#and while my parents know my mental state is super fragile right now my mom didn't help

[indycar-series]

rant in the tags

[sirene312]

i'm back at home

This have to be the first time that the reason I disappeared here was not because I lost my internet, I don't even know how to start the nightmare that these last two-three months have been. What happened to me it's something so horrendous that i need to get this out of my chest now that i have the chance so i don't have to think about this whole experience ever again. sorry in advance but this is going to be a long post. 

Before you read this I want you to keep in mind that I live in a south american country falling apart with many problems (here's a translated thread (x) of the things happening on in my country. here’s the original with images (x) caution some images are distressing) where crazy things like this happen with impunity because literally nothing here works and that includes justice.

My dad passed away suddenly at the end of August, my brother and I went to his house that is on the other side of the city, and when we got there, apparently there were some “friends” living with him: a man, a woman and a child. At the time, since I was distracted by being utterly devastated and my mind was clouded with pain i didn't realize what this could mean, after all my dad had many many friends, but still i thought it was a little weird since we talked to my dad frequently on the phone and he never told us about these randos.

After the funeral, since we still needed to do more legal stuff and wanted to save to give him a proper grave/tombstone we decided to stay and live at my dad’s house (now ours by law) for a few weeks until we took care of everything. and this is where the nightmare starts.

We asked these "friends” of his when they would leave and go back to their place and they never gave us a clear answer, they were very evasive and never told us why they didn't want to go to their own home... and you know why? because they didn't have one. They were squatters. Here they are called “invaders” and you can read in these news articles (x) how they act (x), in our case these squatters were non violent but they did make our lives hell, because since we couldn't get them out we had to live with them or we would have lost our dad’s house and everything inside. 

In this stupid country if the squatters got into your home in a non violent way, you can't just force them to get out. Yes, you read that right. That is why we didn't went to the police, we knew they weren't going to do anything, they only do something if you have money, have contacts in the police, or a bunch of people make a fuss and attract media attention. 

The only thing we could do legally was go to la Fiscalía (I don't know what's the equivalent in English the persecution I think?) and file a complaint and some other paperwork, all that legal process can take years and meanwhile, the squatters can live there as they please and you can’t get inside your home again or get your things out...God...as you can imagine that was definitely not an option. 

After much thought we decided to sacrifice some of the money we had and got a lawyer for advice in what to do, and she said that while she searched for another legal way to get them out asap, we had to live in the house and don't ever leave it unoccupied, always my brother or I had to be there, because otherwise the squatters could change the locks and then there would not be anything we could do to get back in. I didn't want to do that but we had no other choice. Nothing could have prepared us to the things we would have to endure there.

Here are some the horrible things they did while we were living there:

They rearranged everything inside the house. We just lost our dad and I couldn't even keep the memory of how his house was decorated and how his things looked the way he had them. they moved around every little thing. it stills hurts, they had not right. 

They STOLE many things of my dad. They were only old things with very little value, but to me, their sentimental value was incalculable. like for example imagine that favorite chipped coffee mug your mom loves, or your grandpa reading glasses, or that comfy cardigan your granny likes to use when knitting, now imagine that a random stranger took them without permission and is using them as they please, worse because your loved one is no longer here and that is the only thing you had left of them. Now you have an idea of how sad and indignant i felt.

They never wore masks or didn't even wash their hands, they didn't care they were putting us all at risk with their lack of hygienic measures, in fact mocked us because we were super clean and wore masks when they were near us.

The woman pretended to have a serious medical condition and would threaten to report us for attempted murder  if we spoke to her in any way that she wouldn't like because getting “upset” triggered her “condition”. Which is ironic since I’m the one with a heart condition and she could have jeopardize my health with all the stress she and her husband were subjecting me everyday. 

They turned all the neighbors against us! that evil woman would pretend to have “fits” of “her disease” right on the street were the neighbors would witness it to gain sympathy and later tell them that we caused her that, they believed her and everyone on our street hated us, and even all of them signed a bullshit letter to have us evicted from our own house and to let them keep the house. Good thing that wasn't legal and the government office ignored that ridiculous letter.

They used everything inside the house without permission, like our refrigerator, the kitchen appliances, the washing machine, the stereo, our water and food, our frigging clean bed sheets, it was like that was their home and WE were the intruders. that made me so so mad. 

They psychologically tormented us. They took advantage of our emotionally fragile state to do and say things to get us so upset so we would leave the house for good. And they almost got it, my mental health was a mess, grieving and dealing with this was too much but our mom convinced us to stay, she said our dad wouldn't have wanted us to lose our house to these damn thieves.

and speaking of theft...they even tried to steal OUR DOG. The kid one day said “this is now my dog! our new dog, my mom said so!” and i was like wHAT NO! but i just said something like “but we love him we’ll be very sad and lonely if he's not by our side” bc i didn't want to upset the kid. She was very sweet and innocent, she and I actually got along well and played sometimes (she gave me drawings that i still have and i gave her some paper crafts and my childhood toys) it was not her fault that her parents were evil. That horrible man wasn't even her father, he treated her bad, god I hated how he yelled at her and made her cry she was just a little child, i wish i could have had the power to do something.

