loaf, Soft White Sandwich Loaf, and Simple Tender Yogurt Loaf (with my homemade yogurt) several times.

My second method is the DIY mix genre, something I mildly obsessive about currently. This method comes to us circa the 1970s, when people decided to start making store-bought mixes at home—think cake mix, brownie mix, hot roll mix, pancake mix, and Bisquick. You make big, bulk amounts of dry mix, so you can all be done cooking and eating dinner before you watch the Brady Bunch. (I don’t know, that’s the only ‘70s thing I can think of besides Nixon, right now.)

To make bread baking easier, I tried the DIY Hot Roll Mix from Make-a-Mix Cookery (1978). This recipe is dupe for a boxed Pillsbury mix that works for bread, rolls, cinnamon rolls, pizza dough, and other sweet yeasty things. It’s basically a mix of flour, sugar, salt, and sugar. A pre-mix of your dry ingredients. I made two loaves of bread from this mix, and they were good!

My third method is a combination of these two shortcuts to absolutely maximize ease. It is a DIY breadmaker mix. A premade mix you pour in your bread machine with water and yeast. It is from the revised, updated, 2006 Make-a-Mix (sure, I own multiple versions). Again, it’s just flour, salt, sugar, milk powder (cheap!). It was successful, and easy, and good and maybe the least effort you can put into producing homemade bread.

2. Smooth, Long-Lasting Chia Jam

So now you have the bread, but what about the jam? Or, alternatively, why even make jam?! Well, I was in the habit of buying those fancy, reduced-sugar jams for my kids’ lunches, but if you read the fine print, they only last for 30 days when opened, and I had a few mold on me.

As a millennial and product of the aughts food-blog scene, I am well-aware of chia seed jam as a homemade alternative. But the chance of getting that texture past my kids was minimal. And chia jam doesn’t last super long.

So I tried out a recipe for strawberry chia jam from More Veggies Please! by Nikki Dinki (about which I’ve written before) for chia jam, but made with 1/4 cup sugar instead of, like, a tablespoon of maple syrup. This jam lasts a month in the fridge, just like store-bought, and freezes well, so I make a double batch. I use frozen fruit, or any berries going sideways in my fridge, and that reduces the cost even more.

All that being said, there’s still the chewy chia issue. I get around that by simply blending up the jam. It gets rid of the texture problem and still gels up. I keep this jam on hand all the time now for lunches.

(I know it looks like a PB&J theme, but I do not make my own nut or seed butter…yet.)

3. Actually Simple Granola Bars

I think granola bars are a deceptively difficult thing to make. They seem like they should be easy, but then all recipes somehow feel either hard or mostly like candy or they have dried fruit, which my kids hate. I am always coming across recipes and then never making them.

That all changed when I found this recipe. It is my ideal granola bar recipe: Peanut Butter Granola Bars from Real Food Dietitians.

The bars are a simple, one-bowl, five-ingredient recipe, with oats, honey, eggs, chocolate chips, and nut/seed butter. I mix everything together at once, even the chocolate chips, even though the recipe advises to scatter them on top. That makes it even easier and also serves as a deterrent to small folk who prefer to simply excavate the chips and leave the ransacked oats. I’ve also used all iterations of nut and seed butter, sweetened and not, with similar success.

The bars are a bit crumbly, but not in a way that makes it a dealbreaker, especially if you cut them small.

I make these bars once a week, and they stave off empty tummy tantrums from the old and young alike for days on end.

4. Muffins, Full Stop.

Muffins are the best. If you stash muffins in the freezer, you have potential breakfast and lunch components for your most harried moments, and they’re not hard to make.

For lunchbox purposes, I do like to seek out some healthier options so I don’t feel like my kids are having a lunch of full-on cake regularly. Big hits around here lately include Super Green Spinach Muffins from Little Bento by Michele Olivier, Mini Banana Muffins from Real Food Dietitians, and Feel-Good Zucchini Muffins from Pinch of Yum.

Some muffin tips: I have found that consumption among my children spikes if I make mini muffins. I’m not a psychologist, so I don’t know why, but it’s true. And they fit better in little bento lunch box slots.

Another revelation is that if you use a silicone muffin pan for baking, you can cool the muffins, throw the pan in the freezer—muffins and all—and then easily pop the muffins out and into a bag/container once solid.

5. Beef & Bean Burritos en masse

One day, as I was browsing my library Hoopla, I came across a book called Fix, Freeze, Feast by Kati Neville and Lindsay Ahrens. Inside was a recipe for 40 (!!!) Beef and Bean Freezer Burritos and I thought, wow, that is exactly the kind of recipe I need.

Does making 40 Beef & Bean Burritos at once feel excessive? Maybe. But making my own freezer convenience food is such a thrill for me, and the high I get from realizing I will always be fed, no matter how desperate, for the next fiscal quarter, is amazing. No matter how exhausted and stressed I am, I have a handheld, pre-wrapped meal that I can take and eat anywhere.

They are simple. Ground beef cooked in a homemade taco seasoning, added to burritos with refried beans, either homemade or canned. I chose the latter. But they’re hot and hearty and really do hit the spot when you’re starving and exhausted.

On the topic of homemade freezer convenience food, if you’re eating from home, I recommend making and freezing some form of English muffin pizzas. It’s fast, good, inexpensive, and widely accepted.

Rounding it out

I had ambitions to make cute, fun lunches, but I blessed and let that one go years ago. Yet, for better or for worse, I have all the lunchbox cookbooks, and I very rarely reference them.

Options I use a lot in my real life for year, not from a cookbook, are banana-seed butter-tortilla sushi (like this), rice cakes and seed butter (there’s a theme here), quesadillas with homemade salsa, and leftover soup or spaghetti (with accompanying muffin and fruit). I’ve also made mini lunchbox freezer pizzas from More Veggies Please! with success in the past.

I like to round out my kids lunches with yogurt (sometimes with sprinkles for fun), cottage cheese, other cheese, leftover meat, fruit (don’t overlook canned), and a veggie (pickles count) that they generally choose to ignore.

I like to round out my very own lunches with popcorn, fruit, cheese sticks, and chocolate.

And that is how we are currently surviving: with grinding teeth, frayed nerves, and full tummies. We shall endure.

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In fact, in the eighteen months following the birth of my second child, I generally swore off most two-handed kitchen tasks. Did the recipe specifically say to grate my own cheese? Of course it did. But I ignored it. Oh, a cookie recipe that calls for chopped chocolate because of the “melty pockets”? What is this, a Michelin establishment? Pull out the club size chocolate chip bag. Semisweet or bust.

I wouldn’t say things have slowed for me, but now my kids can stand on their own two feet most days, and sometimes they can even play for several minutes together before the screaming starts.

Actually, they often like to join me in the kitchen—one helping and the other trying extremely hard to attain a sharp object or touch anything scalding hot. The upshot is, as long as I maintain basic vigilance, it mostly frees up my hands and attention to get some more done in the kitchen.

With this increased flexibility, I have returned to making more things from scratch like I did in the before-kid times. Most of these are cheaper than their store-bought counterparts, and they taste very good, too.

Here are the staples I make regularly and rely on routinely to bring down my grocery bill and ease some of the weeknight and morning grind.

1) Yogurt

Every week or so, I make two quarts of yogurt. I’ve been making yogurt on and off for years, and I use an Instant Pot method cobbled together from Dinner in an Instant by Melissa Clark, Instant Family Meals by Sarah Copeland, and Rise & Run by Shalane Flanagan and Elyse Kopecky. I’ve also picked up new tips from this helpful post by and Instant Pot Cheese by Claudia Lucero.

Essentially, I remove the sealing ring from my Instant Pot, and then boil 8 cups of milk on the yogurt function. After it boils, I take off the lid, and hit boil on the yogurt mode several more times, for about 30 minutes. Then I let it cool for an hour or so, stir in my starter culture (just a bit of last week’s yogurt), and culture the whole thing in the Instant Pot for 24 hours on the yogurt setting. Apparently the longer culture really does a number on the lactose content, which is good news for me and my stomach.

When it’s done, I proceed to use it for everything, as I wrote over in ’s great round-up post. I thin it as a sub for buttermilk, and strain it for a thicker Greek-style yogurt, Labneh stand in, or sour cream sub. I also use it to culture cream for crème fraîche.

We eat this yogurt all kinds of ways. Most days, my kids and I blend it up with some kind of frozen fruit and then drink it as a smoothie and/or freeze it into popsicles. I use it to make pancakes and these waffles. I mix it with mayonnaise and some powdered ranch mix for a ranch dip. I’ve churned it into frozen yogurt using this recipe from America’s Test Kitchen (behind a paywall, sorry—I copied it from an old mag). I swirl jam into it for a family snack. And, of course, I also eat it for breakfast with granola.

When I strain off the whey, I love using the leftover liquid in lemonade (a tip from Melissa Clark) or baking it into bread.

You need to buy commercial yogurt to start, but once that’s out of the way, yogurt is self propagating, a great way to use up milk that’s about to go, and an excellent sub for the million half-used dairy products that always seem to pile up in the fridge. Plus, it’s super easy and only costs as much as you spend on milk.

2) Granola

Granola is the absolute classic example used to shame people into making homemade food. You’ll read everywhere that homemade granola is cheaper, healthier, and simpler than its grocery store counterpart. These people have evidently never tried to switch around baking sheets while holding a moody ten month old, or chopping nuts in a terrible kitchen, or leaving an oven on for 45 minutes without air conditioning in the summer. Bagged granola is much easier than that, cost and nonspecific oil(s) be damned.

But, admittedly, specific examples aside, homemade granola is pretty easy. Lately, I’ve been using the recipe by Lidey Heuck from Cooking in Real Life, a book I wrote about last year. On that post, recommended I try the granola, so I did, and it has become a great little staple.

I’ve tried a million granolas in my day, and this one is a really pared down recipe in a good way. It requires about five ingredients and uses fairly modest amounts of both honey and oil. This is good news for anyone who has shed a tear pouring a half cup each of maple syrup and avocado oil into a batch of hazelnut granola, really calling into question the whole “frugal” aspect of it.

I use whatever nuts or seeds I have on hand. When I want to be extra cheap and lazy, its sliced almonds and sunflower seeds, which require no chopping at all, but generally I make a double batch with a mix of almonds, walnuts, pecans, sunflower seeds, and pumpkin seeds. I also sub in olive oil because I don’t mind the taste, I buy it in bulk, and it is supposed to make me live longer.

As we all know, however, the relationship between granola made and granola eaten is proportional: the more I make, the more everyone eats. So no matter how big the batch, it somehow only lasts a week. Good thing it’s easy.

3) Salsa

As I mentioned over in this post, we go through a quart of salsa a week, and this here is usually the salsa we’re dipping in. It’s a teeny riff on the Badass Blender Salsa from Trejo’s Cantina by Danny Trejo, which I received free from Clarkson Potter two years ago. The recipe basically requires you to throw a bunch of salsa regulars—cilantro, lime, onion, garlic, chiles—into a blender with canned tomatoes and blitz it up.

The original calls for jalapeños, but I don’t generally keep them on hand at all times, so I throw in frozen Hatch chile from my freezer. With this modification, I can almost always make this salsa on a moment’s notice, and it is super affordable.

Then, we mostly use it in traditional salsa places, like as a dip for all vaguely Mexican/New Mexican/Tex-Mex dishes. It makes for fast meals of quesadillas, tacos, or nachos whenever necessary, and it is great stirred into our house staple fideo soup.

When we don’t go through it as a dip fast enough, a rare occurrence, I’ll pour it over some kind of meat, add a little taco seasoning, and stick it in the slow cooker.

And yes, we usually go through all four cups in a span of seven days, which is why I choose to make it and not buy it.

4) The Great Tomato Twosome: Marinara and a Meat Sauce

I’ve already written about Ready, Set, Cook by Dawn Perry, but here are the staples I keep on hand to wean me off my expensive jarred marinara habits. Both the 15-Minute Marinara and the 53-Minute Ragu are frequent fliers in my home.

The meat sauce is great, because it is delicious and it stretches one pound of meat to three pounds of pasta. I assume this might enrage ragu purists, but for the more meat-reticent in my house, the small sprinkling of meat is appreciated. I prep the sauce once, and have enough for three Pasta Mondays in a row.

The marinara is even more versatile. I put it on pizza dough, doctor it up into tomato soup, and sub it in wherever marinara is called for. It is super simple to throw together, and excellent to have on hand at all times.

Both sauces freeze well and are consistently replenished.

5) Pizza Dough

I have written about our pizza habits before, and our longtime reliance on a Friday night frozen pizza. I have no regrets about this, but whenever I have a bit more time on my hands, I like to make my own pizza instead of dropping a lot of money on something that’s not too hard to throw together. In fact, once I have sauce and dough in the freezer, along with my handy club size packs of shredded mozzarella and pepperoni, the effort required to put together a pizza is not that much more than the effort required for frozen.

