★★★★★ 5
Flavor-packed and accessible recipes
Format: Hardcover
This book delivers. It is structured sensibly, with categories for Snacks, Salad, Carbs, Surf & Turf, Chicken, Veg, Sandos (sandwiches), Breakfast, and Sweets. The ingredient lists are broken down by category, making it easy to identify the produce, dairy, protein, and pantry ingredients you need to assemble, and ingredient prep is thankfully built into the recipe directions, rather than the ingredient lists, so there's no time wasted as you cook.
The recipes are mouth watering and have relatively short but impactful ingredient lists, and are written in an accessible voice that helps the reader learn why certain choices were made. For example, the recipe for "Shells, peas & buttermilk" instructs: "Stir in a small handful of grated pecorino—this isn't a cheese sauce, so don't go too crazy here. We want to really taste the peas and mint—the cheese is there more as seasoning. The sauce should still be quite loose and brothy." These small notes help the home cook understand what the final outcome should look and taste like, beyond just the ingredient list and measurements. And the videos and audio cook-along notes are an entertaining addition that make you feel like you have Molly cooking alongside you in your kitchen—definitely an innovation over the many other cookbooks I own.
As Molly notes in the foreword, the recipes are all purposefully balanced with hits of fat, acid, and (for some) spice. Most of the recipes are not exactly healthy—many call for butter, cheese, heavy cream, and/or oil—but after cooking a few recipes already, I can say that these ingredients pay off in the final product.
There are a large volume of recipes in this book, which I prefer over more minimal books—you'll probably find something that sounds good to you. Recipes that stood out to me include Sizzled [store-bought] Dolmas with Yogurt and Brown-Buttered Pine Nuts; Sizzled Seedy Tomato Salad; Marinated Zucch & Mozz with Fried Sunflower Seeds; Drunken Cacio e Pepe; Grandma Pizza with Morty-D & Peperoncini Pesto [using store-bought pizza dough]; Broken Noodle Bolognese; Rigatoni with Creamed Leeks & Chive Bread Crumbs; Crispy Orecchiette with Spicy Sausage & Collard Ragu; Tangled Leek Pizza; Rarebit Mac 'n' Greens [why does a rarebit mac & cheese not exist already? brilliant]; Skirt Steak with Juicy Tomatoes & Salsa Macha; Crispy Salmon with Coconut Rice & Crackle Sauce; Hot Sauce-Braised Short Ribs with Winter Squash; Miso-Braised Chicken & Leeks; Chile-Braised Half Chicken with Caper Chimichurri; One Pot Chicken Mujadara; Curried Lentil & Sweet Potato Pot Pie; Spicy Green Fregola with Spicy Yogurt; Dilly Beans [canned white beans] & Burrata with Frizzled Shallots; Spicy Coconut-Smothered Green Beans; Sunken Drunken Apple Cake; Black Sesame Rice Pudding Brulee; Maple Ricotta Munchkins; Baklava Ruffle Pie... I could go on.
IMO this book is an improvement over Cook This Book, which featured good basic recipes but fewer innovative flavor combinations. I have fairly specific standards for recipes I actually want to cook—they should be doable within 30-60 minutes, include mostly ingredients I already have on hand, and promise better flavors than I could come up with myself—and nearly every page in my copy is dog-eared, which says a lot.
A minor note: The serif retro header font is difficult to read, the font size of the recipe text is small, and the page margins should be larger. But it's worth breaking out your readers.
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Reviewed in the United States on October 17, 2023