At this point you must be thinking, why the hell were you acting like a doormat?? why did you allowed them to treat you like this!! why didn't you do something!? oh believe me I was very vocal in my discontent and didn't give them an inch, but the thing is there was little we could do, if we tried to talk to them they ignored us at best, police were not going to help (we at one point did end up going to the police station just to get told what we already knew: that they couldn't do anything), and even when one day i snapped and i told them to leave us alone and not touch our things, they just brushed me off. They knew if things escalated and violence of any kind were used against them we could be in legal trouble (same applied to them, that's why they never physically attacked us). We were alone in this battle, didn't have the support of anyone. What else we could do? our hands were tied. 

We had to endure all this shit non stopping every day we were there. I was saving all my limited phone data for important things like calls and messages to my mom and my lawyer, so my only source of entertainment was the cable TV, I can't believe that what kept me sane was watching old reruns of Cupcake Wars and home improvement shows.

But the more time passed the more this situation was unbearable and we were not doing well, this distressed my mom so much that she decided to pack a small suitcase and go stay there with us, we didn't want her to do that because she is an elderly woman and her health could be at risk but she didn't care and just show up one evening and let me tell you, after months of not seeing her when she walked through that door i was so happy and relieved and emotional that i started crying two seconds flat and we just hug her for a long time. Damn these people for causing us to be apart when we needed our mom the most.

Now with our mom there I think they felt threatened and so those pathetic fools went so far as to make a false document where it said that they were “our tenants” so they could be protected by law and could stay there “legally” for at least a year or two. That stupid stunt would be their downfall. 

We were cited to go to a govt office that deals with rent and housing problems where they were going to present that bogus document, the office needed for all parts to be present there, so my bro, our lawyer and I got there and later the squatters and their kid since they were using the scarce public transport. My mom stayed back at the house alone. I don't know if it was luck or divine intervention (or karma in their case)  that the woman in charge couldn't make it and the audience got postponed for the following month, our lawyer was fuming she didn't want those horrible people to spend another whole month at our house, she called my mom and told her to lock all doors and don't let anyone in, we quickly got into the lawyer’s car and got to the house first before the squatters and we put a huge padlock on the door! That way they wouldn't be able to get in, they only had keys (that were originally our spare keys that they stole) to the front door.

I can't even begin to describe how nerve wracking was all this, but for the first time i felt hopeful because finally things were in our favor, now if those squatters tried to get inside of our private property by force they could get in serious trouble. How the turntables bitch!

And that's how we could GET THEM OUT AT LAST. 

When they realized they couldn't do anything more than pace furiously on the sidewalk they left (the woman tried having one of her “fits” to get people’s attention but since it started to rain she quickly gave up ha!). We thought they were going to stay in any of the neighbor's houses but they left to who knows where. A few days later we changed the locks and we got our uncle to go stay and live in the house while we finish sorting the legal papers. The only thing i felt sorry was for the kid but we later learned that the squatters found another house to take over the very same day we locked them out, so i know at least that poor little girl is not sleeping on the streets. I feel sad every time i think of her, this is not how a child should be living bc of her deplorable parents. i wish i could have had the chance to say goodbye to her in better terms.

I still can't believe all this happened to us when all we wanted was to get through grieving our dad and give him a better grave with some flowers. Hopefully we can finally finish saving and get that done now that we don't have to stress 24/7 over people wanting to make our lives hell.

I would have liked for this insanely horrible experience to end with them receiving punishment for what the did to us, but by this country standards when dealing with this kind of situation we were very lucky, this was the best outcome many people has told us, and honestly I'm just happy that it's over and I'm back at my home with my family and I’m sleeping on my own bed again.

Last but not least I want to thank everyone that took the time during these months to send me their lovely messages and their condolences, and were very supportive and understanding of my situation, although now is when I'm able to read them, they have made me very happy thank you so much for all your kindness.

and now to end on a high note here's Tomy our sweet dog, that belong to us and we get to keep because he’s ours :)

[the-final-sif]

Do you think it will ever be made "canon" that Bakugou was abused? Like an official plotline? When do you think Uraraka is gonna have an actual storyline? Do you have any ships other than todobakudeku (and the ships in that ship)? What's your opinion on Aizawa choking Monoma w/his scarf? Do you think Best Jeanist's behavior in the anime is any better than Mitsuki's? Opinions on female adult heroes hitting on teenage boys in the series? Or the ua girls being over sexualized?

I’m honestly not sure if it will every be seriously addressed in canon as abuse.

The initial scene with Mitsuki is played at least somewhat lightly/jokingly. All-Might does note that the family is dysfunctional, but it’s not treated like it’s a super serious issue that the teachers need to do something about.

However, we’ve had it happen a few times now, particularly with Katsuki, where something is played off as a joke only for canon to revisit it with a more serious tone. Almost as if get the reader to assume something is okay and then double back and be like ‘holy shit no this wasn’t.’.

I think the best example of this was the sports festival incident. When we see Katsuki on the podium, it’s played off super lightly. Oh haha, Katsuki’s so angry he had to be chained and muzzled to the podium. Then he’s upset about it and he brushes his teeth angrily. The readers aren’t meant to think something’s really wrong there.

