a dense, grainy daily bread

a very simple pizza dough

alex’s bloody mary prawn cocktail

apricot pistachio squares

artichoke and parmesan galette

bacony baked pintos with the works

bake sale winning-est gooey oat bars

baked oatmeal with caramelized pears and vanilla cream

bakery-style butter cookies

banana bread roll

barbecued squid with chickpeas, chillies, and lemon

barbecued yogurt flatbreads

beef tomato skirt steak salad with blue cheese and parsley basil vinaigrette

blackout brownie waffle sundae

brick hens with charred lemon

broccoli, cheddar, and wild rice fritters

broccoli melts

brussels and three cheese pasta bake

cacio e pepe potatoes anna

cannoli zeppole

caramelized cabbage risotto

caramelized plum tartlets

carrot salad with tahini, crisped chickpeas, and salted pistachios

cauliflower wedge

charred corn succotash with lime and crispy shallots

cheesecake semifreddo with gingersnaps and cranberries

chicken and rice, street cart style

chocolate buttercream frosting

chocolate peanut butter icebox cake

chocolate pecan slab pie

chopped liver on rye, roumanian steakhouse style

coconut buttercream frosting

coconut cake

corn, bacon, and rocket pizza

courgette-stuffed courgette with sorta salsa verde

cream cheese frosting

crispy short rib carnitas with sunset slaw

crispy tofu and broccoli with sesame-peanut pesto

crushed olives with almonds, celery, and parmesan

cucumber yogurt gazpacho with mint, almonds, and grapes

danish rice pudding with cherry black pepper sauce

deli rye english muffins

double coconut meltaways

dry-rub sweet potato steaks with green bean slaw

everything drop biscuits with cream cheese

fall-toush salad with delicata squash and brussels sprouts

fennel, pear, celery, and hazelnut salad

flipped crispy egg taco with singed greens

fried green plantains with avocado black bean salsa

fudgy chocolate cake

garden gin and tonic with cucumber, lime, and mint

golden vanilla cake

grandma-style chicken noodle soup

granola biscotti

halloumi roast with aubergine, courgette, and tomatoes

herb and garlic baked camembert

jam-bellied bran scones

julie’s punked strawberry tart

kale caesar with broken eggs and crushed croutons

kale-dusted pecorino popcorn

leek, feta, and greens spiral pie

lemon meringue pie smash

loaded breakfast potato skins

magical two-ingredient oat brittle

mango apple ceviche with sunflower seeds

manhattan-style clams with fregola

marble bundt cake

marzipan petit four cake

meatballs marsala with egg noodles and chives

mini–matzo ball soup with horseradish and herbs

miso maple ribs with roasted spring onions

mom’s bread bowl with spinach liptauer and pickled red onions

mujadara-stuffed cabbage with minted tomato sauce

my go-to garlic bread

olive oil shortbread with rosemary and chocolate chunks

one-pan farro with tomatoes

parmesan dutch baby with creamed mushrooms

pea tortellini in parmesan broth

peach melba popsicles

perfect blueberry muffins

polenta-baked eggs with corn, tomato, and fontina

pomegranate and orange peel fizz

pork tenderloin agrodolce with squash rings

potatoes and asparagus gribiche

pretzel linzers with salted caramel

quick sausage, kale, and crouton sauté

raspberry hazelnut brioche bostock

red lentil soup, dal style

ricotta blini with honey, orange, and sea salt

roasted tomato picnic sandwich

roasted tomato soup with grilled cheddar

romesco, chickpea, and smashed egg bowl

siberian pelmeni

sizzling beef bulgogi tacos

smashed cucumber salad with salted peanuts and wasabi peas

smoky sheet pan chicken with cauliflower

spaghetti pangrattato with crispy eggs

spice cake

spiced carrot and pepper soup with a couscous swirl

spinach, mushroom, and goat cheese slab frittata

spring fried barley with a sesame sizzled egg

sticky toffee waffles

strawberry cloud cookies

sushi takeout cobb

the party cake builder

the smeteneh küchen / sour cream coffee cake

toasted marshmallow milkshake

tomato and gigante bean bake / pizza beans

two thick, chewy oatmeal raisin chocolate chip mega-cookies

vanilla buttercream frosting

whitefish and pickled cucumber salad

wild mushroom shepherd’s pie

winter slaw with farro

winter squash flatbread with hummus and za’atar

wintry apple bake with double ginger crumble

ABOUT THE BOOK

Deb Perelman, award-winning blogger and New York Times bestselling author of The Smitten Kitchen Cookbook, understands that a happy discovery in the kitchen has the ability to completely change the course of a day. Whether we’re cooking for ourselves, for a date night in, for a Sunday supper with friends, or for family on a busy weeknight, we all want recipes that are unfussy to make with triumphant results.