I still love cooking from Pizza Night by Alexandra Stafford, and I also like to keep a big batch of dough from Seriously Good Freezer Meals by Karrie Truman hanging out for when I feel extra lazy.

These doughs fulfill different purposes in our house. While the former feels like pizza you would get from a nice restaurant and could serve to polite company, the latter is great for the times you have a hankering for DiGiorno Rising Crust Pizza, two glasses of wine, and minimal input.

One note, however, is that the recipe from Karrie Truman is written as a stand mixer dough that can be batched up in huge quantities. If you don’t happen to live in a commercial bakery, making a large amount of dough in a mixer is not just inadvisable, it’s probably impossible. I mix it in my most enormous bowl, enough for six pizzas, and hand knead it every time. Correcting for this oversight, the dough freezes well, behaves exactly as promised, and can be easily pressed out and topped without a rolling pin or difficult technique.

6) Cleaning Spray

Okay, this one isn’t food, but I make it with ingestible ingredients and use it in the kitchen so it kind of fits.

A few weeks back, as I embarked upon ordering another bulk package of cleaning spray through Amazon Subscribe & Save, I decided I was just going to make some.

The recipe I use from Clean Mama is just three ingredients and little-to-no hassle. It is, moreover, super cheap for me, especially with the rock bottom price of vodka in these parts, for better or for worse.

Now look, I’m not Wirecutter, so I’ve done no rigorous testing on how it performs or disinfects. And I still keep bleach wipes on hand for, you know, the gross stuff. For the workaday cleaning, however, I am super pleased with this little concoction.

Is it more work than Subscribe & Save? I don’t know, it depends on how obsessive your commitment to price comparison is (mine is excessive) . But I timed how long it took me to put it together this evening, and it clocked in at two minutes. Not bad.

I also like the glass cleaner recipe.

Those are mine, but I am always looking for more great, repeatable, real life, foundational recipes. Please share yours with me if you have some!

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For this reason, I was thrilled to receive an entire book on salsa courtesy of Clarkson Potter: Salsa Daddy by Rick Martínez. And while I know of Rick Martínez, I have yet to cook from Mi Cocina, his award-winning first book, nor have I interacted extensively with his work in any other forum. For those who don’t know, Rick is a Mexican-American food authority, who worked in U.S. food media for a while before relocating to Mexico where he lives and works now.

Admittedly, I’m probably not super familiar with him due to my avoidance of the Bon Appetit magazine extended universe, where Rick was an editor, and where I first became aware of his work. I subscribed to the magazine for years, but by the time the Bon Appetit Test Kitchen videos were hugely popular around 2018, I was living in the mountains of North Carolina on a teeny tiny budget. The whole voice and vibe of Bon Appetit just didn’t speak to me anymore, and I honestly felt like most of the people who worked there would probably be mean to me at a party, so I turned to other outlets.

Listen, I am not saying any of this is rational! I am just being self reflective. Also I cooked a bunch from Priya Krishna and Claire Saffitz (never watched the videos, though), so it’s barely even coherent. I guess what I’m establishing is that I had none of the BA hero worship I know is out there. And I went into this book thinking it might make me feel like Bon Appetit magazine used to make me feel—kind of poor and unsophisticated.

I thought: What could Rick Martinez, who wrote this imposingly stylish book and cavorts around Mexico cooking beautiful food, tell me, a rooted and rural home cook who primarily shops at Walmart, about cooking?

A lot. It turns out its a lot. Because for all the glossy glamor of the book and the intimidating background of its author, Salsa Daddy, like any good daddy, is actually eminently pragmatic and gently instructive. Rick, I learned quickly, is not just an impressively creative condiment innovator, he’s also a kind and effective teacher.

The Book

This book is, primarily, a salsa book, as the title subtly hints. The first seven chapters are devoted to recipes for salsa. That being said, Rick’s definition of salsa is loose. He is not simply giving his take on classics, though those are in here, too. He is instead opening up and playing with the category of salsa in all kinds of fun ways. Even if you have a million cookbooks on Mexican cooking, you will find something new in here. For example, under the broad umbrella of “salsa” there is an Alfredo Rojo, a spicy take on chicken Alfredo pasta, a salted tequila caramel, a peanut salsa, and a Mexican-Style Giardiniera. There are ways to use peaches, kiwi, fresh berries, and cucumber in salsa as well as a chapter on fermenting.

The book itself is mostly sauce, with 70 different saucy recipes and 24 full recipes for putting them to use. Along with the formal recipes, he also lists recommended uses for every salsa alongside its recipe, like putting it over roast chicken or with breakfast tacos.

But there is so much more in here, too. While I love reading cookbooks, rarely do I read them cover to cover. I generally skip over the introductory sections on how to cook, what to have in your pantry, etc. Usually, they’re pretty formulaic. I don’t begrudge it, I just don’t really need it anymore.

Not so in this book. Impressive for any form of writing, let alone a cookbook, Salsa Daddy seems void of clichés. Rick is excellent at taking his well-earned knowledge and imparting it to the reader while making it feel like a conversation. He teaches about ingredients, methods, and tools in a way that felt both authentic and novel.

Additionally, he packs in a ton of additional valuable information, like a table of contents for various salsa pairings or moods, as well as a page on how he makes use of leftover salsa. Rick champions and explains freezing leftovers and prepping ahead, which is a book’s surest path to my heart, making it even more pragmatic.

Overwhelmingly, Rick encourages play. “There are no salsa police” he implores. Keeping that in mind, we began putting salsa on more things than ever before.

The Recipes

I received this book way back around Easter, so I consulted Rick’s salsa pairing chart, where he recommended Marmelada de Habanero Celestial (Heavenly Habanero Jam) for A Holiday Spread. This recipe involved soaking a peck of diced up habaneros in liquor to temper their heat, then cooking them down with a sweet and tangy mix of vinegar and piloncillo (Mexican cane sugar). This condiment was truly fantastic. We used it first with ham and then with everything and anything.

Next, I cooked down a whole bag of onions and a load of Serranos to make Salsa de Cebolla y Serrano Caramelizado (Caramelized Onion and Serrano Salsa). Essentially caramelized onions with caramelized chiles, this salsa was spicy and sweet, and it also went on everything: pizza, grilled cheese, fideo soup, quesadillas, nachos. Then, we ran out and I made it again with the various green chiles beginning to go downhill in the crisper. Again, fantastic. I stashed some away in the freezer, but that was mostly wishful thinking. It came out to be thawed almost immediately.

I made Salsa “BBQ” de Albaricoque (Apricot-Chipotle Barbecue Sauce) as a repository for the dried apricots no one wanted to eat in my pantry. Then, we roasted a chicken with it and basted grilled chicken breasts in it. It was smoky, sweet, practical, and well-received.

Salsa Verde Tatemada (Charred Green Salsa), Rick’s take on the classic, was a big hit in our house, though it was more popular with my husband and kid than it was with me. On the other hand, I found the red La Mañanera (The Morning Salsa), made with chiles de árbol, truly addictive, while no one else seemed to enjoy it. Fine. More for me!

The Guacamole con Tomatillos is a good recipe to have on hand, because Rick notes you can use avocados that are a bit hard. You can also keep in the fridge for up to two days or freeze it. It was a solid spin on guacamole that came together easily.

Finding myself with a bunch of dried chiles hanging about in dire need of use, I made La Pasilla (The Chile Pasilla), a flexible and pantry friendly recipe that required no tomato or tomatillo. I subbed in New Mexico chiles for pasillas, and it was extraordinarily delicious. It made one cup, and it never saw a sunset.

Unfortunately, not all was rosy in salsa land. I made the Pipián Verde (Green Nut and Seed Sauce), Rick’s take on an ancient Mexican seed-based salsa. My troubles began when I could not find enough pepitas (pumpkin seeds) for the recipe, so I subbed in some sunflower seeds (no salsa police!). A mix of nuts, seeds, chiles, tomatillos, onions, and herbs, this purée came out thick and tasted strongly of the three bay leaves called for.

Rick noted it could be used in enchiladas, but when I tried using it in his enchilada recipe, the corn tortillas stuck, tore, and then almost disintegrated in the thick sauce. No one enjoyed them very much and they were frustrating to make.

I stuffed the Pipián Verde in the freezer and regrouped. When I pulled it out again, I decided to use it for Rick’s chilaquiles recipe. I attempted his Oil-Free Totopos, and burnt my tortillas to a crisp. I resolved to check them much earlier than the 35-45 minutes suggested in the recipe. But even at 25 minutes, they were burned beyond saving, so I popped the chip bag. Unfortunately, like the tortillas, they were no match for the pipián, turning into a bay-heavy tortilla mush. I conceded defeat to the pipián.

Final Thoughts

This book is great for anyone interested in Mexican cooking, especially if you are looking for a creative and expansive exploration of the cuisine. Rick is a wonderful writer, the book is beautifully designed, and it is easy to put to use on a day-to-day basis. If you are desperate for new, innovative, thoughtful recipes, this is a great book, too.

If you do not have easy access to Mexican staples like fresh and dried chiles or tomatillos, however, this book might be a bit trickier and more expensive to use. Where I live, I can buy piles of chiles at a very reasonable price, but if that is not something available to you, it might be a bit more of a challenge to cook from this one.

To get the most out of this book, I think it is best to either have a solid cooking foundation already, or a personality that tends towards kitchen experimentation. Indeed, if you count yourself among the latter, I think this would be a fantastic book. Furthermore, a little something on the side can ease the boredom of the creative cul-de-sac of feeding little kids, so if you are in that stage of life, this is nice to have.

If, on the other hand, you hear “put this salsa over a grilled chicken” and think “wait, how do I grill chicken?!” you might want to start elsewhere.

Has this book replaced my workaday, weekly red salsa made from blending some stuff with canned tomatoes? No. I still use the basic Badass Blender Salsa from Trejo’s Cantina (free from Clarkson Potter two years ago) for that. But when I want to go a step further in both effort and taste, I’m excited to dig into this one a bit more. It’s a unique and wonderful book.

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There are quite a few budget cookbooks out there, but it’s not really a one size fits all category in my opinion. Everyone’s budgets, tastes, cooking styles, food access, and needs differ drastically.

Instead, there are a few things I specifically look for when I am need a book to help me shore up my budget:

1. Flexibility: I love books with blueprints, ways to use scraps, and recipes written with purposeful flexibility. Sure, I could wing it in the kitchen, but I generally don’t because I am too cautious and a little bit lazy. I like having a set of instructions, however loose, with a proscribed way to play around and use up what I have. I always keep an eye out for books with these roadmaps or recipe types.

2. Ingredient overlap: I look for books with recipes using ingredients that overlap with what I usually have on hand, or that I can obtain easily and affordably. Hunting down specialty ingredients or cuts of meat that I don’t know how to use in many ways is something I try to avoid when I don’t have a lot of money wiggle room. Additionally, if I always find myself with some kind of scrap or leftover of something, I keep an eye out for recipes that use it up. For me that’s celery, carrots, bread crusts, and the crumbs at the bottom of the tortilla chip bag.

3. Personally accessible ingredients: There are ingredients that immediately make me turn the page when I’m on a budget. I’ve been in situations where anything with a red bell pepper was off the table, and let’s not even talk about Manchego cheese or saffron. (It’s green peppers, mild cheddar, and paprika, buddy, or we don’t have a deal!) Or, if I can buy cheap spaghetti but not, say, ziti, then I avoid the ziti world. If there are too many recipes in a book with ingredients out of my budget or that lack versatility for me, then I’ll avoid it.

4. Taste: Maybe obvious, but a budget book is of no use if you or your family won’t eat it. A book that relies heavily on the thrifty staples of beans and rice, for example, would probably end up being more expensive for me because I would be throwing out a lot of beans and rice that my children categorically refuse to touch and making a second dinner. Similarly, if there’s something you sink a lot of money into, like frozen pizza or yogurt or Rao’s marinara (which is actually priced for royalty)1 and you find a book with a whole bunch of ways to make those things at home in a way that is sustainable and enjoyable, then it’s a good book for you!

5. Time: Sometimes books are great for your budget but completely impossible in terms of time. This is just to say, time and cost are a tradeoff. It’s probably cheaper to make your own all-butter puff pastry, but making puff pastry when you’re alone with a baby who just learned to crawl or you’re working away from the house from 7 am to 7 pm is probably not a good idea. Sometimes, however, you lack both time and money. At these times, you need a book that is both cheap and easy, and it probably involves less scratch cooking. Thus, cooking like this might also entail eating some humble pie, as you begin to rely on ingredients you previously avoided (maybe even avoided vocally). Or it could involve the righteous anger that comes with the consistent denigration in food media of something that has legitimately made feeding your family possible. Both of these changes are positive in the long run, so soldier on!

With all those variables in mind, here are some of my personal favorite book for helping me tighten up my budget. These are all books I have used for several years that have earned a permanent place in my collection. Here they are in no particular order.

1) Ready, Set, Cook by Dawn Perry

I had my library buy this book four years ago, and then I checked it out so often I bought it. That’s how much I liked it.