Only, then we hit the kidnapping plotline and we go back to that incident with fresh eyes, and holy shit, they chained and muzzled a teenager to a podium in front of thousands of people. Now all of the sudden it’s not a joke anymore, Tomura has a photo of Katsuki chained to that podium which is really clearly shown to be why he thinks Katsuki will join the league of villains. We also see that the incident has warped the public’s perception of Katsuki to the point that a reporter, directly after this 16 year old child has been kidnapped by an extreme dangerous group of villains, feels comfortable asking his teachers if they think Katsuki will become a villain. Going so far as to call the again, child who is currently kidnapped, mentally unstable. At that point Aizawa apologizes and states what happened at the Sports Festival was his/the school’s fault. It’s taken very seriously even though it was originally played as a joke.

Since that initial scene with Mitsuki, we have gotten two hints about Katsuki’s home life. During Katsuki vs Izuku 2 he mirrors her words very closely when blaming himself for the kidnapping.

To quote from the official viz translation:

“We wouldn’t be in this mess if you hadn’t been so weak and gotten caught in the first place”

(Note the use of the word we, meaning she’s blaming him for more than just the kidnapping itself, she’s including the media disaster UA is facing. As if, it’s somehow his fault the school is being criticized for having a student kidnapped)

Then during Katsuki vs Izuku 2:

“If only I’d been stronger.. If I hadn’t been kidnapped by those stupid villains.. everything woulda been fine!”

Katsuki, a character who didn’t cry while he was actually kidnapped by villains or fuck even during/after the slime villain bullshit, has been driven to tears having emotional breakdown blaming himself for All-Might’s retirement. Using words that sound just like what we heard his mother say.

The second hint is the line from Katsuki in the remedial courses where he wants to fight the kids and doesn’t see an issue with it saying he was raised with violence. We’ve also seen his teacher acknowledging that they fucked up and didn’t watch his mental health after the kidnapping. We still haven’t exactly seen them doing shit to help him, but canon has acknowledged Katsuki has been failed by the adults in his life for the second time.

So, I’m not sure if canon is going to try and address this more seriously. It’s entirely possible given what we’ve seen so far. I do think it’s noteworthy that we’ve seen almost nothing about Katsuki’s personal life despite him being such a major character. We don’t see his dorm room, we don’t really see his bedroom, we don’t see him interacting with his family outside a grand total of 2 scenes (only actually seeing them in 1), and we’re missing a ton of info about him compared to the other main characters. I wouldn’t put it past the author to be purposefully hiding a lot of this so he can pull a more serious storyline regarding it later. Given the current push in Japan against child abuse (they finally made it illegal to hit kids at all, it’s a pretty serious issue right now since there was a string of kids who died from abuse), I would say it’d be quite clever to purposefully play those scenes like jokes, subtly drop hints to the readers that something’s up, and then after awhile hit the readers with a “actually, no, this had serious implications and impact for this character”. In a way it mirrors how a lot of emotional/more “mild” forms of child abuse can go unnoticed irl because people try to laugh it off. It’s also possible it will never get addressed. Who knows.

God I hope like hell we get more development for the female characters soon. On some level the bar is already so low I’m just happy Uraraka purposefully put her crush to the side to focus on being a hero, and that she’s working on improving her Murder Capacity. I’m definitely bothered by the amount of over-sexualization for basically all of the female characters. Actually Foraged By Nitroglycerin and Sparks will have a little after-fic one-shot addressing all my issues with that.

Actually, that kinda leads me into my stance on Midnight. Her hitting on teenage boys is gross af, but I think it’s symptomatic of cultural issues behind her character more than anything else. She’s the only female teacher at the school, so I understand why some people basically take her character and rewrite her to be, you know, not a pedophile. I think it’s really important that we acknowledge that what we see her doing (hitting on teenage boys) is not okay, but I’m not going to give people shit for liking her. Particularly the fanon version of her. 

I’m going to assume you meant Shinsou and not Monoma? Honestly, I wasn’t really bothered by that scene. For one, it’s directly called out out by the background characters of the scene (”That’s corporeal punishment, alert the PTA”). Shinsou’s got the artificial vocal cords on under the scarf guarding his neck, and he’s not spluttering or shaken afterwards. He doesn’t even seem upset by it or out of breath, he just looked surprised to me. I think it’s intended as Aizawa cutting him off when he’s putting himself down instead of Aizawa choking him. This is more of what I’d consider ‘slapstick anime jokes’ than anything else. It’s also important to remember, despite fanon, Aizawa is a mentor figure who taught Shinsou how to fight, and not Shinsou’s parent (yet). Different relationship, different boundaries, different general behavior to expect.

I actually haven’t seen the anime, but going off what I’ve seen from that scene, no I don’t think Jeanist is as bad as Mitsuki. For one, context is important. One of the reasons I take such issue with the scene with Mitsuki is Katsuki was just kidnapped. By villains. And held for 2 days. He’s in a very fragile place mentally, and he’s been through a highly traumatic experience. Beyond that, Katsuki wasn’t doing anything before Mitsuki hit him and started in on her lecture, he was just,,, sitting there,,, looking upset. He cannot/doesn’t fight back, and his childhood hero and teacher are in the room. Compared to his scene with Jeanist, Katsuki makes an aggressive first move before Jeanist restrains him. Jeanist is also a mentor figure, while Mitsuki is his parent (at least in canon). Which, again, are very different things.

Oh! And finally, ships!