Deb thinks that cooking should be an escape from drudgery. Smitten Kitchen Every Day: Triumphant and Unfussy New Favorites presents more than one hundred impossible-to-resist recipes—almost all of them brand new, plus a few favorites from her website—that will make you want to stop what you’re doing and cook right now. These are real recipes for real people—people with busy lives who don’t want to sacrifice flavor or quality to eat meals they’re really excited about.

You’ll want to put these recipes in your Forever Files: Sticky Toffee Waffles (sticky toffee pudding you can eat for breakfast), Everything Drop Biscuits with Cream Cheese, and Magical Two-Ingredient Oat Brittle (a happy accident). There’s (hopelessly, unapologetically inauthentic) Kale Caesar with Broken Eggs and Crushed Croutons, Mango Apple Ceviche with Sunflower Seeds, and Grandma-Style Chicken Noodle Soup that fixes everything. You can make Leek, Feta, and Greens Spiral Pie, crunchy Brussels and Three Cheese Pasta Bake that tastes better with brussels sprouts than without, Beef Tomato Skirt Steak Salad, and Bacony Baked Pintos with the Works (as in giant bowls of beans that you can dip into, like nachos).

And, of course, no meal is complete without cake (and cookies and pies and puddings): Chocolate Peanut Butter Icebox Cake (the icebox cake to end all icebox cakes), Pretzel Linzers with Salted Caramel, Strawberry Cloud Cookies, Bake Sale Winning-est Gooey Oat Bars, as well as the ultimate Party Cake Builder—four one-bowl cakes for all occasions with mix-and-match frostings (bonus: less time spent doing dishes means everybody wins).

Written with Deb’s trademark humor and gorgeously illustrated with her own photographs, Smitten Kitchen Every Day is filled with what are sure to be your new favorite things to cook.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Deb Perelman is a self-taught home cook, photographer, and the creator of smittenkitchen.com. She is the author of the New York Times best-selling The Smitten Kitchen Cookbook, which won the IACP Julia Child Award. Deb lives in New York City with her husband, son, and daughter.

ALSO BY DEB PERELMAN

The Smitten Kitchen Cookbook

For Anna Helen and Jacob Henry,
who made our family complete

against drudgery

(or, in praise of the unfussy but triumphant)

One of the delights of life is eating with friends; second to that is talking about eating. And, for an unsurpassed double whammy, there is talking about eating while you are eating with friends. People who like to cook like to talk about food. Plain old cooks (as opposed to geniuses in fancy restaurants) tend to be friendly. After all, without one cook giving another cook a tip or two, human life might have died out a long time ago.

—LAURIE COLWIN, Home Cooking

We home cooks have never gathered in force to speak out in defense of home cooking. So the image of cookery as drudgery lives on.

—MARION CUNNINGHAM, Lost Recipes

THIS ISN’T THE cookbook I had expected to write.

When The Smitten Kitchen Cookbook headed to the printer in 2012, we were a family of three. Our two-year-old was eating table food, but in a dabbling way. Mostly, I cooked the food that I was excited to eat, and little about having a kid changed how I went about it. In the years since, we’ve added another delicious little human to our family, and while most people will tell you that going from zero kids to one is the big adjustment, in the kitchen, the shift from one to two was more dramatic. All of a sudden, it wasn’t just us plus an extra half-portion stripped of offending chilli peppers or with some couscous on the side to bait a suspicious toddler to the table. Quickly, half our family (ahem, the noisier half) needed square meals at predictable times and I, well … I began to understand why not everyone jumps with joy when it’s time to make dinner.

On any given night, most of us have countless really excellent reasons not to cook—be it picky kids, spouses, or roommates, or the extinction of a 9-to-5 workday that might actually get you home in time to assemble dinner for yourself, your friends, or your family. Even the people who are ostensibly cheering for you to cook can do more harm than good, be they restaurant chefs who forget you may not have a line of prep cooks at your disposal, recipe writers who alienate the budget-conscious by insisting on the “best” olive oil, or home-cooking advocates who tell you the very best thing you can do for your health/your children’s IQ/the economy/environment/nothing short of this earth (oh, the pressure!) is cook dinner every night—people who have clearly not spent a lot of time in the chaos of most households at Hangry O’Clock. (Roughly, 30 minutes after pizza would have been there already, at least around here.)