The book is divided into three parts: What to Buy, What to Cook, and What to Make. Out of all of these sections, I have relied most heavily on What to Make, which is itself divided into In the Cupboard, In the Fridge, and In the Freezer.

This section includes excellent ideas about food prep, recipes for useful freezer staples, several options for using up scraps, and a ton of flexibility. There are recipes for homemade spice blends and all kinds of dressings and sauces. It includes savory sauces, like a marinara I like to keep on hand, as well as a chocolate sauce I have made dozens of times. It also contains a freezer pie crust easy enough for the perpetually pie-crust challenged (me).

The What to Cook section has several recipes for putting the staples made in the previous chapter to use, as well as many more adaptable recipes. In bygone years, with the pie dough in my freezer, and pre-cooked vegetables according to Dawn’s methods in the fridge, I made super easy veggie galettes regularly, because it was very quick and delicious, and even my young toddler ate them. This mostly stopped with my kid’s inevitable discovery of dining autonomy around age 2, but it was great while it lasted.

Dawn uses a fairly small range of inexpensive staples to produce varied meals, snacks, and staples. She also provides recipes that give a range of ingredient options, making Ready, Set, Cook helpful for making food based on what’s on sale in a given week or what needs to be used up in your fridge ASAP.

This book is incredibly useful and well thought out, and I have turned to it many times over the past few years.

2) Meal Prep Magic by Catherine McCord

I’ll admit that I follow absolutely none of the organizational ideas in this book but I think the recipes are very useful. Like Dawn Perry’s book above, Meal Prep Magic is very adaptable, and also makes good use of a lot of inexpensive staples.

Admittedly, the book is a bit confusing in its organization because it’s broken down by storage area and ingredient rather than meal type. That is, it has three main recipe chapters: Refrigerator, Freezer, and Pantry. Then, each of these sections is subdivided into ingredient, i.e. Frozen Vegetables, Frozen Fruits, Frozen Seafood.

While this is extraordinarily unhelpful when you can’t find the Stovetop Broccoli Mac and Cheese (filed under Milk, not Pasta), it’s great because all of these sub-categories are pretty cheap staples that Catherine builds the recipes around. If you can get over the organizational hurdle, the payoff is there. On top of that, Catherine provides storage and make-ahead instructions, ways to repurpose leftovers, and a lot of accommodating recipes.

In our house, the variations of Overnight Oats and Chia Pudding are on repeat, and the Pull-Apart Egg Sandwiches are a house favorite. I’ve also had success with the Crispy Avocado Tacos, Hand Pies, Blender Banana Breakfast Loaf, Cheesy Brown Rice Cakes, Blistered Cherry Tomato and Gooey Mozzarella Spaghetti, and Crispy Artichoke Hearts. I did have on big fail with the Ricotta Gnocchi, which was actually unpalatable, but that’s the only misstep I’ve run into so far.

Catherine McCord created the Weelicious website back in the day, so her original beat was kid food. While this book definitely does tack family friendly, it is not kid-centric. It’s a solid book for anyone to have at the ready for creative uses of cheap staples in any size household.

3) Make the Bread, Buy the Butter by Jennifer Reese

Remember above when I talked about the time-versus-money balance? Jennifer Reese tackles that question throughout this entire book in an incredibly acerbic and articulate way. In Make the Bread, Buy the Butter, Jennifer assesses the cost and hassle of making versus buying several different foods, ranging from basic and easy to very complex. For the book, Jennifer went so far as to raise goats, chickens, and turkeys to see if it was worth it to raise and slaughter them instead of buying them from the store.

Each recipe offers a cost comparison of homemade versus store-bought, an assessment of the hassle involved, and a declaration on whether to make or buy it. It is also filled with hilarious essays that I have probably read twenty times each.

This book really opened my eyes to the expense of store-bought vanilla, and I often consult it when I get the yen to cook something from scratch. If Jennifer deems it unworthy of the hassle, or the cost differential is pathetically low, I generally trust her and avoid it. Just last weekend, I tried Jennifer’s take on pigs in a blanket, and they were excellent. I’ve owned this book for nearly fifteen years, and I’ve always been happy to have it.

A few things of note are that there are absolutely no pictures, and that Jennifer is not a recipe writer who holds your hand. She writes in an old-school, pragmatic way. This book might not be for the beginner cook—though I did use it when I was starting out—but it is excellent for anyone wading into more from-scratch cooking with a budget in mind.

But even if you don’t cook from it, it’s a fantastic read.

4) Bare Minimum Dinners by

I’ve actually written about this book before as a dinnertime lifesaver in a particularly hectic phase of life, but I didn’t focus on its affordability. While this book certainly contains some pricier ingredients, most of it is easily accessible and inexpensive. On top of that, Jenna’s minimalist approach to ingredients really keeps spending in check.

I lived on this book after the birth of both of my kids. If you need something quick and easy that incorporates quality store-bought options, this is your book. Jenna has given me many of my favorite cheap recipes: Fish Stick Tacos, Skillet Harissa Beef and Cabbage, Turkey Enchilada Bowls, Black Bean Burgers, Shortcut Salmon Burgers, Chicken Enchilada Casserole, Apple-Cheddar Dutch Baby, Baked Rigatoni (make your own crème fraîche if you need, it’s easy!), BBQ Pork Burgers, Any Onion Frittata, Mixed Grill, Eat with Everything Slaw, Peels-On Cumin Roasted Carrots, Cheesy Cauliflower Rice, and Quick Cukes.

That’s a lot because I am literally always cooking from this book. If cooking feels like too much right now or ever, you might want to get your hands on a copy.

5) Simply Julia by

Julia Turshen writes great books, and I think they’re actually all budget-minded because of her consistent openness to experimentation. But if I had to pick one right now to fit this list, it would be Simply Julia. I turn to several recipes in this book when I’m cutting costs.

Julia is incredibly skilled at sifting through all the pretension and superfluity that can pervade cookbooks. She breaks down food and eating in a way that seems authentically non-judgmental, and it comes through in the recipes in this book. Nothing in Julia’s recipes feels geared towards clout or culinary grandstanding. If you’ve ever read a cookbook and felt alienated by its preachiness or pronouncements, I would direct you towards Julia’s work.

Some of my favorite cheap recipes from this book that I have cooked many times and loved are Doug’s Tex-Mex Turkey Meatballs (for using up the bottom of tortilla chip bags!), Mustardy Cracker Crumb Fish, Stewed Chickpeas with Peppers & Zucchinis, Spinach & Artichoke Chicken Bake, Sticky Chicken, Chicken Reuben Skillet, Green Chile Braised Chicken Thighs with Pinto Beans, Grace’s Green Beans with Garlic & Tomatoes, Sled Dog Muffins, and Any Frozen Fruit & Cornmeal Cobbler.

The energy from this book, to me, is a kind aunt teaching you how to put food on the table but not be too serious about it.

6) Ten Dollar Dinners by Melissa d’Arabian

Okay, finally, this one is actually a budget book, and it’s a good one! While you may know her only from Guy’s Grocery Games, Melissa was once a host of a Food Network show in her own right about cooking on the cheap, and this book is a product of that original persona.

Each recipe in this book is given a rating from one to five showing how comparatively expensive it is. There are also some roadmaps for using up scraps that I’ve used countless times, including Crisper Drawer Pasta and Creamy Any Veggie Soup.

While some inexpensive-cooking books can feel very developed, this one comes across as genuine. It conveys an understanding of what it truly means to want to cook well within the confines of a small budget. Melissa’s husband is French, and she spent some time there, as well, so there is a heavy French inflection on the recipes. Additionally, Melissa had four young children at the time she wrote the book, so there is some attention paid to family-friendly food. On the time/money continuum, the recipes in Ten Dollar Dinners definitely involve more effort to eke great flavor out of humble ingredients.

With good success, I’ve made the Zucchini Carpaccio, Salmon Cakes, Spiced Tilapia Tacos, Easy Coq au Vin, Slow Cooker Pork Shoulder, Black Bean Nacho Burgers, Sweet Zucchini Sauté, Provençal Tomatoes, Creamy Celery, Quick Sour Cream Biscuits, Rigatoni with No-Cook Tomato Sauce, Peanut Butter-Chocolate Lava Sundaes, and Croque Madames.

If you do have more time on your side, this book has been consistently reliable for me for years.

To conclude, we must ask the looming questions: if you spend all your money on budget cookbooks, are you even saving money? All of these books have been out for at least a few years, so if you can’t find them at your library, I bet you can at least find an inexpensive used copy.

Sometimes, when you have to forgo non-canned fish and non-ground beef, it can seem like a huge drag. But it can also lead to some awesome culinary discoveries. If you’re really in the thick of it, I hope this helps.

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In the meantime, spring cookbook season has been in full swing, and I have a backlog of three new books—thanks to Clarkson Potter and Ten Speed Press—that I am dying to write about.

First is A Grain, A Green, A Bean by longtime vegan food writer and cookbook author Gena Hamshaw, with whom I am pretty familiar (thanks Ten Speed Press for the free book in exchange for an arguably too honest review).

This is because, years and years ago, I was a vegan. In fact, I learned to cook as a vegan, butchering scores of tofu blocks and butternut squash before I even touched a chicken. When I started grad school with nothing but a suitcase in a brand new country, I spent my Fridays on Skype with my mom while I made elaborate vegan meals for one. During that time, to make friends, I showed up to gatherings with vegan cupcakes, a statement that AI would definitely spit out if you typed in “reminisce about food in 2011 without mentioning bacon.”

I say this not to brag, but rather to assert that I have no deep-seated, anti-vegan-cookbook sentiments that might skew my response to this book. In fact, I have quite the opposite: a rosy, nostalgic fondness for the genre, and a familiarity with the cuisine.

My children, on the other hand, have no such tender associations. While I have frequently documented how they largely refuse meat, they are not exactly replacing it with a varied repertoire of plant-based proteins. Actually, “a grain, a green, a bean” might as well be something a heffalump chants at them in their nightmares to chill them to the bone.

Nevertheless, when one takes on the wholly self-directed and self-pressured responsibility to honestly test cookbooks, one must persist.

If you didn’t read the Post-Punk Kitchen Cookbook forums in the aughts, or otherwise pay attention to the vegan cooking scene, you might not be familiar with Gena. She has written about vegan food since 2009 at The Full Helping, and A Grain, A Green, A Bean is her fifth cookbook. Gena is a registered dietitian and nutritionist, and went through all her training while simultaneously developing recipes and writing books, chronicling it all on her website.

A Grain, A Green, A Bean is an attempt to break down vegan eating to perhaps its simplest formula. As the title suggests, every recipe includes a grain in some form (bread, noodle, whole), a green vegetable, and a type of bean.

The chapters are: Bowls & Salads, Beans & Greens on Bread, Stovetop Meals, and Oven to Table Recipes. At the end of the book are some basic component recipes, and a brief dessert section that breaks from the formula, thankfully not attempting to shoehorn beans and greens into cake. The category of grain/green/bean is pretty broad, as Gena shows while she plays with it to make soups, salads, pastas, bowls, sandwiches, and sheet pan meals.

Gena works to keep the ingredients at their most accessible with regards to avoiding vegan speciality foods. There is no Violife cheese or Beyond Meat required. Still, her category of “bean” does include all forms of soy, including tofu, tempeh, TVP, soy curls, and yuba. If you live with more basic grocery stores, as I do, some of these soy variants or certain grains and greens might also prove a bit harder to find. On top of that, if you’re new to vegan cooking, you might have to stock up on staples like nutritional yeast and heaps of raw cashews. Otherwise, a lot of the ingredients can be sourced pretty easily and affordably.

Welcome to Vegan Week

We began our vegan foray with Green Onion and Black Bean Tortillas. For this dish, I cooked down a huge pile of green onions—a nice, affordable green—mixed it with mashed black beans and fried it up in a tortilla. This was a wonderful take on a vegan quesadilla, because it really mimicked the textural experience of eating cheese without trying to actually imitate cheese. I liked it a lot. And my kids? They ate plain cheese quesadillas and sneered at the beans I put on their plate, thanks for asking!

Next we made Pita Chips and Crispy Chickpeas with Broccolini and Green Tahini Sauce. This was kind of a pita chip nacho idea, with chickpeas, homemade pita chips, and broccolini covered in a tahini sauce and garnished with pickled onions. My kids helped me put this one together in hopes that they might try some. And they did try, but they did little more than that. I thought maybe my youngest would eat crispy chickpeas since tiny spherical objects are a big draw, but apparently they weren't seasoned with enough dirt or danger, because they were rejected. (I might try scattering them on the lawn next time, fingers crossed!) This one took time to assemble all components, but nothing was too hard. It was fairly tasty, but I also found it quite light as a meal.

The Broken Vermicelli and Lentil Chickpea Stew with Herbs is Gena’s take on harira. I had a bit of trouble getting excited for a lentil stew, so I made both the cashew sour cream and corn muffins as accompaniments to bolster my spirits. The soup tasted almost like a chili to me, but with noodles. It was a solid recipe if lentil soup is something that gets you excited, and it made a big pot so I could freeze some.