Honest to god, I’m on board with almost any ship. I don’t tend to talk about a lot of the female characters because we just don’t have much (if any) development for them and I’m more attached to Katsuki rn, but Jirou is amazing.

I like Momojirou, Mina/Tsuyu, BakuKiri (honestly almost any ship w/Katsuki I’m down with), Miruyumi (I don’t care that they haven’t met, I’m gay and I want them to be gay too), Shigadabihawks, Miritama, Kamishin, Fumikage / Katsuki for Goth Solidarity, Camie / Toga as a more AU style one, tbh Toga / Uraraka and/or Tsuyu too, Vaguely Itsuka/Mei because I love unstoppable chaotic lesbian / unmoveable force lesbian. In even more AU of a setting I think Inko / Mitsuki is cute af and despite my distaste for her in canon, I adore AUs where Mitsuki is a bamf lesbian mom.

Platonic ships I really like are Katsuki and Ochaco where the two of them have a friendship built of their general desire to piss off the other. Ochaco doesn’t take any of Katsuki’s shit and actively goes out of her way to fuck with him in Chaotic Gremlin Fashion, and Katsuki returns the favor. I also really like platonic Bakukiri with them just being Good Damn Bros.  Platonic bakudeku with Adoptive Sibling Energy is Good Shit too. Jirou and Denki both being gay messes together is a Mood. Same for Jirou and Mina. Bakusquad in general.

Honestly though, I’m down for most relationships tbh.

[juistheseminarian]

Eccentric, part 1: (gasp) a child!

You can tell I take myself seriously as a writer since I was originally planning on making this a stand-up-sounding twitter thread, doing my usual best turning the topic into a trendy depression meme while telling anyone who’d listen that I’ve decided to write “real articles” since I “can’t find a job in my field” (I’ve totally looked). So this is me taking a step. I get the tingling feeling it might sound exactly as it would have anyway, except this time i’m gonna have to pry readers from one platform they spend their time on to another that’s about real reading, and somehow this distance is a real marathon to close. I know because I don’t read, and i do run. I expect little and I hope for even less. 

Writing “for real”, as opposed to waxing my usual poetics, has been a terror of mine, along with praying mantises, stick insects and john mulaney’s wife, in a good way. It’s been my plan A as well as my every other plan for as long as I can remember, which is an excellent reason to stay away from it since nothing else could possibly keep it from failing. It’s almost like I didn’t believe in hard work, which is ironic for a person who spent hours a day playing over two-measures loops of music so I’d learn guitar solos for a man. Where’s the reward here? Non-gendered consideration? Give me a break. 

I’ve been told in school that a writer’s first work is oftentimes autobiographical, in reaction to which I thought it would be a funny idea to even try to write about anything else (who could possibly?). That was before I tried viewing it through the lens of standpoint theory and claiming the relevance of my situated point of view as if we needed another white girl to cry about the upper middle class experience. Now don’t get your hopes up, I’m still gonna do it, but I’ll do my best to keep some perspective. There are more important pieces to be written and more important voices to be heard and I’ll never replace them or try to; what I want to do is use the language I’ve had the privilege to develop, and acknowledge my main skill as an opportunity to challenge what needs to be challenged at my own scale. 

Now that I’ve proceeded to justify myself because clearly you had asked, and have realized I’m going to have to find another way to introduce myself than to offer my guests a cup of insecuritea (get it?), let’s move on - I’ve been meaning to talk about, well, me, you got me there - no but really, about my journey trying to put words on my mental health. Tl;dr: I haven’t yet. I’m starting to think the final boss of this game is financial independence so I’ll probably shelf it and go back to super hexagon for a decade or two. What could go wrong. 

It all started when i was still going to school in rollerskates and wearing orange tights to show how I had just discovered the sex pistols - in fact, it started long before, as the nice ladies at daycare told my parents that maybe I was a little more than just shy. The year after that, I was pulled out of school for being unable to stay in class during storytime: I had taken to crying uncontrollably and panicking into a near catatonic state at the thought of the old crone in charge reading fairy tales. I got sick in the morning. I was taken home and it fortunately coincided with my family moving to another village, where I started class the next year and appeared normal, if a little keen on the self-pity. My teacher suspected I was bored, but shit happens, and it didn’t show. I didn’t show.

I never showed. Later on I tried to show and disappear all at once, which was, you’ll see, a little suboptimal, but you do what you can, right. I went from year to year in constant fear and numbness, threats surrounding me in the classrooms, hallways, home, people. I felt injustice and it made me puke, and all that mattered was not being seen, not being seen for this reason at least. To everyone’s surprise, including mine, I had numerous friends, which made the loneliness thing all the more age-typical. Girl-typical. Good grades for a good girl, we never hear her. Now she’s too confident, we hear too much of her. Oh I too was bad at maths! You’re good at languages, where did you learn this? Why do you know that? Why do you talk like this? Look at her, she was ready to cry! We got you! 

Most of what I remember from school is the shame and inadequateness of feeling. I had a few questions: why was I obsessed with sex, how would boys like me, why did it feel better talking to adults even though I was ashamed to do so. At home, I was shamed for masturbating and at school I was just ashamed without anyone needing to make me that way. I don’t know where the trauma was, so don’t ask, okay? I know it’s gotta be in there but how can I tell what’s real and what’s a memory this abusive therapist planted for the sake of being right? 

