Everything I Want to Eat: The New California Comfort Food from L.A.'s Sqirl


Jessica Koslow - 2016
      Jessica Koslow and her restaurant, Sqirl, are at the forefront of the California cooking renaissance, which is all about food that surprises us and engages all of our senses—it looks good, tastes vibrant, and feels fortifying yet refreshing. In Everything I Want to Eat, Koslow shares 100 of her favorite recipes for health-conscious but delicious dishes, all of which always use real foods—no fake meat or fake sugar here—that also happen to be suitable for vegetarians, vegans, or whomever you’re sharing your meal with.   The book is organized into seven chapters, each featuring a collection of recipes centered on a key ingredient or theme. Expect to find recipes for dishes Sqirl has become known for, as well as brand-new seasonal flavor combinations, including:  Raspberry and vanilla bean jamSorrel-pesto rice bowlBurnt brioche toast with house ricotta and seasonal jamButternut squash latkes with crème fraîche and applesauceLamb merguez, cranberry beans, roasted tomato, and yogurt cheeseValrhona chocolate fleur de sel cookiesAlmond hazelnut milk  Koslow lives in LA, where everyone is known to be obsessively health-conscious and where dietary restrictions are the norm. People come into Sqirl and order dishes with all sorts of substitutions and modifications—hold the feta, please, add extra kale. They are looking to make their own healthy adventures. Others may tack breakfast sausage, cured bacon, or Olli’s prosciutto on to their order. So Koslow has had to constantly think about ways to modify dishes for certain diets, which in a way has made her a better, more adaptable cook.   Throughout this book, Koslow provides notes and thought bubbles that show how just about any dish can be modified for specific tastes and dietary needs, whether it needs to be gluten-free or vegan.  Everything I Want to Eat captures the excitement of the food at Sqirl—think of a classic BLT sandwich turned playful with the substitution of chicken skin “bacon”—while also offering accessible recipes, like tangerine and rosewater semolina cake, that can be easily made in the home kitchen. Moreover, it’s an entirely new kind of cookbook and approach to how we are all starting to think about food, allowing readers to play with the recipes, combining and shaping them to be nothing short of everything you want to eat.   Praise for Jessica Koslow and Sqirl:   “Koslow’s dishes managed to galvanize the very narrow crossover of food writers and L.A. salad obsessives. Turns out that in her hands, breakfast and lunch are what people want to eat all day long.” —Bon Appétit   “I would say that Koslow and I are culinary soul mates, but given the popularity of the place, it’s clear that I’m not the only one. This is food whose time has come.” —Mark Bittman

The Pleasures of Cooking for One


Judith Jones - 2009
    It’s a fulfilling and immensely economical process, one perfectly suited for our times—although, as Jones points out, cooking for one also means we can occasionally indulge ourselves in a favorite treat.Throughout, Jones is both our instructor and our mentor, suggesting basic recipes—such as tomato sauce, preserved lemons, pesto, and homemade stock—that all cooks should have on hand; teaching us how to improvise using an ingenious strategy of building meals through the week; and supplying us with a lifetime’s worth of tips and shortcuts. From Child’s advice for buying fresh meat to Beard’s challenge to beginning crêpe-makers and Lidia Bastianich’s tips for cooking perfectly sauced pasta, Jones’s book presents a wealth of acquired knowledge from our finest cooks.The Pleasures of Cooking for One is a vibrant, wise celebration of food and enjoying our own company from one of our most treasured cooking experts.

Ad Hoc at Home


Thomas Keller - 2009
    . . don’t miss it.”—People   “A book of approachable dishes made really, really well.”—The New York Times Thomas Keller shares family-style recipes that you can make any or every day. In the book every home cook has been waiting for, the revered Thomas Keller turns his imagination to the American comfort foods closest to his heart—flaky biscuits, chicken pot pies, New England clam bakes, and cherry pies so delicious and redolent of childhood that they give Proust's madeleines a run for their money. Keller, whose restaurants The French Laundry in Yountville, California, and Per Se in New York have revolutionized American haute cuisine, is equally adept at turning out simpler fare. In Ad Hoc at Home—a cookbook inspired by the menu of his casual restaurant Ad Hoc in Yountville—he showcases more than 200 recipes for family-style meals. This is Keller at his most playful, serving up such truck-stop classics as Potato Hash with Bacon and Melted Onions and grilled-cheese sandwiches, and heartier fare including beef Stroganoff and roasted spring leg of lamb. In fun, full-color photographs, the great chef gives step-by-step lessons in kitchen basics— here is Keller teaching how to perfectly shape a basic hamburger, truss a chicken, or dress a salad. Best of all, where Keller’s previous best-selling cookbooks were for the ambitious advanced cook, Ad Hoc at Home is filled with quicker and easier recipes that will be embraced by both kitchen novices and more experienced cooks who want the ultimate recipes for American comfort-food classics.

Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat: Mastering the Elements of Good Cooking


Samin Nosrat - 2017
    Chef and writer Samin Nosrat has taught everyone from professional chefs to middle school kids to author Michael Pollan to cook using her revolutionary, yet simple, philosophy. Master the use of just four elements—Salt, which enhances flavor; Fat, which delivers flavor and generates texture; Acid, which balances flavor; and Heat, which ultimately determines the texture of food—and anything you cook will be delicious. By explaining the hows and whys of good cooking, Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat will teach and inspire a new generation of cooks how to confidently make better decisions in the kitchen and cook delicious meals with any ingredients, anywhere, at any time. Echoing Samin’s own journey from culinary novice to award-winning chef, Salt, Fat Acid, Heat immediately bridges the gap between home and professional kitchens. With charming narrative, illustrated walkthroughs, and a lighthearted approach to kitchen science, Samin demystifies the four elements of good cooking for everyone. Refer to the canon of 100 essential recipes—and dozens of variations—to put the lessons into practice and make bright, balanced vinaigrettes, perfectly caramelized roast vegetables, tender braised meats, and light, flaky pastry doughs. Featuring 150 illustrations and infographics that reveal an atlas to the world of flavor by renowned illustrator Wendy MacNaughton, Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat will be your compass in the kitchen. Destined to be a classic, it just might be the last cookbook you’ll ever need. With a foreword by Michael Pollan.

It's All Easy: Delicious Weekday Recipes for the Super-Busy Home Cook


Gwyneth Paltrow - 2016
    All the dishes are surprisingly tasty, with little or no sugar, fat, or gluten. From easy breakfasts to lazy suppers, this book has something for everybody. Yummy recipes include Chocolate Cinnamon Overnight Oats, Soft Polenta with Cherry Tomatoes, Chicken Enchiladas, Pita Bread Pizzas, Quick Sesame Noodles, and more! Plus, an innovative chapter for "on-the-go" meals (Moroccan Chicken Salad Wrap, Chopped Salad with Grilled Shrimp, and others) that you can take for lunch to work or school, to a picnic, or to eat while watching soccer practice!

My Mexico City Kitchen: Recipes and Convictions [A Cookbook]


Gabriela Camara - 2019
    With 150 recipes for Basicos (basics), Desayunos (breakfasts), Primeros (starters), Platos Fuertos (mains), and Postres (sweets), Mexican food-lovers will find all the dishes they want to cook--from Chilaquiles Verdes to Chiles Rellenos and Flan de Cajeta--and will discover many sure-to-be favorites, such as her signature tuna tostadas. More than 150 arresting images capture the rich culture that infuses Cámara's food and a dozen essays detail the principles that distinguish her cooking, from why non-GMO corn matters to how everything can be a taco. With celebrated restaurants in Mexico City and San Francisco, Cámara is the most internationally recognized figure in Mexican cuisine, and her innovative, simple Mexican food is exactly what home cooks want to cook.

Tartine Bread (Artisan Bread Cookbook, Best Bread Recipes, Sourdough Book)


Chad Robertson - 2010
    At 5 P.M., Chad Robertson's rugged, magnificent Tartine loaves are drawn from the oven. The bread at San Francisco's legendary Tartine Bakery sells out within an hour almost every day.Only a handful of bakers have learned the bread science techniques Chad Robertson has developed: To Chad Robertson, bread is the foundation of a meal, the center of daily life, and each loaf tells the story of the baker who shaped it. Chad Robertson developed his unique bread over two decades of apprenticeship with the finest artisan bakers in France and the United States, as well as experimentation in his own ovens. Readers will be astonished at how elemental it is.Bread making the Tartine Way: Now it's your turn to make this bread with your own hands. Clear instructions and hundreds of step-by-step photos put you by Chad's side as he shows you how to make exceptional and elemental bread using just flour, water, and salt.If you liked Tartine All Day by Elisabeth Prueitt and Flour Water Salt Yeast by Ken Forkish, you'll love Tartine Bread!Additional categories for this book include:Baking BooksBaking Recipe BooksBaking Cook BooksBread Recipe Books

Oaxaca: Home Cooking from the Heart of Mexico


Bricia Lopez - 2019
    Founded by the Lopez family, Guelaguetza has been offering traditional Oaxacan food for 25 years. The first true introduction to Oaxacan cuisine by a native family, each dish articulates their story, from Oaxaca to the streets of Los Angeles and beyond. Showcasing the “soul food” of Mexico, Oaxaca offers 140 authentic, yet accessible recipes using some of the purest pre-Hispanic and indigenous ingredients available. From their signature pink horchata to the formula for the Lopez’s award-winning mole negro, Oaxaca demystifies this essential cuisine.