I grew frustrated with the sour cream recipe, unfortunately, because as written it did not have enough volume for my blender to run. I doubled it and it tasted great, but that seemed like an oversight. The muffins were easy and good and my kids ate them.

I was hopeful that I could make some of the noodle dishes work in my house, so I made the Cold Kimchi Noodles, Eggy Tofu, and Cucumber as well as the Miso Soy Noodles for the spice-averse crowd. I made the Eggy Tofu—a simply seared tofu coated in nutritional yeast—ahead of time, and the dish came together easily. It was flavorful and filling, and the adults in the room quite liked it. It felt like something you could order from a fast casual place in a city for about $25. Good!

One creative grain-bean-green combination that intrigued me was the Savory Corn Waffles with Kidney Beans and Kale. This dish was our favorite of the lot and really satisfying. It consisted of kidney beans and kale sautéed in salsa and piled high on corn waffles with pickled jalapeños, avocado, cashew sour cream, and even more salsa. Again, I made the waffles ahead of time, so the entire thing was very fast to get on the table. This dish was quite satisfying and filling, with a nacho vibe, and lots of flavors and textures. I would absolutely repeat this one.

The final main dish I made was a very simple grain bowl, the Basmati Rice, Tomato Coconut Lentils, and Collard Greens. I found the cooking method a bit tedious, because Gena writes it so everything cooks in one pot. While this is great for the after-dinner dish load, it really stretches out the time required to put it all together. I chose to stick my collards in the Instant Pot instead to hurry things along. I offered some of the collards to my kid who said “that’s a plant” and pushed it away as though something being a literal plant in the ground had ever been a barrier to consumption before. I, on the other hand, really liked this dish. It was basic, wholesome, and soothing.

I could not leave the dessert chapter untested, of course, and so I made both the Chocolate Chunk Cookies and Chocolate Snack Cake. The cookies were fine. They came together easily with no specialty products, using nut butter for fat. They were wholesome cookies and tasted as such. The chocolate snack cake is probably one of the easiest and cheapest cake recipes out there, made with water and no eggs. A wonderful pantry cake for when a cupboard is especially barren, the cake still tasted rich and fluffy. This cake is going in my memory bank as something tasty and within reach no matter how long it’s been since I made the journey into town to shop.

Final Thoughts

Overall, the book has some great flavors, though some of the meals might need a little more bulking up for larger appetites. They also might be a bit challenging for picky eaters, though the nature of the recipes often lends itself to being able to separate out components. Anyone who is averse to beans might want to avoid this one for obvious reasons, however.

On the continuum of vegan food recipes, this definitely tacks to the health food end of things, and occasionally felt a bit austere to me. I did have some trouble working up the enthusiasm to make and eat everything, though I generally enjoyed the finished dishes when it came to mealtime.

One of the wonderful things about this book is that it notes how and when to prepare and store all the components of the meals. It’s not a meal prep book per se (check out Gena’s book The Vegan Week, which Ten Speed Press sent me two years ago, if you’re looking for that), but Gena is open about cooking mostly for one on a busy schedule. She is mindful of what that means for make-ahead and leftover food, and I really appreciate that attention to detail. If you do cook for one, or maybe just want to make some vegan meals for yourself in a house where certain family members treat serving lentils as a felony, this book would work really well for you.

I envision putting it to use in my house to prep some healthy adult lunches, both because it’s largely unappealing to my kids right now and because the meals are a bit light. Gena is an experienced and creative recipe developer, though, so if you're looking for a good whole foods, plant-based, accessible, affordable collection of dishes, this is a reliable and thoughtful cookbook.

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The latter method is called Baby-Led Weaning, and the idea is often attributed to Gill Rapley, who began using it in 2001. Around two decades later, the massively popular Solid Starts launched and really popularized the method.

But I am not here to debate the merits and downfalls of either feeding method. I’m not even here to talk about what I did with my kids. If you want to know my philosophy, I believe babies should be fed enough food to keep them alive and thriving and in a way that causes minimal anxiety for caregivers. Beyond that, I don’t care.

Instead, I would like to discuss some of the historical justifications of baby led weaning. While it would be perfectly fine to tout it as a good feeding method, many people across the internet have felt the need to promote it as a more “natural” way of feeding babies. Using history, they argue that baby-led weaning confers a variety of benefits that historical babies ostensibly displayed, particularly a lack of pickiness and thus more robust lifelong health because they will always prefer the taste of steamed broccoli to Ring Pops. Or something like that.

I wanted to dig into where this historical justification comes from. A lot of it, it turns out, can be traced back to the first part of one book: Inventing Baby Food: Taste, Health, and the Industrialization of the American Diet by Amy Bentley. It is unfortunate, then, that I found the first section of this otherwise informative book rather lacking in good history.

What is more unfortunate is that this information has been taken and twisted into an argument Dr. Bentley never made by big names in the baby-feeding sphere.

In this post, I am going to sort through some of the inaccuracies I found in Dr. Bentley’s work and the way it has been reproduced, and then go into what I think the the most important historical takeaway about baby feeding is.

The Chart That Launched A Thousand Questions

About a year back, I was listening to a podcast on the Baby Led Weaning debate. I can’t actually find it now, but in the episode, the hosts noted that scholar Dr. Bentley, in her 2014 book Inventing Baby Food, wrote that, historically, many children subsisted almost entirely on milk through age two.

Having fed—and fed and fed and fed—two ravenous little beasts myself, my first thought was that this could not be an accurate representation of Dr. Bentley’s work. Anyone who has met an actual human baby knows that they begin demanding food much, much sooner than that.

This little tidbit had me digging into the book, because it is all over the baby feeding internet. In fact, twelve out of fourteen citations on the Solid Starts article “History of Baby Food” are from Inventing Baby Food. And that’s not all. Search for the history of baby weaning and you will find Dr. Bentley’s chart again and again.

I am a citation hound so I just had to find the source that informed this chart, but when I went in search of it, I was disappointed. Dr. Bentley includes no citations for the figure. A bit weird, I thought, but not a deal breaker. The absence of a citation probably means she put it together based on her research, I thought. If I read the rest of the book, I reasoned, I should find where this comes from.

But I was wrong.

If she does draw it from her research, it’s not at all clear to me where. As far as I can tell, Dr. Bentley did not do any kind of quantitative historical research on the age of introduction of solids to babies—that is, she didn’t really crunch any numbers nor work off numbers someone else crunched. And that’s fine. A lot of historians don’t (including me most of the time).

If that is the case, however, you cannot produce a chart like this without some kind of qualification. At the most basic, I would love to know why the chart starts in 1880. In history, just to state something obvious, dates really, really matter. You can’t just pluck a date out of thin air as a starting point. If you ask me, 1880 is an extremely arbitrary time to start. Maybe Dr. Bentley has a reason, like a good source, but she doesn’t say what it is.

So I went through the text to try and find where she pulled the date of weaning at 11 months in 1880. This search, however, just produced more confusion. All the history of pre-twentieth century baby feeding is pretty mushy. Dr. Bentley lumps all pre-industrial, global history together rather non-specifically and oddly conflates the length of breastfeeding time with age of introduction to solids. (These are two very different things, because you can introduce a baby to solids while still breastfeeding.) So while she notes that the customary time of breastfeeding was around two years “before industrialization”, she does not discuss whether or what kind of solids they were eating (p. 25).

Additionally, her references to the nineteenth century—the very time period addressed in her chart—shows that weaning advice was fairly vague and rather contested. And I would love to track down dates for what she is discussing here, but between citing a pediatrician writing in the 1960s as proof of Victorian feeding practices and jumping all over chronologically, I couldn’t really nail down any chronology.

I was able, finally, to track down the source of the idea that babies used to be fed only milk until they were two years old. It actually traces back to what proved to be a very interesting article from 1955 from a scholar named Alice L. Wood. But what Dr. Bentley fails to note when she pulls this little factoid from Wood’s article is that Wood is speaking very specifically about the nineteenth century. Furthermore—and hilariously—Wood actually begins this section by noting, “From the viewpoint of infant mortality statistics, the nineteenth century was one of the worst” (477). In other words, they might have done this but it probably wasn’t a great idea.

As it turns out if you parse through Dr. Bentley’s sources, children surviving mostly on milk is very distinctly and—this is important—anomalously from the nineteenth century. In fact, there are a lot of relatively recent archaeological studies that note that people have been introducing solids around six months of age for millennia.1If we charted the grand arc of human weaning, then, the baby boomers would still be a nadir, but the Victorians might also be the apex.

So why does this matter? By beginning her chart in 1880, Dr. Bentley does us a disservice by implying that this year is representative of what came before. The suggestion, intended or not, is if you stare into the mists of time when what mothers did was “natural,” before industrial food started messing with our babies, our precious little creatures ate only liquids until they were at least 11 months old and at most two years. Treating a historical peculiarity as a starting point really skews the whole picture.

Maybe you are less sensitive than me, but I read it as look how far you’ve fallen, you unnatural, brainwashed monster mommy, forcing your helpless babes to choke down oats before their time. And God help you if you sullied their bodies with a jar of Gerber.

But let’s be frank here, the boomer babies fared a lot better than their Victorian counterparts. Juxtaposed against a chart of infant mortality for the same period, this chart would tell an entirely different story.

Inventing An Argument

Up to this point, everything I have said about Inventing Baby Food is about the first 35 pages. I actually found the rest of the book quite good. It shows how the rise of the baby food industry and ideas of modernity and infant care intersected in the mid-to-late of the twentieth century. The book, that is to say, is not about baby led weaning at all, save for a few paragraphs near the end about the latest feeding trends.

Like a lot of history, though, it has been repurposed, and not necessarily to great effect. Solid Starts takes Dr. Bentley’s research and then makes a few reaches with it, arguing:

“Before the invention of perfectly smooth baby food, babies were exposed to a wider variety of textures. Further, because straining baby food was so labor intensive, it's not hard to imagine that babies may have eaten finger foods earlier in their solid food journey than babies did in the 1950s.”

This sentence has no citation and there is a reason for that. It’s because it’s not in the book. Babies were not necessarily exposed to a wider variety of textures—think of those Victorian milk babies, for one. This pulled quote is on the level of Ancient Aliens history. (“The pyramids were pretty labor intensive to build. It’s not hard to imagine aliens might have done it.”)

Saying things like “it’s not hard to imagine” is a placeholder for a lack of evidence. Sure, it might not be hard for you to imagine, but our historical predecessors lived different lives, with different concepts of labor and hardship. Not to mention, it’s not that difficult to mash a lot of first foods for babies or make a simple porridge. Indeed, many moms used to prechew food for their babies through the sixteenth century, as Dr. Bentley and Wood note, not strain steamed peas.

In fact, Dr. Bentley convincingly argues that fruits and vegetables were not considered good foods for babies in the nineteenth century due to their dangers. Research on ancient babies backs this up. As one study on Bronze Age (3000-4000 years ago) populations notes: “weaning foods were most likely cereal/legume pulp mixed with dairy and perhaps honey.” Not that labor intensive after all.

Solid Starts uses Dr. Bentley’s chart in an article on the rise of picky eating to obvious effect. It notes that picky eating has been on the rise for “quite some time.” But honestly, if I were just feeding my kids bread, grains, milk, and honey—some of the main components of ancient through nineteenth century weaning diets, they might not seem so picky either.

To be clear, I am not against baby led weaning in the least. I think it’s a perfectly fine option. I am against the misguided arguments and implied guilt that come packaged with it. By all means, feed your baby from your own plate. Just don’t do it thinking it’s some kind of primordial prophylactic against pickiness or an inherent approach to perfect weaning.

One of the main arguments of Dr. Bentley’s work is that perhaps the most salient constants in baby feeding is the pressure that moms face and the anxiety they hold about nourishing their babies. Especially in light of this acknowledgement, the use of her book to provoke more anxiety is unfortunate.

Dr. Bentley states in the introduction: “At base, infants are incredibly resilient creatures and it’s hard to inflict serious damage on a baby as long as you feed him or her sufficiently, and provide care, protection, and love” (p. 20).

Let that be your take away.

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I also appreciate the return to the a more banal way of cooking. While November and December are months of fancy cheeses, precious appetizers, and decorated desserts, January and February sees me retreating back to my meal matrix. We become a house of simple pastas, pancakes for dinner, pureed soups, and throw-together bar cookies.

The ease and comfort of early year cooking feels especially important right now. Adela Amador, in her cookbook Southwest Flavor, notes that New Mexico old-timers call February “febrero loco,” due to the unpredictability of the weather.

As we all know, this February has been particularly loco, and sometimes it helps to focus on our small comforts in order to stave off the numbness that threatens; personally, it grounds me so I can fight another day.

With this small interregnum between the winter holidays and the frenzied season of spring birthdays and holidays coming to an end, I thought I’d reflect on some of the best things I have made.

