Step up your food game with these recent publications
By Katrina Caruso
Another year, another grand plan to redesign your life and do better. For many people, that means eating more healthfully and perhaps trying new recipes. We’ve selected some of the most popular and highly rated cookbooks from late last year to help you start the new year right.
Frederic Morin, David McMillan, and Meredith Erickson have published their second cookbook, Joe Beef: Surviving the Apocalypse: Another Cookbook of Sorts. Some of the decadent, hearty recipes are straight from the kitchens of Joe Beef, Liverpool House, and the other trendy Montreal restaurants that Morin and McMillan created, but many are from the authors’ personal lives and childhoods. For crafty types, there are also sections on soapmaking, canning (to help you survive the apocalypse!), and even DIY cough drops.
If you want to start eating a healthier diet, you might love Tina Chow’s The Everything Healthy Meal Prep Cookbook. The book offers 200 portion-controlled recipes that can be easily followed to perfection. The best part? Chow teaches you how to plan for the week through meal prepping, so that you’ll be less likely to snack on something that’s not-so-great for you.
If you jumped on the Instant Pot bandwagon and then stuffed the multi-purpose kitchen gadget in a cupboard and promptly forgot about it, the Instant Pot Cookbook #2019 is for you. The Canadian-designed cooker is intended to serve as a pressure cooker, slow cooker, steamer, and even sauté pan, eand Carolina Sanders’s book will make you want to use it all the time. The recipes cover breakfast, dinner, and dessert—and touch on almost everything in between. The ingredients are easy to find (and probably things you already have in the home), and the recipes will save you lot of time.
Canadian chef Matty Matheson made his name as a TV host and Internet sensation. In his debut book, Matty Matheson: A Cookbook, he introduces the reader to meals that have deeply affected him and brings new twists to classics such as gumbo and seafood chowder. The recipes are full of love, with a refreshing outlook on cooking. If you’re looking for a mix between a funny (if at sometimes a little inappropriate) read and an opportunity to learn more about food, this is a great book.
Gina Homolka and Heather K. Jones’s Skinnytaste One and Done was highly praised when it came out in 2018. A New York Times bestseller, Homolka has been behind the Skinnytaste brand and blog for several years and has made a name for herself promoting healthy eating with lots of flavour. This book is for health-conscious folks looking for easier ways to cook—the recipes can be used with Instant Pots, pressure cookers, air fryers, slow cookers, sheet pans, and more, with the ultimate goal that of making healthy eating easy.
Claire Tansey’s Uncomplicated: Taking the Stress Out of Home Cooking shows us that simple doesn’t have to mean boring or bland. As a busy mother and a chef, Tansey brings her wisdom and a sprinkle of reality to this cookbook, which has been carefully curated with love to show the reader how to cut down on cooking time while keeping everything flavourful. She even has a section on shopping and another on hosting dinner parties.
Photo: iStock/CentralITAlliance.