My body felt like a traitor, always horny and always heavy and always numb. The swimming pool was a nightmare. My femininity was nowhere to be found. The delicate, cheerful way the others sang and hopped around made me grow old, I found myself revoltingly fat, I found my hair too short, and why didn’t I know how to dance? Why were people telling me I was so honest when all I did was be ashamed? Something wasn’t working out for me, and I was crying often. As soon as I pictured myself skipping and singing i couldn’t hold back my tears. I invoked this image of me as what I figured would be a normal little girl, and I felt a thousand years old, an antediluvian tree, its movements blocked and its curves absent. 

The body did things and I hid them. Through puberty i felt like an impure, sexless organism, like secondary sex characteristics implanted on a shape, a bunch of pubes on a round mistake. I didn’t know what makeup was for and my friend group had common enemies: lingerie, sluts, girly girls, because they could not be smart, they wore thongs and smoked and thereby lost the war of clever versus hot. Somewhere along the line we admitted to masturbating and that was the breakthrough, that’s that on that, and one day a girl choked another during recess. Around this time fat became an issue and everyone knew before I did, because it was normal and I overplayed normal. The limits were, and are, invisible to me.

The old school ended without a diagnosis, and I feared for my life since some older kids made a hobby out of telling us we were gonna get beat up as soon as we’d have set foot in the new school. I was scared, normal scared at first, and I shared the scared, which was something I thought I could get used to (unfortunately I did, and then it went away). I moved on and at first it all seemed to have worked out, I had kept some old friends around and even made new ones, I had a boyfriend for one month and we held hands before I told him I was a vampire (I had read a book by Anne Rice) and he no longer wanted to speak to me. I didn’t particularly mind. I found another (I didn’t want him and we tried to fit him inside me; it didn’t even feel like it would ever be a physiological possibility, he was a gentle friend, I was not receptive). I found another (it worked out and we dated for five years. I did manage to fit him inside me, and to this day i’m not certain I should have). Fat had become an issue. 

For the first year it didn’t show - well, not alarmingly so. I studied how to girl and promptly found out that caring about the body seemed an effective shortcut, and I did, very much. I was nerves and erogenous shame, a piglet in human cast, and anything that touched me sent thunderbolts of frustration through my entire bedroom; anyone that talked to me was taking me by surprise and met with confused torrents of whatever had to come out that day. At this point we called the food thing “being careful”: you didn’t want to gain weight so you were “being careful”, salad instead of a main course, no ice cream, careful. Look in the mirror, have you been careful enough? I have a very clear image of walking in on my mother weighing herself and telling me “you see, the biggest worry for moms is to have a flat tummy”. She denied it ever happened. Truth is, the last time she said it was three days ago. 

Then came the warnings and I had already learned to take them as compliments. Everytime someone told me I was eating too little, I was gaining points. I was about to graduate. I was about to evolve like a training pokémon; warnings were congratulations and fear was validating me as a fragile young girl, finally, finally, no longer a slug. You could say it was progressive, and throughout the whole thing I was taken care of, yet I slipped through everyone’s fingers because I had lost twelve kilos and weighed a remaining 36 (that’s 79 pounds). 

My grandmother was afraid of my hands and my body was drying out, dehydrating, too weak to menstruate or feel. During this time I have never fainted, but have pretended to numerous times. I still wasn’t the center of the world, so I considered it a failure. My mother’s friends said I needed to gain weight for men to love me, my mother said I needed to eat or people would keep staring, and everytime I bought diet coke my boyfriend gave me the look you give to a relapsing junkie, because it was the case. All other possibilities had been eliminated, by me. 

The abusive therapist was there all along, but then she was okay still. I saw her all the time, did all sorts of talking and then I saw a doctor and she measured my heart and threatened me with a hospital stay so I cleaned up my act. I was admitted once, in a special unit for teenagers, and it was a nightmare. The others were real and a girl lived there long term because her mother threw chairs in her face (she was the first one to come and introduce herself to me, smiling, complimenting my clothes, kind). One had lost her father and one didn’t like spinach. Before I could spend the night I had caved in and my parents collected me, and I collected the phone they thought was the problem. ED treatments: isolation won’t do shit, trust us. We get better because everyone else is less cruel than you were, and don’t say that’s the point. You lasted one hour before telling me my skirt was too short. 

At one point I told the abusive therapist I was going to get better, and I did. It had lasted about a year and the doctor said it hadn’t been real anorexia or I would have had it worse, and I thought, the nerve on this person that jumped on the occasion to invalidate me as soon as I ate one bite. Don’t you dare take the words from my experience, don’t be ridiculous, I’ve already claimed the words - I do realize how lucky I was, others died, I didn’t, but I was very ill indeed, your ego be damned. I was very ill, I was offered fashion advice and condescension and suggestions that I should stop or men wouldn’t look at me, and I was not medicated and I had my asshole pumped full of water because it had dried shut. My heart sounded like a ruffled biscuit wrapper and my first year of high school was a made-up arrangement for me to not completely float away: I would come to some classes for the sole purpose of keeping myself afloat and would repeat the year no matter what. I think this kept me alive. 