1) Milk & Honey Oatmeal Dinner Rolls

The entire idea for this post came because I made these dinner rolls from The Ambitious Kitchen Cookbook and posted about them on notes. I do not regularly attempt yeast breads beyond Alexandra Stafford’s Pizza Dough. Indeed, I wrote an entire post about avoiding the hassle and using my bread machine. (Which I still love! And P.S. both Lukas Volger and Julia Child think it’s a good gadget, too.)

But sometimes, I get the yen for slowing down and making some dough myself. And when things align perfectly, like a bread-baking solar eclipse, my mom is visiting from Canada when the urge hits. Therefore, I actually have the energy and focus required for making it because she has taken my hungry, hungry hippos outside for a bit. (She also likes to take pictures so I have photographic evidence of this creation!)

Anyways, these rolls are amazing and I want to put the accompanying honey butter on anything and everything I can from here on out. There is a burger bun variation I plan to make before my mom leaves again, and we return to more harried bread production.

2) Breakfast Burritos: Variations on a Theme

Breakfast is my own personal bête noir. I am decidedly not a morning person, but I am a vehement breakfast person. (It’s an unfortunate combination, but I’m trying to hold two things at once.) I need at least two hours and four cups of coffee to begin functioning, neither of which are feasible with my two small morning birds chirping away hungrily alongside my own stomach’s admonitions. Add to that the need for three quarters of my house to be out the door shortly after 7 am, and the conditions for a hangry hurricane of chaos begin to swirl.

To this end, I like to make breakfast ahead of time. My kids are in a very strong Cheerio phase right now, so that’s easy. But what about me?!

Behold the breakfast burrito. Here in New Mexico, people love these things. In fact, when I went into labor with my second baby, my husband and I made a pit stop for a burrito on the way to the hospital, even though I was technically at risk of precipitous labor. Priorities.

But, while delicious and filling, breakfast burritos have a downside. They are annoying to make. So I set out to find a recipe that had the best work to reward ratio for me.

I’ve tried a bunch. The PW Breakfast Burritos from the OG The Pioneer Woman Cooks were pretty disappointing in flavor—like one big, weird, mushy scramble in a burrito. To be fair, there is an option in the book to use frozen potatoes and I chose it, which could have been my downfall. Maybe it’s improved with homemade taters. I can’t say because I’ve never reattempted.

The Smitten Kitchen Breakfast Burritos are wonderful and have a great sheet pan shortcut, but I still hate chopping the potatoes.

From the Ambitious Kitchen Cookbook, The Breakfast Burritos that Should Always Be in Your Freezer will, in all likelihood, seldom be in my freezer, because, while good and high yield, they are especially finicky.

The recipe I have been making for weeks now is the Freezer Breakfast Burritos, 3 Ways from Well Plated: Every Day by Erin Clarke. (If you don’t have the book, you can access the recipe with the ebook preview through your library or whatever seller you prefer.) The recipe is fairly straightforward, very flexible, and it begins with frozen potatoes. It has a rather weird, extraneous step of microwaving the potatoes before sautéing them with other veggies, so I just sauté them with a bit of a head start to avoid an extra dish. I also leave out the avocado, because a frozen and thawed or week-old avocado sounds gross to me. Otherwise, I’ve made this in many variations. Bacon, sausage, pesto-veggie, and all have worked well.

Is it an authentic New Mexico breakfast burrito? Nope. But you can throw in some chile—red or green—and pretend if you want. We do sometimes.

3) Scallops and Sun-Dried Tomato Couscous

There are a lot of downsides to your two-year-old turning off your chest freezer without your knowledge, but you have to look at the silver linings when you’re done crying into your partially thawed chuck roast. Sure, half your meat needs to be cooked ASAP even though you barely had time to brush your hair today, but now you don’t have to wait for a special occasion to eat those scallops. Now you get scallops on a random Thursday! Congratulations!

Should you run into this situation, or perhaps a less stressful scallop occasion, I highly recommend Scallops and Sun-Dried Tomato Couscous from The Mediterranean Dish: Simply Dinner (I wrote about this book a little while back). This meal is a combination of some basic, fresh flavors—parsley, lemon, sun-dried tomatoes, and pearl couscous—that combine to become something incredibly flavorful and bright. It really lets the natural sweetness of the scallops come through.

Suzy Karadsheh, the author, writes in the headnote that this is “easy for a busy weeknight” and, listen, we’re all different people, but that’s a lie. It requires three cooking vessels, transferring things in and out of pots, a few components, tenting with foil, and above-average concentration in dinner terms.

But it is so good, that if you are saving your scallops for a nice meal, it’s worth the effort.

4) Pumpkin Soup

There are few things both my children will eat, and if we leave Cheerios, pancakes, and ice cream off that list, then it’s probably not even accurate to call it a list anymore. One will be asking for a third helping of something, while the other will be horrified at me for even daring to assault their senses with such pigswill.

It is for this reason that I find it exceptionally noteworthy when they both eat something and enjoy it. If that dish just happens to be easy and tasty for me, too, then it’s a jackpot.

That’s what the Pumpkin Soup from Chloe’s Vegan Italian Kitchen accomplished for us this month. I doubled the recipe so it used one full can of coconut milk, and I skipped the Brussels sprout garnish out of laziness. It didn’t seem like it would make or break the soup, and I don’t think it did.

Did the quarter cup of brown sugar in there help the child-approval rating? Without a doubt. Do I care? I do not.

One more tip: years ago wrote about pastry monograms in the Dinner: A Love Story cookbook. I didn’t have kids when I first read it, but it stuck with me. Now, I monogram soup with either coconut milk or cream, and let me tell you, it always gets my preschooler to at least try it!

5) Saucy Sesame-Ginger Meatballs

A few years ago, Clarkson Potter sent me Once Upon a Chef: Weeknight/Weekend (thanks!) by Jennifer Segal, and I’ve found it to be very reliable over the years. I haven’t stopped using it.

A couple weeks back, I had an annoying half-pound of ground pork hanging around my freezer, and I chose this meatball recipe to use it up. It was delicious and pretty easy to put together.

While we’re on the topic of the original Pioneer Woman Cooks, I used to make her Comfort Meatballs often, and the Once Upon a Chef meatballs remind me of those. They have a sweet, ketchup-based glaze, but the Sambal Oelek in Segal’s sauce, along with the ginger and soy sauce in the meat make them a bit more complex in flavor. They definitely lean in the meatloaf direction, and I say that as someone who loves meatloaf. I liked these a lot, and so did 50% of my offspring. Good enough!

6) Indonesian Ginger Chicken

Recently, I wrote about Ina Garten’s memoir and her Coconut Cupcakes. But while I was on my Ina kick I made a few more classic recipes, including the Indonesian Ginger Chicken from The Barefoot Contessa Cookbook.

In my second-hand copy of this book, the page on which this recipe is printed is completely spattered—a sign of a good recipe. On top of that, it is apparently a favorite of Jeffrey, Ina’s husband.

The recipe is six ingredients, can be made ahead, is easy, and it tastes great cold from the fridge. That means you can grab a drumstick and eat it standing up whenever you suddenly realize you’re famished but don’t feel like washing a plate.

It's a teriyaki marinade in spirit, with honey, soy sauce, garlic, and ginger. I’m not sure what makes it Indonesian, but I do think it would make a great picnic chicken. I’ll have to get back to you on that, though, because I’m still more of an aspiring picnic person.

Honorable Mentions

I loved the Hot-Honey Glazed Salmon from the Ambitious Kitchen Cookbook. My husband thought it was fine. He really liked the Coconut Fish Tacos with Mango Salsa from Seriously, So Good by Carissa Stanton, but I found it annoying to make and a bit lackluster. My kids’ vote goes out to Gorton’s Fish Sticks, so they technically win.

Speaking of Jenny Rosenstrach, I’ve made her Yogurt Flatbread from The Weekday Vegetarians a lot recently. It’s easy and fast, a dough made from greek yogurt and baking powder, cooked like a big pancake. So if your grocery store doesn’t carry any flatbread apart from tortillas (nope, not even pita), this might be a good option for you, too.

My future holds at least two birthday cakes, a leg of lamb I bought on sale, and the very New Mexico season of pure wind. Hopefully I have some more tasty things to write about soon.

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Then, this past fall, just as I was embarking on the latest season of Only Murders in the Building—a season in which Longoria was a guest star—her new book, My Mexican Kitchen: 100 Recipes Rich with Tradition, Flavor, and Spice, appeared on my doorstep (or rather, at my PO Box).2

In Only Murders, Longoria, playing an embellished version of herself, lectures one of the main characters on diversifying revenue streams. And, as it turns out, Longoria has been doing this exact thing in real life. Not only does she have a tequila brand, she also has been establishing herself as a food authority.

This pivot isn’t completely unprecedented. You may know (I didn’t) that she released her first cookbook in 2011. Of that book, Longoria states in her introduction to My Mexican Kitchen:

“I so clearly remember telling my editor that, while I planned to include some Mexican dishes, I didn’t want the book to be all Mexican food. I saw my cooking as a reflection of me and, although my Mexican heritage is an essential part of my identity, I didn’t want to be defined solely by it.”

Since then, Longoria has moved to embrace this heritage. She is married to a Mexican man with whom she has a son, and she calls both Los Angeles and Mexico City home.

Apart from these personal credentials, she has also pursued the subject professionally, hosting a CNN culinary documentary, Searching for Mexico, and cohosting a food history podcast, Hungry for History.

The Book

Both of these influences—her home and working life—inform this book. The dishes are a mash up of unique dishes from her travels, staples her family likes to eat, childhood favorites, and some restaurant recreations. Longoria, who grew up in Texas, calls it a “Texican” approach. Overall, it’s largely Mexican, with a bit of Texas and California thrown in.

As such, the recipes themselves are varied. The book has a chapter each on breakfast, soup, sides/salads, tostadas, tortilla-based dishes (tacos, taquitos, enchiladas, quesadillas), masa-based dishes (tamales, sopes, gorditas, huaraches, tlacoyos), main dishes, desserts, drinks, and a final chapter on staples and condiments (tortillas, salsas, beans).

Some are quite simple weeknight dishes, like grilled shrimp tacos, veggie quesadillas, and a picadillo made with frozen mixed vegetables. Others are more complex, such as short rib birria and tamales. There are classic Mexican dishes that you may well have a million recipes for already, like a margarita, chicken tinga, and a tres leches cake. And then there are some deep cuts, like Huevos con Jocoque, a Lebanese-Mexican egg-and-yogurt dish, and Vanilla Chicken, where the poultry is cooked in a cream sauce heavily flavored with Mexican vanilla.

Paging through the book, I was very excited to begin cooking. Living in such a rural area, my access to ingredients beyond basic-American cuisine is pretty constrained. The one exception to that, however, is Mexican ingredients. Owing to the large Mexican-American population around these parts, I could find everything Longoria called for at my local Walmart. The various chiles, Maria cookies, Abuelita chocolate, fideo, cotija, piloncillo, and so on were no issue.

Having lived in places like Appalachia, suburban Ontario, and Washington, DC with only a rundown Giant nearby, I know this access is not a given. If you live in such a place, this book might be a bit tougher to cook from. Longoria gives substitutions where she can, but a good Latin grocer/aisle is definitely your friend if you want to make good use of My Mexican Kitchen.

As one more fun aside, Longoria intersperses the book with historical and culinary facts about Mexican food, which I enjoyed. She delves into the history of vanilla—the orchid is endemic to Mexico—along with asides about beans, chiles, and agave plants.

My Cooking Experience

Being able to explore a bunch of new flavors, products, and dishes on the cheap, I launched into this cookbook full steam ahead. I was emerging from the haze of Matty Matheson’s Soups, Salads, Sandwiches, and I was looking forward to some more easygoing cooking.

One of the first dishes I tried was Longoria’s Fideo Soup, a classic Mexican/Mexican-American comfort food. For 70 cents, I bought a bag of fideo (small noodles), and for not much more, a few tomatoes and an onion. Longoria’s recipe is quick, simple, and now one of my kid’s favorite meals. As I wrote in my year-end cookbook roundup, we make this soup about once a week. The little ones like it plain, while I like to bulk it up with avocado and sometimes canned (yes, canned, I loved canned meat, sue me) chicken. For us, this recipe satisfies all our needs. It’s cheap, easy, fast, and gets eaten by all even though there’s no chocolate in it.

Then, I made the above mentioned Eggs con Jocoque, for which I did have to invest in some mail-order za’atar (only half a teaspoon and I wanted to get some anyway to cook some things from The Mediterranean Dish: Simply Dinner). Similar to Turkish eggs, these were simply fried eggs served atop garlicky yogurt, doused in flavorful finishers. These were okay, though I will admit I used Matheson’s Salsa Macha instead of Longoria’s because I had it hanging around in the fridge, and I think this probably did not help matters. (I would like to try Longoria’s Salsa Macha soon.)