Everyday Italian: 125 Simple and Delicious Recipes


Giada De Laurentiis - 2005
    And here, in her long-awaited first book, she does the same—helps you put a fabulous dinner on the table tonight, for friends or just for the kids, with a minimum of fuss and a maximum of flavor. She makes it all look easy, because it is. Everyday Italian is true to its title: the fresh, simple recipes are incredibly quick and accessible, and also utterly mouth-watering—perfect for everyday cooking. And the book is focused on the real-life considerations of what you actually have in your refrigerator and pantry (no mail-order ingredients here) and what you’re in the mood for—whether a simply sauced pasta or a hearty family-friendly roast, these great recipes cover every contingency. So, for example, you’ll find dishes that you can make solely from pantry ingredients, or those that transform lowly leftovers into exquisite entrées (including brilliant ideas for leftover pasta), and those that satisfy your yearning to have something sweet baking in the oven. There are 7 ways to make red sauce more interesting, 6 different preparations of the classic cutlet, 5 perfect pestos, 4 creative uses for prosciutto, 3 variations on basic polenta, 2 great steaks, and 1 sublime chocolate tiramisù—plus 100 other recipes that turn everyday ingredients into speedy but special dinners.What’s more, Everyday Italian is organized according to what type of food you want tonight—whether a soul-warming stew for Sunday supper, a quick sauté for a weeknight, or a baked pasta for potluck. These categories will help you figure out what to cook in an instant, with such choices as fresh-from-the-pantry appetizers, sauceless pastas, everyday roasts, and stuffed vegetables—whatever you’re in the mood for, you’ll be able to find a simple, delicious recipe for it here. That’s the beauty of Italian home cooking, and that’s what Giada De Laurentiis offers here—the essential recipes to make a great Italian dinner. Tonight.

A Homemade Life: Stories and Recipes from My Kitchen Table


Molly Wizenberg - 2009
    But when she tried going back to her apartment in Seattle and returning to graduate school, she knew it wasn't possible to resume life as though nothing had happened. So she went to Paris, a city that held vivid memories of a childhood trip with her father, of early morning walks on the cobbled streets of the Latin Quarter and the taste of her first pain au chocolat. She was supposed to be doing research for her dissertation, but more often, she found herself peering through the windows of chocolate shops, trekking across town to try a new pâtisserie, or tasting cheeses at outdoor markets, until one evening when she sat in the Luxembourg Gardens reading cookbooks until it was too dark to see, she realized that her heart was not in her studies but in the kitchen.At first, it wasn't clear where this epiphany might lead. Like her long letters home describing the details of every meal and market, Molly's blog Orangette started out merely as a pleasant pastime. But it wasn't long before her writing and recipes developed an international following. Every week, devoted readers logged on to find out what Molly was cooking, eating, reading, and thinking, and it seemed she had finally found her passion. But the story wasn't over: one reader in particular, a curly-haired, food-loving composer from New York, found himself enchanted by the redhead in Seattle, and their email correspondence blossomed into a long-distance romance.In A Homemade Life: Stories and Recipes from My Kitchen Table, Molly Wizenberg recounts a life with the kitchen at its center. From her mother's pound cake, a staple of summer picnics during her childhood in Oklahoma, to the eggs she cooked for her father during the weeks before his death, food and memories are intimately entwined. You won't be able to decide whether to curl up and sink into the story or to head straight to the market to fill your basket with ingredients for Cider-Glazed Salmon and Pistachio Cake with Honeyed Apricots.

To Asia, with Love: Everyday Asian Recipes and Stories from the Heart


Hetty McKinnon - 2021
    McKinnon grew up in a home filled with the aromas, sights, and sounds of her Chinese mother’s cooking. These days she strives to recreate those memories for her own family—and yours—with traditional dishes prepared in non-traditional ways. It’s a sumptuous collection of creative vegetarian recipes featuring pan-Asian dishes that anyone can prepare using supermarket ingredients.Readers will learn how to make their own kimchi, chilli oil, knife-cut noodles, and dumplings. They’ll learn about the wonder that is rice and discover how Asian-inspired salads are the ultimate crossover food. McKinnon offers tips for stocking your modern Asian pantry and explores the role that sweetness plays in Asian cultures. Her recipes are a celebration of the exciting and delicious possibilities of modern Asian cooking—from Smashed Cucumber Salad with Tahini and Spicy Oil, and Finger-lickin’ Good Edamame Beans with Fried Curry Leaves, to Springtime Rolls with Miso Kale Pesto and Tamarind Apple Crisp. Featuring big, powerful flavours created from simple, fresh ingredients, these recipes are firmly rooted in the place where east meets west and where tradition charts the journey to the modern kitchen.