My first days of high school i was a mummy. I had taken to rubbing the skin off of my arms with a pumice stone until they oozed with pus and burned constantly, I wore bandages from my wrists to under my t-shirt sleeves, I don’t know how my legs supported me, I don’t know how anyone did. I had picked a special high school where half my classes would be in english but I’d know nobody: I lasted two days and was transferred to my local school, and there I appeared sporadically in french class, bonding with the delightful old man who gave it and thought my writing was “images”. He said I should do contests but maybe I wouldn’t win because “the best ones often don’t”.

I repeated the class and fell in love with the next french teacher, a gentle woman who taught us about the middle ages. She was the most beautiful person I’d ever seen, mysterious, a woman but not just a mother, she didn’t know what to do with my writing and I’m ever so sorry she had to fence off the embarrassment and try to be a good role model. Lucky for me, she really wasn’t. 

Ultimately I got better. But I gotta say: my style during this era was off the charts. I looked amazing, I copied Amanda Palmer and my boyfriend and the mad hatter and David Bowie, I once went to high school with a suit and converse because of David Tennant, and I cut my own hair with kitchen scissors. My then-boyfriend painted my t-shirts with foetuses and whatever else we found extremely shocking. We said we’d lose our virginity to raw power by Iggy Pop (did we?) and his mother said she was afraid I would mentally screw her stable, balanced son whose anger issues had him slap me a bunch of times - I would have slapped me too, I said then, and almost stand by it. Years later he phoned me saying he was in therapy and he was sorry and it wasn’t my only fault; I don’t think i hold grudges and I’m glad others don’t either. My mother, however, does. Beyond unrealistic. Must be exhausting. 

If I had to describe what anorexia felt like, i’d say it felt like depression but floating, like compulsive obsessing over fashion because I felt I was allowed to now that I was thin; like the most hopeless cul-de-sac with no way out except the one you came from, a well full of serpents like you’re Ragnar Lothbrok and the british are laughing at you from the surface. You float yet sink and you have to claw your way up but your nails are like chalk, you know, from the not eating bit. The anxiety makes every day feel like a year of waiting in terror, and you don’t know why it came and you don’t know why it ends, and sometimes it doesn’t. 

...

I’ll have to return to the abusive therapist topic, which is why this is part one of a series on my experience of mental health issues. This isn’t meant as a self indulgent victimization (although it is self indulgent, I mean what the hell, i’m not catholic) though I don’t think it requires further justification, either. I don’t know what will come out of this once I said everything I had to say on the matter, but for now i’m angry about things, and I feel we need to do better. 

I was in the best possible conditions and my treatment still sucked, and I still spent the last fifteen years of my life in pain because health professionals can’t have an empirical, science-based approach for shit. I’m not exaggerating when I say I was a ping pong ball in a match doctors played with their dicks. Gender informed how easily my anorexia was diagnosed whereas countless young men still suffer in silence; it also informed how patronizing people would sound and how “efforts” were suggested as medication for my disorders. How pleasing men was supposed to be reason enough for me to eat my own illness. How my ‘’giftedness’’ was not investigated and neither was my ADHD because female-coded symptoms are overlooked. I’m pissed off, I’m qualified to be, and you’ll hear more of me. 

-Ju 

[whumptasticwednesday]

FIC RECS 2 - RETURN OF THE FICS

Alright boys, it’s my turn.

[Broken Pieces]

 House of Anubis - whump

I love this fanfiction so much. Oh my god, it’s whack. Pretty much all the boy get in this huge car crash and like Fabian and Eddie are like fucked. It’s literally so whumpy, (a little too much Eddie whump, but whatever. I’ll get over it) but it was like one of the first fanfictions that I read that gave me the whump feeling. Plus I’m a sucker for a good car crash fic.

[Never Planned For]

  House of Anubis - whump

Words can’t even describe this fic. It’s like the best and worst thing I’ve ever read. For those of you who don’t know, the fandoms that I enjoy tend to have little to no fics writers. Which sucks on a level you couldn’t even imagine. But that also means that when I find a fic, especially a whumpy one, it’s like the most exciting thing I’ve ever experienced. This fic is so long and drawn out it’s almost unbearable to read, but when it gets into those good scenes with Fabian and Rufus it’s like nothing I’ve ever experienced. That being said, I can’t even begin to give you a synopsis of this fic. It’s just so fucking weird. But it gets the job done. Sooooo….   moving on

[Damaged Goods]

House of Anubis - smut/whump

Wow, okay, where to start. This is by far the most fucked up fanfiction I have ever read. (Not counting the one I found about The Office where Dwight kidnaps Jim and ties him to a wood table in his barn and then uses this like cow milking contraption on his dick to extract his semen for nurturance.) So pretty much Fabian and Jerome were both victims of sexual abuse, and then they meet like during a concert or something and connect over the fact that their parents liked to touch their 10-year-old weenies. Then Jerome ends up like sucking Fabian’s dick while they’re stuck at the top of a Ferris-Wheel. Shit gets real. I pretty much only enjoy this fic because I’m a sadistic fucker. Well, not as sadistic as the person who wrote it lmao.