That same weekend, I was invited to a Dia de Los Muertos potluck. I cooked up some Café de Olla, a sweetened and spiced coffee, from the book and got to work putting together a Chocoflan in my toaster oven (my big one being broken).

While the coffee was delicious and apparently authentic tasting according to a friend who knows about such things, the Chocoflan was a bit of a mess. Essentially a flan and rich chocolate cake baked together, Chocoflan is a classic for many but new to me. Because I bake way above sea level and I was working with an unknown oven, I’m not surprised it failed but I was a bit disappointed. The flavor was good, but the flan was a bit like scrambled eggs. (Apologies to all potluck attendees.)

The following day, a lazy Sunday, I embarked on the Short Rib Birria, subbing in chuck roast as suggested because that’s what I had and also have you seen the price of short ribs?! To go with it, I made Longoria’s Chipotle Salsa. My husband skipped right to the leftover stage and made the Birria French Dip. It was a lot of work but not hard and the result was good enough, though probably better with the ribs and without kids complaining about how much they don’t want to eat it.

Next up, I made Grilled Spiced Shrimp Tacos, with homemade Flour Tortillas and Tomatillo Salsa from the book. The shrimp was easy if not groundbreaking, though I sautéed it instead of grilling. The tortillas were a bit of work but tasty. The salsa was a big hit.

On the side I made a Classic Margarita and a Flamin’ Hot Margarita. The latter was a jalapeño-spiked cocktail with a Tajín rim and it was delicious. As I noted, Longoria has a tequila line, and this is definitely a good way to sell me tequila.

In fact, the Bebidas (drinks) chapter has gotten a lot of use in this house. The Champurrado is a delicious, thick hot chocolate with piloncillo (an unrefined cane sugar you grate) and masa harina (a type of corn flour). An Aperol Spritz Margarita was exactly what it sounded like in all the best ways.

Finally, I made the chicken taquitos. Again, these were a bit of work and involved deep frying. In fact, there is a fair amount of frying in this book. I, personally, have too many hangups to regularly embark on frying. The thought of a scalding hot pot of oil in the same zip code as my children makes me nervous, and I worked in a tiny kitchen with a huge deep fryer in college, so the smell transports me nowhere good.

That being said, they tasted like something you would get at a restaurant and my two tiny chicken abstainers ate them with enthusiasm. For dessert, I made the Carlota de Limón, a dead simple citrus icebox cake with a result that greatly outweighed the effort to make it.

Final Thoughts

I’ve had this book since October, and you might be able to tell from the amount I’ve cooked from it that I do enjoy it. This result is partly based on a few factors specific to me any my family.

First, we mostly love Mexican food, and one of my kids will reliably eat chips and salsa while eschewing everything else so I can pretend I’m cooking “one meal for everyone.”

Second, I have access to all the ingredients and they are affordable, so it has been a fun way for me to try some new things.

I wouldn't call it a staunchly weeknight or quick-and-easy book, though the options are in there. It’s a pretty personal mix to Longoria, and there are eccentricities. But if you are new to cooking Mexican food and want to learn some basics, it is a good start. Similarly, if you want to delve a bit deeper, there are things inside here for you, too, though perhaps a bit less.

I have a long list of what to try next. My dear neighbor just brought me back some vanilla from Mexico, and thanks to this book, I have a good idea of where it came from and some exciting things to do with it.

As for the various ways in which to use tequila, I am especially thankful for that right now, too.

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And the first few recipes I tried from that book were absolute disasters. I knew not about Diamond Crystal kosher salt being two times as salty as Morton, and so I served a painfully salty butternut squash hummus to friends.

I have since learned to reduce the amount of plebeian salt (Sam’s Club sea salt these days, thanks) that I use, and I have cooked many great recipes—and some fine recipes—from Garten’s books. I own every single one now.

While I like Ina and respect her commitment to quality, I am not an Ina superfan. I am a regular fan, reluctant to bestow a royal title on any one person, mostly because I find that a sensible way to move through the world.

The upshot from all of this is that I was modestly excited for Ina’s memoir, Be Ready When the Luck Happens, if not a bit disappointed that it wasn’t a cookbook. I put a library hold on the audiobook, read the Ina profile in The New Yorker, and moved on with my life, confidently believing I had a sense of what was contained therein. If nothing else, it would be fun thing to listen to on my 45-minute drive to the grocery store whenever my kid fell asleep and I could turn off the Elmo.

What was I expecting? I suppose more of the same narrative that I absorbed about Ina through the cultural zeitgeist plus the combination of knowing her through her cookbooks and TV shows. To me, she has always conveyed simplistic joviality, and I absorbed her as a representation of entertaining perfection. So I expected the narrative of the infallible Ina: the recipes always succeed, the choices are always tasteful, Jeffrey is the best, and being rich—how easy is that?

Getting Into Be Ready When the Luck Happens

What I found in the memoir, however, was so much more complex and interesting. Ina, as a person, is different than my shallow conception. She is a bit reckless, constantly jumping into things without thinking about the consequences. She is strong-minded, self-doubting, and incredibly hard-working. She spent a good chunk of her life flailing around trying to find a purpose, she hated school, she partied so hard in the Hamptons with her staff once that someone had to pull her out of a stranger’s pool.

The book, to my mind, can be divided into three rough parts. The first is the pre-Barefoot Contessa years. This includes all of Ina’s upbringing, her marriage to Jeffrey, her boring DC jobs, and everything else up to her purchase of the Barefoot Contessa store in 1978.

Following this is, to my mind, the meatiest and most fascinating section. The middle part is about Ina as an entrepreneur, figuring out how to run, grow, and walk away from Barefoot Contessa.

Then, it covers Ina’s transition into cookbook author and TV star in her 50s. This part is really inspiring and occasionally hilarious, like when Martha Stewart’s crew tried to film a TV show at Ina’s house, breaking the septic system, and spewing sewage everywhere. Ina comes off as strong, competent, collaborative, and a generous mentor. She messes up, she problem solves, she runs out of money, she reinvents herself, she holds convictions. I loved it.

Finally, there is the last part. All memoirs, as a function, tend to have less-realized concluding sections. The closer authors get to the present, the less perspective they have. The same can be said for the final parts of this book. They are gossipy and bright, mostly about celebrity friends and backgrounders on viral moments. While the rest of the book feels reflective and candid, Ina recedes into her polished image in this part. Life is just a happy dinner party, and all the famous guests are so fun.

That is not to say she is baring her soul entirely through the rest of the book. She puts barriers up around Jeffrey and her relationship with him. Just as the food world hails Ina as a flawless deity, so too does Ina prostrate before her higher power: Jeffrey. Jeffrey saves her and supports her. Like Ina’s recipes, Jeffrey never fails.

By now, all the most salacious tidbits of the book have been pulled and quoted, and if you pay any attention you probably know that in the 1970s, Ina and Jeffrey separated briefly. Still, Ina shows that Jeffrey was faultless. I believe no one owes us any story about themselves that they don’t want to tell, and I greatly respect the protection Ina puts around Jeffrey.

I think it also reveals something about this book on the whole. Ina has invited us in, but she is still our ever-gracious host. She’s going to make us feel good for the night. She’s arranged everything just so, according to her vision. But don’t worry about the mess, and please, let’s keep the conversation mostly light, shall we? We don’t need to dwell on that. Now who needs another drink?

Cooking with Ina

Of course, part of reading this book is learning about food, and sending you running into the kitchen. (For example, did everyone but me know that Chicken Marbella is pronounced “Mar-BEY-ya”?!)

There are three recipes included with the memoir: Coq au Vin, Coconut Cupcakes, and Outrageous Brownies. Due to current kitchen constraints (my oven in broken), I chose to make Coconut Cupcakes in my toaster oven, which will not fit the entire sheet pan requisite for the brownies.

This recipe is classic Barefoot Contessa fare, and one of the store’s most famous. The coconut flavor comes entirely from shredded coconut in the batter and atop the cupcake. No coconut extract, flour, oil, or sugar here (many of these ingredients being obscure to nonexistent at the recipe’s creation). There is almond extract in both the cake and the cream cheese icing, which makes that more of a dominant flavor.

The yields for these Barefoot Contessa Recipes are pretty huge. While ostensibly enough for 18-20 large cupcakes, I got 24 big cupcakes cooked in an average pan. The muffin tops spread out over the top of the pan, I think by design, but my life was made easier when I sprayed the top of the pan with cooking spray before baking the second batch so I didn’t have to extract them so carefully.

I made a half batch of icing, which turned out to be more than enough to frost the whole batch, plus some leftover.

Upon first taste, the cupcakes were distinctive. My husband declared they tasted like something from the 80s or 90s. With further discussion, we determined there was a richness that harkened to another time and place.

While I mostly zone out while baking, I decided to compare the recipe to other cupcakes to see if it was, in fact, richer.

And it is! Significantly! I combed my cookbook collections for cupcakes—classic cupcakes, contemporary cupcakes, current cupcakes—only to find that every single one called for, at most, eight tablespoons of butter per twelve cupcakes. Ina, in contrast, called for twelve—50% more butter. On top of that, most recipes included one to two large eggs max per twelve cupcakes, whereas Ina’s recipe called for two-and-a-half extra-large eggs.

I am worlds away from the Hamptons of the 1980s, but, opulent cupcake in hand, it tastes like I’m right there in that store, rubbing shoulders with Lauren Bacall and Steven Spielberg, asking for a roast chicken to go.

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So I thought it would be fun to look back and see what I actually used and enjoyed the most in 2024.

On top of that, I love reading end-of-year, best-of cookbook lists, but I find they rarely reflect what I’m actually using in the kitchen. So this is honest to goodness what I cook from time and again. I’m not here to juice any numbers and impress you with my range and eclectic tastes, I’m just here to say what worked on the ground for me.

My Most-Used Cookbooks of the Year

Most Used Overall: Pizza Night by Alexandra Stafford and What To Cook When You Don’t Feel Like Cooking by Caroline Chambers

I acquired Pizza Night by in April (courtesy of Clarkson Potter) and What To Cook When You Don’t Feel Like Cooking by in August (courtesy of my birthday), both about which I have already written extensively. They have lived up to my own hype and I have used both nearly weekly since.

I have, thus far, used Pizza Night mostly for the crust recipes, and I have experimented with the bulk of the cooking methods. I am most proud of the fact that the book helped me master a mean grilled pizza.

Making two grandma pizzas from Pizza Night became my go-to move for a steady rotation of guests in the spring and summer, and one of them offered to pay me to make the same for a party. There was no follow up, but I think that means it was good.

I hope to have more bandwidth for fun toppings soon. Let’s make that my New Year’s Resolution.

Similarly, I’ve put What To Cook to intense and repeated use. In heavy rotation are the tuna melts, chicken tinga, and cottage cheese pancakes. I made the short ribs for Christmas dinner (good!) and I’m making the bo ssam for New Year’s Day (tbd!). My husband requested the chicken parm sliders mentioned in my review for his birthday meal (high praise!) and they were just as good the second time. This is a highly cookable book.

Most Used Late Additions: The Ambitious Kitchen Cookbook by Monique Volz and My Mexican Kitchen by Eva Longoria

I’ve only been using The Ambitious Kitchen Cookbook and My Mexican Kitchen (thanks for the free book Clarkson Potter!) since October, so while I’ve used them quite a bit, I don’t have a long-term perspective.

I’ve found a lot in Ambitious Kitchen to be appealing and often quite good, though it occasionally seems needlessly labor intensive. I made an entire Canadian Thanksgiving meal from it, comprising Turkey Enchiladas and a Pumpkin Cake, that was overall really tasty, but at the same time a lot of work. There’s a fig jam and goat cheese pizza that was amazing, and a chicken and sweet potato sheet pan situation that was delicious, but again with the outsize effort. I am enjoying this one, if occasionally cursing at it.

I plan to write a full review of My Mexican Kitchen soon. As a preview, this has an excellent cocktail chapter, and it introduced our family to fideo soup. Anyone with even a glancing knowledge of Mexican food will know this is not a groundbreaking recipe, but it gets one of my kids regularly eating a meal without protest and that is no mean feat. We make Eva’s fideo soup one to two times per week. Time will tell how much this one gets used on the whole, but it’s coming off the shelf a lot currently. Full thoughts coming soon.

Most Used in the Single Recipe Category: Chloe Flavor by Chloe Coscarelli and The Real Food Table by Jessica Bascom and Stacie Hessing

I am a longtime Chloe Coscarelli fan. Her recipes are always reliable and delicious, and they have the added appeal of being kid-friendly. I memorized her cauliflower-based White Shells and Cheese Sauce from Chloe Flavor, altered to use frozen cauliflower rice and served with spaghetti. I made it every other week for months. And honorable mention for Pasta in Pink Sauce from Chloe’s Vegan Italian Kitchen, a runner-up to the cauliflower sauce for most cooked. (I reviewed Chloe Flavor on Amazon way back when it came out in 2018!)