Food52 Genius Recipes: 100 Recipes That Will Change the Way You Cook


Kristen Miglore - 2015
      Genius recipes surprise us and make us rethink the way we cook. They might involve an unexpectedly simple technique, debunk a kitchen myth, or apply a familiar ingredient in a new way. They’re handed down by luminaries of the food world and become their legacies. And, once we’ve folded them into our repertoires, they make us feel pretty genius too. In this collection are 100 of the smartest and most remarkable ones.   There isn’t yet a single cookbook where you can find Marcella Hazan’s Tomato Sauce with Onion and Butter, Jim Lahey’s No-Knead Bread, and Nigella Lawson’s Dense Chocolate Loaf Cake—plus dozens more of the most talked about, just-crazy-enough-to-work recipes of our time. Until now.   These are what Food52 Executive Editor Kristen Miglore calls genius recipes. Passed down from the cookbook authors, chefs, and bloggers who made them legendary, these foolproof recipes rethink cooking tropes, solve problems, get us talking, and make cooking more fun. Every week, Kristen features one such recipe and explains just what’s so brilliant about it in the James Beard Award-nominated Genius Recipes column on Food52. Here, in this book, she compiles 100 of the most essential ones—nearly half of which have never been featured in the column—with tips, riffs, mini-recipes, and stunning photographs from James Ransom, to create a cooking canon that will stand the test of time.   Once you try Michael Ruhlman’s fried chicken or Yotam Ottolenghi and Sami Tamimi’s hummus, you’ll never want to go back to other versions. But there’s also a surprising ginger juice you didn’t realize you were missing and will want to put on everything—and a way to cook white chocolate that (finally) exposes its hidden glory. Some of these recipes you’ll follow to a T, but others will be jumping-off points for you to experiment with and make your own. Either way, with Kristen at the helm, revealing and explaining the genius of each recipe, Genius Recipes is destined to become every home cook’s go-to resource for smart, memorable cooking—because no one cook could have taught us so much.

Deceptively Delicious: Simple Secrets to Get Your Kids Eating Good Food


Jessica Seinfeld - 2007
    Mother of three, Jessica Seinfeld wages a personal war against sugars, packaged foods, and other nutritional saboteurs, offering appetising alternatives for parents who find themselves succumbing to the fastest and easiest (and least healthy) choices available to them.

The Lady & Sons Savannah Country Cookbook


Paula H. Deen - 1998
    Paula H. Deen, the owner and proprieter, has created a friendly cookbook filled with hundreds of quick and easy recipes. Perfect for home entertainment, family picnics, or Sunday dinners, The Lady & Sons Savannah Country Cookbook completes any kitchen."I tell Savannah-bound friends that if they want a short course in the meaning of Southern cooking--the flavors, the ambience, indeed the very heart of Southern cooking--they should drop in at The Lady & Sons."--from the introduction by JOHN BEHRENDT, author of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil"The recipes in this book are so wonderful, I almost ate the book!"--FANNIE FLAGG, author of Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe

Thug Kitchen: The Official Cookbook: Eat Like You Give a F*ck


Thug Kitchen - 2014
    Beloved by Gwyneth Paltrow ("This might be my favorite thing ever") and named Saveur's Best New Food blog of 2013—with half a million Facebook fans and counting—Thug Kitchen wants to show everyone how to take charge of their plates and cook up some real f*cking food.Yeah, plenty of blogs and cookbooks preach about how to eat more kale, why ginger fights inflammation, and how to cook with microgreens and nettles. But they are dull or pretentious as hell—and most people can't afford the hype.Thug Kitchen lives in the real world. In their first cookbook, they're throwing down more than 100 recipes for their best-loved meals, snacks, and sides for beginning cooks to home chefs. (Roasted Beer and Lime Cauliflower Tacos? Pumpkin Chili? Grilled Peach Salsa? Believe that sh*t.) Plus they're going to arm you with all the info and techniques you need to shop on a budget and go and kick a bunch of ass on your own.This book is an invitation to everyone who wants to do better to elevate their kitchen game. No more ketchup and pizza counting as vegetables. No more drive-thru lines. No more avoiding the produce corner of the supermarket. Sh*t is about to get real.