[Reactions]

 House of Anubis - whump

Alright, this is by far one of my favorite fanfics ever. The plot is original and the whump is SO GOOD. Pretty much Eddie, being a dumb cunt, ends up cursing all the kids at the house. So everyone ends up with a different reaction (role credits). So, as an example, Patricia is like super horny all the time, I think Alphie acquires like narcolepsy, Victor has this insufferable blood lust and I believe kills a civilian and then consumes all of his blood lol. Alright anyway, Fabian gets like super depressed and his friends have to like talk his down as he’s like literally having a breakdown. Fuck. I’m getting worked up just thinking about it. We love boys in fragile mental states. But all jokes aside, I do genuinely love this book. Give it a good read if you are in the mood for some thick angsty shit.

[House of Anubis - The College Experience]

  House of Anubis - whump/fluff

This book literally has everything, angst, brain damage, fabian getting hit by a bus, fluff, fabina, fabian getting hit by a bus. Everything! I don’t want to spoil too much because the story is really cute, and this author does an amazing job with all her stories. It’s a great book, show her some love.

[The Peters]

   Evan Peters x Taissia Farmiga - lime/whump

This story is so fucking cute. I normally wouldn’t ship Evan and Taissia because I respect that they don’t want to be together and that they want to maintain a professional relationship and that they are dating other people and bla bla bla. But when it comes to Evan Peters fanfictions, if you refuse to ship Evan and Taissia your fanfiction quality and quantity takes a huge hit. So I grit my teeth and try my best to imagine Taissia sucking Evan off even though they have zero interest in each other. But this fic is great. Just tells the story of Evan and Taissia starting a family and the chaos that ensues. I believe there are some whumpy scenes in this book but I honestly don’t remember so  d e a l  w i t h  i t.

[Can I Keep You?]

    American Horror Story - Jimmy x Dandy - Smut/Whump

[Unbroken]

    American Horror Story - Jimmy x Dandy - Smut/Whump

So I’m lumping these two together because they are pretty much the same story. The premise is Dandy buys Jimmy to use at his own disposal but then ends up falling in love with him. Life is good and Jimmy pile drives Dandy’s ass as they watch the sunset. I love these fanfictions so much, they are just the right amount of fucked-up. Also, Jimmy begins regressing after his moms dies and starts wetting the bed again! I don’t remember in which fanfiction that happens in so I guess it will be a surprise.

[Trigger]

     The Office - Jim x Pam - Whump

So in this fic Jim apparently has asthma, and during the soccer game in the parking lot, he has an asthma attack and goes to the hospital. Pretty straight forward, but also very whump. I would recommend giving it a read.

[Pam Halpert and the Great Forearm Disaster]

    The Office - Jim x Pam - Whump/Angst

This one’s a real doozy. So Jim helps pam take down some shelves and ends up cutting his arm. Again, pretty simple but also very hot lmao.

Alright, sorry those last two were kind of short. Not much to say about those two. Plus I’m tired! Alright, please enjoy. Also as I’ve mentioned in other posts, spelling isn’t my strong suit so please let me know when you come across a spelling mistake lol. Cool, that’s all for now.

-Jimmy

[easyfoodnetwork]

The Best Cookbooks of Fall 2020

New cookbooks from Ina Garten, Vivian Howard, Yotam Ottolenghi, and more will restore some much-needed joy to cooking

For many of us, cooking has taken on a different role in our lives over the past six months. As restaurants closed, cooking — and cooking well — became essential even for those who previously spent little time in the kitchen. It also became a chore. At this point, six months into the pandemic, I’m impressed by anyone who still considers cooking a creative, joyful pastime, not just a means to food.

But here to change that is a stellar lineup of fall cookbooks, bringing with them new inspiration and new comforts, and, at last, a reason to enter the kitchen with excitement. There are anticipated titles from beloved culinary figures, whose time-saving guidance and easy meal upgrades feel especially welcome now. There are books from some of the restaurants we miss the most, offering recreations of their dishes and insights that make us nostalgic for the time before shutdowns. There are primers on international cuisines; books for the adept home cook that take a studied, even scientific approach to flavor; and books that reflect the trends of the moment, including baking books for the person who has spent hours perfecting their bread game as well as the one who feels the occasional urge to bake a cake to be eaten immediately.

I’m confident that even the most reluctant cook is sure to find at least one new cookbook among these 17 to dip a fork into. And for those for whom cooking never lost its luster, it’s a feast. — Monica Burton

One Tin Bakes: Sweet and simple traybakes, pies, bars and buns

Edd Kimber Kyle Books, out now

The philosophy of Edd Kimber’s One Tin Bakes is pleasingly minimalist: Invest in one good 9-by-13-inch aluminum pan — or “tin,” in British parlance — and bake everything in it. Kimber has published three other books since winning the inaugural season of The Great British Bake Off in 2010, but this is the first that’s themed around a specific piece of equipment, and by focusing on the versatility of a single pan, One Tin Bakes prioritizes simplicity for both novice bakers and those who already know their way around a stand mixer.