As for The Real Food Table, from the creators of The Real Food Dietitians, I make the Oven-Baked French Toast Casserole about once a month to use up the random bread crusts/buns/bread heels on my freezer door. This is a good little book that I got when I had gestational diabetes a few years ago and that I have had consistently good results with. But it’s the French toast casserole that puts it on the list. Pairing this with a smoothie is my go-to move for fending off my kids’ diehard attempts at developing scurvy.

Most Used in the Baby/Toddler Feeding Category: More Veggies Please! by Nikki Dinki and Fast Family Food by Rebecca Wilson

(Alternate tile: best books bought out of desperation on Book Outlet late one night when I was despairing about my children’s diets)

Are you a person who disagrees with sneaking veggies into kid food? Not me! I sneak away. And these books help!

The great thing about both these books is that they focus on kid food without emphasizing abstemious food, a surprisingly hard thing to find. Once you wade into the little-kid-food world, you’ll start finding things that don’t seem to fit, like the avoidance of grains, fat, and dairy for no discernible reason. That is why I like both of these books. They focus on delicious food without shoehorning any other kind of diets in.

More Veggies Please! is aimed at a broad range of kids. The recipes can be labor intensive and the end results can have a laughably small amount of vegetables per serving. But there are a lot of winners in here and most everything I’ve made—never again to the bean chocolate chip cookies, though—has tasted great and has a high acceptance rate with my tiny tough crowd. I’ve been using this one since 2022 regularly.

This book is best for toddlers through kindergarteners, but it’s good for anyone who wants to sneak in some more nutrition without reducing things like calories and fat. Off the top of my head, maybe pregnant folks, or anyone in a caretaking role of an older person who needs both nutrition and calories.

Fast Family Food by Rebecca Wilson, on the other hand, is aimed at the youngest eaters. The premise of all Wilson’s books, and I have three of them, is that both weaning babies and the people that eat with them should be able to eat the same thing. Sounds easy until you start looking at some of the baby dietary guidelines—there’s only so much after-cooking-seasoned soup this mom can take.

Wilson loads up recipes with cheese, butter, and spices, that make food tasty for little weaners and palatable for others with small additions. I had a high success rate with these, particularly the baked goods, which got my kid eating things he might not otherwise—green bean muffins, salmon muffins, and cabbage flatbread. They sometimes even worked on my preschooler. Fast Family Food was my favorite of the Wilson set. It’s best for kids around one year old, maybe two, though, making it a short shelf life book.

Most Used Online Resources

I mentioned this way back, but I cooked a ton from Thriving Home’s 1 Hour Freezer Prep. Mostly breakfasts, but also lots of meat in marinade to throw on the grill in the summer, largely with good results. On top of that, my whole family likes this recipe for tortellini soup, and I cling to that for dear life, because it rarely happens.

By far my most used blog is Pinch of Yum, which I find super reliable and generally good. I like the beef stew, zucchini muffins, pecan pie energy bites, harissa meatballs, lasagna Florentine, and sheet-pan pitas.

My favorite online menu was Caroline Chambers’s Easy-But-Fancy Holiday Menu, from which I drew heavy inspiration this year to good effect.

And, of course, to Hoopla and Libby and public libraries for being the best and helping me not buy every single book ever—or maybe convincing me I need every book? Not sure yet.

Standout Recipes of the Year

Standout Single Recipes

I had a lot of hits from the Ina extended universe this year. And while it was not so long ago that I wrote a fairly tepid review of Cooking in Real Life by Lidey Heuck, I must admit I have used it a lot. It might even fit in the above categories. But I am writing now about the Ice Cream Sprinkle Cake, which is a top recipe this year. Special mention also to the Crunchy Cucumber Salad with Peanuts & Chili Flakes.

The Cheddar and Scallion Creamed Corn from Modern Comfort Food was outstanding.

The Lemon Squares from ’s Baking in the American South were fantastic, easy to make, and fed a large horde of people. (I actually received an ARC of this way back, and I still aim to write a review because the book is a true treasure.)

The Detroit Pizza from Pizza Night was a big favorite, as were the Chicken Parm sliders from What to Cook, as mentioned above. Olive Oil Snack Cake from At My Italian Table by Laura Vitale was great, too.

Standout Meal: Roast Chicken with Schmaltzy Potatoes + Garlic Sauce + Chile Crisp + Watermelon Salad from Kismet by Sara Kramer and Sarah Hymanson

This meal from Kismet was so good and the best single meal I’ve eaten all year. However, now is the part when I admit I have not picked this book up again since I wrote a review of it.

Not most used, then, but very much loved.

Favorite $1 Find

I wrote all about Marian Burros after taking a deep-dive into her old columns, so I was so excited when I came across her 1981 book, Keep it Simple, at my library store. I haven’t been through it in any depth yet, but it was definitely one of the ones I wanted. I love when that happens.

That’s all for now. Happy New Year! I hope you eat so many delicious things and find piles of good $1 books in 2025! (OR successfully purge your collection—I haven’t decided which direction I’m going in on this one, yet.)

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This is the reason why I knew Matty Matheson was Canadian. I knew very little about him apart from that fact. I came across it one day, filed it away, and proceeded to relay it to anyone who watched The Bear with me.

In fact, I knew so little, I actually thought he was from Montreal all this time, but he’s not. He’s from the Niagara region of Ontario, and he lives there to this day.

All of this is to say, I was very excited to receive his new cookbook, Soups, Salads, Sandwiches, and write an unabashedly glowing review. (Thanks Ten Speed Press for the free copy!) Matty, after all, is incredibly accomplished and well loved—restaurants, and producer credits, and a huge social media following. His cookbooks are favorably reviewed and top sellers. And obviously I like The Bear because I have a soul.

I was pumped to get to know him and his recipes. I was cracking my knuckles, ready to put my thumb on the scale.

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The Book, in General

The book itself is beautiful. I’m not great at describing photography, but it’s filled with kind of moody, retro, disposable-camera-looking photos of Matty and his family on heavy matte paper. It’s fun to feel and to flip through.

It’s also organized as expected: one section on soup, one on salads, one on sandwiches. It’s 127 recipes in total, according to Eat Your Books, divided more or less evenly.

A thorough read through, however, made me realize that this book was a bit strange and wily. My first reaction was, this book is not really for me. Cooking, for Matty, does not seem to be about getting food on the table every night. That’s not his thing. And that’s fine; that doesn’t make a bad book.

But my second thought was, I actually have no idea who this book is for or really even what cooking is for Matty.

He starts out his book by saying that it is for the home cook. "These are just at-home recipes that are easy and fun," he promises, "Just open the book, pick a recipe, cook it, close it, and put it back on the shelf.”

Sounds great, count me in!

After reading and cooking from it, though, I have to disagree. Some of the recipes are wildly complex, with involved preparation methods and long processes (prep time: 2-12 days!), and others are ridiculously simple, like a grilled cheese made with Kraft Singles.

Hard-to-find ingredients abound, but never the same hard-to-find ingredient, so that if you cooked from the book you'd have random spices and condiments from which you've used one teaspoon. One day, you might be chasing around hamachi fillets and honeycomb, the next doubanjiang and Kimmelweck rolls. So you can’t just open it and cook from it most of the time. Even if you live in the most well-provisioned of cities, it would be a huge ask.

And if you don’t live in such a city? Well, I don’t think I have to tell you that my local grocers carried none of these things. Did they carry Kraft Singles? Yes, but how interested are you in knowing how good Matty’s Kraft Singles grilled cheese recipe is? Yeah, me neither.

Actually, I don’t even like Kraft Singles (sorry). And this is another thing I found frustrating about the book. Matty implores you to buy the best ingredients, except for when he instructs you to buy Kraft Singles or bacon bits. Honestly, the weird gatekeeping of what lowbrow foods are acceptable lowbrow foods and when you should absolutely talk to your butcher kind of bugs me.

Cooking with Matty

That being said, there were some recipes I managed to cook living without access to specialty ingredients and with limited time. First up the Canadian Donair with Onion, Tomato, and Donair Sauce. I’ve actually wanted to try a Donair since one very homesick Halifax-transplant of a math teacher spoke about them in great detail every day of the ninth grade so I bookmarked this one immediately. And I liked it. It had a very unique and strong flavor profile. The sauce was basically just sweetened condensed milk, vinegar, and garlic powder, and it tasted exactly how it sounds. The whole thing was super spicy, unique, good, and not hard.

The Broiled and Burnt Roasted Tomato Soup with Grilled Cheese Crostini Thing [sic] was okay. The soup was both overwhelmingly spicy and bit bland, and there was definitely not enough crostini for the amount of soup. I’m talking something like ten servings of soup to a generous four servings of crostini. Not a repeat soup for me.

The Broccoli Salad with Bacon Vinaigrette Dressing, Fried Egg, and Gorgonzola was quite good and not too challenging for a weeknight, kind of like a broccoli spin on a wedge salad. Good salad. No complaints.

The Black Beans with Cotija, Cilantro, Red Onion, Crumbled Pork Rinds, Oregano, and Salsa Macha was solid, but not particularly special. The friends I served it to really liked it, but it didn’t feel worth the effort. The flavors were fairly muddled, and the pork rind garnish quickly turned mushy.

On top of that, it calls for guajillo chile powder, ancho chile powder, and Mexican oregano. I can actually find all those near me, so that’s not an issue. My frustration is that I believe this is the only—or close to it—recipe in the book that uses any of these ingredients. If you have to do that for every recipe, things get expensive fast, and pantries get full. It points to a lack of cohesion in the book that got under my skin. What am I supposed to do with all this stuff after this one single recipe? (To be fair, Matty never promised cohesion, nor is it his brand as far as I can tell.)

Final Thoughts

Matty has a very popular online presence and is incredibly successful, but I'm not sure it quite translates for the home cook. The book is a bit disjointed, and the writing is all over the place. If you're used to Matty's voice, however, and want to cook what you see him make on YouTube by devoting an entire day or night to it, this is the book. If you're interested in exploring a wide variety of tastes and techniques, this might also be appealing to you. But I struggle to imagine who the person is who could make good use of this book. It would be someone with lots of time time and access to ingredients and a large budget and ample pantry space.

Even then, however, the recipes I tried hinted that the time could possibly be spent in vain. I get the sense Matty is a bit of an instinctual and intuitive chef with a real natural talent, and I'm not sure that always comes across on the page.

You know he’s from Fort Erie, though, eh?

Whereas last year I painstakingly cut up pepperoni to make a mac and cheese jack-o’-lantern and was met with a blank stare, this year I am confident food in a silly shape will hold more appeal.

I must confess, I love Halloween-themed food, but entire menus are not always easy to find, nor are there an agreed upon Halloween foods. In fact, as I combed through many magazines from Octobers past and books that generally have menus for most holidays, Halloween was often excluded.

There are many reasons for this, I’m sure. The foremost, I would imagine, is that it is primarily a kids holiday that occurs, most unfortunately, right at kids’ dinnertime. This means that we are all trying to either shove food in our mouths before running out, or coming home to something that is hopefully already cooked, hence the popularity of chili as a Halloween dinner.

The second is that it is a holiday of sweets for kids and partying for the older set, so we mostly see desserts for the younger, and maybe cocktails for the older.

All that aside, I wanted to take a nostalgia trip to see what else I came up with for those books that did offer up some Halloween ideas. Here are some of the fun things I found.

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1950s

Halloween Cake from Betty Crocker’s Picture Cookbook.

This witchy cake from 1950 would still be beautiful today, if you are a person who is able to make such a nice witch out of melted chocolate. I am doubting my proficiency in this one, but maybe a stencil with cocoa powder would work just as well, and perhaps be a bit easier for the more decorationally challenged (it’s me, hi) among us.

Better Homes and Gardens New Cookbook Menu: Hot Dogs, Rolls Spread with Catsup, Canned Shoestring Potatoes, Jack-o-Lantern Cooky Faces, Apple Cider, Toasted Marshmallows.

This menu is made to be served around a campfire, for the ghost stories of course! It is a fun easy menu if you live somewhere where you don’t have to wear a coat under your Halloween costume so that you’re a sad, puffy Sailor Venus. To choose a random example.

Hot dogs definitely seem like a solid choice, though, when you come in the door at almost literally bedtime.

1960s

New York Times Menu Cookbook “Supper for Halloween” Menu: Witches’ Brew (Hot Buttered Rum with Cinnamon Sticks), Shrimp Toast, Buttered Nuts, Eleanor Hampstead’s Scalloped Oysters, Mushrooms Florentine, Orange Bavarian Cream, Chocolate Pudding I.

While Halloween was still for the kids in the 60s, Craig Claiborne did not seem one to miss a chance for a party. Here is a beautiful menu that I bet would go over as well today as it did 60 years ago.

I picture a very sophisticated older lady serving this in an urban apartment with lots of warm, dark paint colors on the walls to her eclectic mix of friends. I love the idea of orange Bavarian cream and chocolate pudding as a Halloween dessert, and I would like to try that when I am (fingers crossed) a sophisticated older lady entertaining my eclectic friends.

As for now, I might settle for stealing the idea of hot buttered rum, or something else hot and spiked.