I began to wonder if it was time to write about the realities and practicalities of cooking. You know:

• How to Keep the Joy in Cooking

• 42-ish Minute Meals (But You’ll Have to Rush)

• Things to Make with Broccoli and/or Sweet Potatoes, the Only Vegetables Everyone Agrees on This Week

• Just Kidding, the Baby Ate Blueberries for Dinner Again

There was only one problem: I didn’t want to write this book at all. And so I did not. I continued sharing new recipes a couple times a week on my website, Smitten Kitchen. I launched a newsletter. I worked with people to usher the technology behind my site into its second decade of web life. I started working with Food Network on a digital series. I spent a lot of time around the table with friends and family and couldn’t help but notice that what was regularly taking place—telling stories, workshopping silly armchair philosophies, cracking up over the baby’s antics—barely resembled the compromised, plodding hypotheses I’d set out about cooking when life gets busier.

What I have always loved about cooking is the way a happy discovery—a new way to meatball, a four-ingredient farro that has caused more than 800 comment section exclamation points, cookies that look like clouds and taste like pink lemonade, crunchy spaghetti with crispy eggs, a birthday cake you can make from scratch in just over an hour (yes, really) or maybe even four of them—has the power to completely change the course of a day.

I like the way that when you make something new and awesome, the first thing you want to do is tell another friend about it so they can make it, too. I like the way following a recipe to the letter can feel like handing the reins over after a long day of having to make all the decisions, but also that pulling off a good meal when you least expected is the fastest way to feel triumphant, even if your day left you short of opportunities to. I like the way that when you sublimate your wanderlust in a dish—a cacio e pepe addiction picked up in Rome or a Thai-ish salad with crispy shallots, lime, and fish sauce—it becomes a gateway, or an escape hatch, to so much more than dinner. I like the way that when you cook at home, you don’t actually have to compromise a thing; you get to make exactly what you want, exactly the way you want it, and then you get to invite all your favorite people over to pass the dish around. I like the way a great meal makes grouchy people ungrouchy or turns a thankless day filled with thankless stuff into a hilarious one. And I like the way the prospect of a fudgy one-bowl chocolate cake with a raft of chocolate frosting one hour from now might make us cancel our other plans.

And the thing is, people—that is, you, the people who have come along for all or part of Smitten Kitchen’s decade-plus story—had been trying to tell me this the whole time.

The stories in the comments and in my inbox are as much about the cooking as they are about the life around it—the delight from the surprise of a good meal, the person who thought they hated broccoli or brussels sprouts finding that with the right preparation, they adore both, or finding, on a morning you think there’s no reason to cook, a new pancake recipe that you’re too curious not to make. This doesn’t mean that these dishes aren’t practical, that they cannot fit into a busy life, that they cannot accommodate picky eaters and grocery stores with limited imaginations, it simply means that they don’t do that before—they don’t prioritize that over—making food that we are really, really excited to eat.

This book is—forgive me—how I got my groove back.

These recipes don’t just fit into our lives, they make us happy.

It’s great big bowls of beans that we dip into like nachos.

It’s my kids’ beloved roasted sweet potatoes given the dry-rub barbecue treatment, slaw and all.

It’s the famous chopped liver you get in a windowless basement restaurant on Chrystie Street that’s like a Bar Mitzvah that never ends (in a good way).

It’s a crunchy three cheese pasta bake that tastes better with brussels sprouts (yes, brussels sprouts) than without.

It’s giant white beans cooked to the tune of baked ziti, bronzed melty lid and all.

It’s the hopelessly unapologetically inauthentic kale caesar we make almost every week of the year.

It’s the English-muffin-meets-Jewish-deli-rye-bread recipe I promised to a library full of people a book tour ago.

It’s a modern matzo ball soup and the beef bulgogi tacos I fell in love with at the Jersey shore.

It’s a whole-grain bread for people who don’t like to knead or time things, a bread that works on your schedule and not vice versa.

And such a great big noisy fuss over cake (and cookies and pies and popsicles).

The jam-filled, sprinkle-rolled butter cookies I made at the bakery where I worked in high school.

The gooey oat and chocolate cookie bars that will win bake sales.

The strawberry tart that the friend we picked up at a party sixteen years ago coached me through over Skype from Germany.

The chocolate icebox cake to end all icebox cakes, with peanut butter too.

The crumb cake with impeccable priorities—that is, more crumbs than cake—and a very familiar name.

A sticky toffee pudding, but breakfast-style.

The blueberry muffins I made fifty ways before finding my forever formula.

And an accidental two-ingredient granola.

So while this isn’t the cookbook I expected to write, I like the one that’s emerged much more—a celebration of breakfast, dinner, cake, and everything in between, and maybe a bit of resistance, too: against the idea that cooking must be an obstacle to overcome or that the food we most want to eat cannot also be practical. This book is all of my new favorite things to cook, and I hope you’ll find a few worthy of your Repeat Forever files, too.

breakfast