1970s

Ideals All Holiday Cookbook Menu: Dainty Rolls, Beef Stroganoff, Candy Apples, Halloween Date Cake with Orange Butter Frosting.

This menu seems pretty classic, with a stew, some rolls, a cake, and classic candy apples. This stew is slow cooking, perhaps to be left in the oven while all the trick-or-treating fun happens and taken out after, just like chili! So if you hate chili, here’s another idea.

It also includes that all-time Halloween classic, candy apples. I haven’t had a candy apple in years, and it could be a fun thing to bring back. Preferably in the form of the candy apple’s tastier counterpart, the caramel apple.

Ghost Cake with Flaming Eyes from Betty Crocker’s Cookbook for Boys and Girls.

I really love this adorable cake and its simplicity. That’s a 9x13 cake mix cake with the corners cut off and turned upward to make the hands reach out. The eyes are eggshells and sugar cubes. This is a cake that would be very fun to decorate with a kid and then set on fire. Flambé for bébé.

1980s

Southern Living 1988 “Invite Spooky Friends To This Party” Menu: Quick Little Pizzas, Nutty Popcorn Balls, Gingerbread Man Cookies.

Pizza is a great Halloween idea, and Southern Living suggests eating before the main event. I probably would not make two-thirds of the menu sweets right before the candy bonanza, but I bet the sugar onslaught wasn’t quite as intense in the 80s. Or maybe it was and that was the 80s for you.

1990s-2000s

Southern Living 1999 Menu “No Trick to Treats for Teens”: Hot Apple Cider, Chili-Cheese Dip, Salmi Rollups, Almond Delight Dip, Chocolate-Peanut Butter Snacks, Marshmallow Popcorn Balls.

Another Halloween classic seems to be the popcorn ball. A popcorn ball paired with a candy apple would be a fun nostalgic Halloween menu if you want to layer sugar on your sugar fiesta, or if you are person who doesn’t get trick-or-treaters, have trick-or-treaters, or is not a trick-or-treater (been there).

Taste of Home Quick Cooking Annual Recipes 1999 “Speedy Spread is Spooktacular” Menu: Great Pumpkin Sandwiches, Bat Wing Soup, Frankenstein Salads, Black Cat Cupcakes.

Taste of Home Quick Cooking Annual Recipes 2002 “Scare Up This Fun Feast” Menu: Boo Beverage, Monster Munchies, Bewitching Chili, Cauldron Bread Bowls, Candy Corn Cookies.

These are all ideas you can pretty much riff on without a recipe, and honestly I think they’re great because they’re easy. I especially like the little pumpkin-shaped quesadilla-type thing (Great Pumpkin Sandwich) and I think I’ll use it for my menu. I like the cute whipped cream ghosts on the Boo Beverage, too.

Taste of Home Annual Recipes 1999 “Spooky Supper for Hungry Goblins” Menu: Jack-o’-Lantern Burgers, Broccoli Boo Salad, Wormy Orange Punch, Graveyard Cake.

Taste of Home Annual Recipes 2006 “Good Gobblin’ for a Ghostly Night” Menu": Spooky Joes, Halloween Caramel Apples, Spider Cupcakes, Great Pumpkin Brownie, Fingers of Fright.

Here we have two ideas for Halloween cheese cutouts, which work until you put the top of the bun on, I guess. I have my eye on that retro punch and graveyard cake.

One more thing—do people still make those popcorn gloves? They are bringing back murky but intense nostalgia.

2, 4, 6, 8: Great Meals for Couples or Crowds “Halloween Hoopla” Menu: Pumpkin-Peanut Curry Noodles with Five-Spice Seared Scallops and Shrimp, Looking for Mr. Goodbar Sundae.

If we’re talking early 2000s, we can’t miss Rachael Ray. I am definitely intrigued by the pumpkin peanut noodles. Peanut noodles are a big hit around here currently, and adding some pumpkin could be a fun way to alleviate my boredom and check some Halloween boxes. Win win.

2010s

Sugar Ghost Cupcake from Taste of Home Annual Recipes 2010.

Is that a cupcake with too much fondant? Yes it is! We must be in 2010. And I’m not quite ready to go back there yet. Let’s stop.

My Halloween Menu

Honestly, probably chili, Great Pumpkin Sandwiches ca. 1999, and tiny pumpkin candies. (My favorite Halloween chili is this one, not least because serving beans is equated to torture by some in this house and it has pumpkin.) Maybe something mummy shaped, too, because mummies are popular in this house.

Happy Halloween!

p.s. I didn’t cover the 1940s, but did a fun post on that recently if you’re in the market.

So as soon as Mediterranean Dish: Simply Dinner by Suzy Karadsheh arrived in my PO Box courtesy of Clarkson Potter (thanks!) I was ready to get into it.

Suzy, for those who don’t know, is a popular blogger and purveyor of Mediterranean goods over at The Mediterranean Dish. I have never really followed her online output, only becoming aware of her work two years ago when her first book, The Mediterranean Dish Cookbook, became very popular. I purchased a Kindle copy, though sadly never cooked from it because, well, I was seven months pregnant and it got away from me (okay and maybe I was baselessly scared of eating feta cheese).

But if there’s anything I love more than a debut cookbook, it’s the near-inevitable “easy” version that follows these days. Give me your quick, simple, prep-ahead recipes, food writers. I want them all! For those who hate this pared down approach, it is people like me who are to blame. I am the woman on the Clapham omnibus. Apologies.

So anyway, Simply Dinner was right up my alley.

About the Author’s Interpretation of Mediterranean

You’ve probably heard of the Mediterranean diet. Since the 1990s, it has been listed as one of the healthiest diets on the planet, and, ostensibly, a great way to eat for your heart, brain, and longevity. All good things.

But is “Mediterranean” in the culinary sense broad enough to be meaningless? I’ll give you a sec to look at the below map in case your geographical memory recall is terrible like mine, and think about the vast range of places that can be called Mediterranean:

All I’ll say is, it seems like a broad brush. What does it include food wise, then, in popular and medical parlance? I haven’t done a deep dive, but I am an avid consumer of clickbait nutrition articles and, it seems to me, the Mediterranean diet generally boils down to eat lots of plants, legumes, nuts, seafood, grains, and olive oil, and go easy on the meat and sweets.

So what is Suzy’s version of Mediterranean within this rather flexible definition?

In her first book, Suzy writes a beautiful and evocative introduction about growing up in Port Said in Egypt and wandering along the Suez Canal, that monumental symbol of cultural and commercial exchange.

This upbringing means that North African and Middle Eastern flavors heavily influence her cooking, though she also became familiar with Greek, Italian, British, French and other flavors when she lived at a such a significant culinary crossroads.

Suzy then moved to Canada for high school and the United States for college where she met and married a man with Jordanian ancestry. Far from her family, Suzy’s mother in law took her under her wing and taught her more about cooking. Suzy calls this her Levantine influence, which includes a lot of rice, warm spices, and hummus among other things.

And finally, Suzy counts all the states in the US where she has lived—Michigan, Iowa, and Georgia—as influences, if more subtly.

That is to say, it is a well-rounded interpretation of Mediterranean cuisine that tacks a bit more to the sea’s southeastern parts with some slight Americanization. (In this book, for example, there are Mediterranean spins on chili and chicken wings.)

In practice, as far as the book is concerned, it translates to a lot of vegetables and legumes—chickpeas, predominantly—as well as poultry and seafood. Beef, pork, and lamb make occasional appearances. Frying is not out of the question. Olive oil is used with abandon—I went through about three quarters of a bottle cooking from it for a week. Parsley and other fresh herbs are prominent. Suzy also like to say “garlic is life” so that gives you a clue as to her feelings on that.

The book, as the title suggests, is focused on dinner, though proper main dishes make up somewhere around half of the books recipes, maybe even a bit less. These include a chapter each on quick meals, soups, grilled food, and one-pan mains. The rest of the book, and the bulk of the chapters, is made up of small plates (a dinner option if you love washing lots of dishes), salads (mostly side salads), sides (breads and vegetables), protein add-ons, drinks and desserts, and condiments.

There is a note near the beginning about meal prep, but this isn’t really a meal prep book. There are little “Make-Ahead Tips” scattered about for things that can be prepared ahead of time, as a nod to this way of cooking, and which I appreciated, but not everything fits in this category.

My Life on the Mediterranean Diet

Mediterranean pantry prep

To begin, I thought it would be fun to make a homemade Harissa Paste. Suzy includes a recipe that uses New Mexico chiles, which she states are close to the chiles traditionally used in Tunisia, and, as a New Mexico resident, I couldn’t resist.

Now, to be fair, Suzy never promised that the condiments chapter would be simple, but I just have to say that, when making this, I felt like the very hungry caterpillar: I went through one pot, one mortar and pestle, one bowl, one colander, and one food processor. And I roasted my own peppers so I had to steam those. It was an affair.

But I was extremely happy with the resulting paste. It is incredibly fresh tasting and, importantly, not too spicy. That means, I can use it in many dishes and not burn my kids’ mouths. I have been putting it to work constantly since I made it.

Dinner, not always simply

Next, I made the Sheet-Pan Chicken Meatballs and Veggies. The entire thing was simply seasoned and easy to put together, with tomatoes, mushrooms, onions, and zucchini all flavored with Italian seasoning and garlic. I assembled it, as suggested, ahead of time, and then threw it in the oven a bit before dinner. The result was much more than I thought it would be based on the ingredients. It was hearty, flavorful, and filling, and I could honestly eat it once a week for the next year and be happy.

And I would do that, too, but my children would not touch a single part of it.

To use some of my harissa, I then made the Penne with Roasted Bell Pepper and Harissa Paste. Except I used fusilli instead of penne so I could market it as “accordion pasta” to the under four set.

This recipe was super simple to throw together, very flavorful, and a huge hit with everyone at my table. I have already made it twice.

On fish night, I went for the Garlic and Dijon Baked Salmon and paired it with Broccoli Fritters. Neither of these dishes was particularly hard—the salmon requiring a little foil tent and the fritters fried in a half inch of olive oil (pricey!). But neither of them seemed particularly worth the effort either.

The Armenian Apricot and Red Lentil Soup had a bit of a strange flavor profile for me. One of my children literally cried when taking a bite. Probably not a repeat for us. The Crispy Roasted Artichoke Hearts and Creamy Feta Dressing were fine if a bit forgettable.

Like the salmon and fritters, the Kleftiko-Style Spatchcock Roast Chicken, with potatoes, vegetables, and feta was quite good, and I loved living on the leftovers for a few days. That being said, the method seemed needlessly complex. It involved creating a huge parchment package for steaming the chicken, and there was very minimal direction on how to do this. I wouldn’t call myself a kitchen novice, and even with the aid of Google, folding this monstrosity eluded me. I had to throw my hands up before finally saying well I guess that’s good enough, and plunking it in the oven.

It was good, but I’m not sure the whole, complex process made it taste any better or different than a much easier chicken in a pot or some such.

The Spicy Adana Kebabs, on the other hand, were excellent. These spiced meat sticks were easy to throw together, could be made ahead of time, and they were intensely flavorful. I made the Sumac Marinated Onions, as suggested, to go with them. The whole thing was a hit. One of my kids is still begging for the pickled onions with most meals. (Can someone make children’s eating choices make sense?)

And for dessert

Finally, I had to make some desserts. Apparently some who follow the Mediterranean diet eschew dessert, but that is not the life for me. I, personally, like to eat cake and think about how great it is for my heart.

So I made the Italian Apple-Olive Bread. It turned out somehow both crumbly and dense for me. It honestly just made me crave the Olive Oil Apple Snack Cake from At My Italian Table. We did our best but didn’t finish it before it went off.

I then made the Amygdalota (Greek Almond Cookies). A mix of egg whites, almond flour, and sugar, these were easy and really good.

Final Thoughts

Out of the thirteen recipes I tried from this book, five are keepers (harissa, meatballs, pasta, kebabs, pickled onions), one was good (almond cookies), five were fine but likely not repeats (salmon, fritters, chicken, artichokes, feta dressing), and two I did not like very much (soup, cake). But the keepers in the book are real keepers and I know I will repeat them.

The ingredients are fairly accessible, too. Some of the harder things to find for me were Aleppo pepper, Urfa pepper, pomegranate molasses, and sumac. I had some of these things on hand from other cooking adventures, but a few required a roadtrip to procure, and even then the Urfa pepper was a no-go.

There is a lot more I want to cook from this book, and I am certain I am going to make a pretty good dent in it. The food is good, the flavors are interesting, and I like all the produce it helps me consume. The food feels healthful but not austere.

It might be for you if you are dying for a Mediterranean vacation so you can try the food but you need a cheaper option and/or are pretty sure jet lag would kill you considering how tired you are on a regular basis. Or, I guess, if you like the idea of a healthy long life and want to see what all the hype is about.

My husband said it made him feel great and asked if we could eat like this always—as he made the leftovers into nachos. Balance, friends.

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