For the most part, these are not show-stopper, highly technical bakes — though some, like the “Giant Portuguese Custard Tart,” are impressive by nature. The recipes are unfussy, undemanding, and a pleasure to cook. They’re all sweet, with chapters spanning cakes, pies, breads, bars, cookies, and some no-bake desserts too. And while 9-by-13-inch sheets and slabs of baked goods are the stars of the book, Kimber’s collection also includes non-rectangular treats: rolled cakes, ice cream sandwiches, and babka buns, among others. Six months ago I might have described this book as a party baking companion — most of the recipes feed eight to 12 people — but parties are in short supply for the foreseeable future. That said, even without feeding my coworkers or friends, there is something so joyful (surface area, perhaps?) about pulling a magnificent rectangular pan of streusel-topped coffee cake or gigantic British scone from the oven. — Adam Moussa

Parwana: Recipes and Stories from an Afghan Kitchen

Durkhanai Ayubi with recipes by Farida Ayubi Interlink, out now

The story of Parwana, the popular Afghan restaurant in South Adelaide, Australia, has always been intertwined with history. Owners Zelmai and Farida Ayubi fled Afghanistan for Australia in 1987, during the Cold War, itself the result of hundreds of years of conflict. So it’s no surprise that the restaurant’s cookbook, written by Zelmai and Farida’s daughter Durkhanai Ayubi, would double as a history lesson. Interspersed between recipes are stories of the Silk Road, the Mughal empire, and the Great Game, which illustrate how because of trade, plunder, and cultural exchange, Afghan cuisine is both beloved and recognizable.

The book walks through classics like kabuli palaw, shaami kebab, and falooda (all of which, unlike so many restaurant dishes adapted to cookbooks, are incredibly achievable for the home cook) and demonstrate how Afghan cuisine both influenced and was influenced by nearly all of Asia. No matter what cuisine you’re most used to cooking, you’ll find a recipe, or even just a flavor, that feels familiar here. — Jaya Saxena

The Sourdough School: Sweet Baking: Nourishing the Gut & the Mind

Vanessa Kimbell Kyle Books, out now

The first thing to know about the sweets-focused follow-up to 2018’s The Sourdough School cookbook, the groundbreaking gut-health baking book by food writer and BBC radio host Vanessa Kimbell, is this: “It is not a book about baking,” she writes. “This is a book about understanding.” She’s right, sort of. It is not just a book about baking. It is, like its predecessor, a manifesto on the gut-brain connection — a guide to caring for the magical ecosystem within our own bodies, a fragile environment that, she says, our modern way of eating has ravaged, grimly affecting both our physical and mental health. It’s a book about science and bacteria and flour milling and fermenting and strategies for adjusting our lives in such a way to allow for four-day cupcake-making.

But then... it is also very much a book about baking. There are loads of delicious (if unabashedly healthy-looking) recipes with ingredients that prioritize your gut’s microbiome, everything from chocolate chip “biscuits” and Bangladeshi jalebis to swirly miso-prune danishes and a pudgy lemon-poppyseed cake with a hit of saffron. Nothing about these multi-day recipes is what anyone might call simple (I’ve never been so tempted to whip up my own couture flour blends), but Kimbell is as lovely a hand-holder as she is a writer, giving out lifelines like detailed schedules for each recipe, including the crucial pre-bake starter feedings so many other sourdough books leave out. She also is not above compromise, allowing for store-bought flours and dolling out assurances like, “if you are not into the scientific details, feel free to skip this entire section. I totally get just wanting to get on and bake.” A thorough reader, though, will be rewarded with a whole new way of thinking about the human body, along with a whole bunch of yummy new ways to indulge it. — Lesley Suter

The Mexican Home Kitchen: Traditional Home-Style Recipes That Capture the Flavors and Memories of Mexico

Mely Martinez Rock Point, September 15

Mely Martínez comes to publishing by way of the old-school world of recipe blogging on her website, Mexico in My Kitchen. Martínez was born in Mexico and traveled throughout different regions as a teacher and again later in her life, learning from local women along the way, before eventually settling in the United States. After bouncing around recipe forums, she established the site in 2008 as a way to record family recipes for her teenage son. Through the internet, she reached a far wider audience of Mexican immigrants craving their abuela’s recipes. Now, her debut cookbook, The Mexican Home Kitchen, reflects that well-traveled savvy, but it’s forgiving, too, providing helpful tips on variations of recipes and alternative methods of food preparation or ingredients.

Martínez’s book is about the basics of Mexican home cooking; recipes include comfort foods like caldo de pollo dressed up with slices of avocado and diced jalapeño and special occasion meals like mole poblano. The recipes are simple enough for people just getting into Mexican cooking, but also have a nostalgic quality that will appeal to those who grew up with homemade arroz con leche or chicharrón en salsa verde. Flipping through The Mexican Home Kitchen, I remembered my own childhood visits with my stepmother’s family, where I would sit around the table with the many other grandkids swirling Ritz crackers in steaming bowls of atole. I turned to Martínez’s atole blanco recipe on page 178, and headed to the store for some masa harina, newly inspired. — Brenna Houck

Pie for Everyone: Recipes and Stories from Petee’s Pie, New York’s Best Pie Shop

Petra “Petee” Paredez Abrams, September 22

If you’re not a pie person, then clearly you’ve never had a slice of Petra Paredez’s black-bottom almond chess pie. Growing up in a baking and farming family (her parents started northern Virginia treasure Mom’s Apple Pie Company in 1981), Paredez has considerable pie-making expertise. In 2014, she and her husband, Robert Paredez, opened their Lower East Side shop Petee’s Pie Company on a shoestring budget, and today, the sweet, sunny cafe on Delancey Street is considered one of the best pie shops in New York City.

At the heart of Petee’s Pie, the goal is simple: a flavorful, flaky, tender crust and perfectly balanced filling. Pie for Everyone teaches readers how to achieve this at home. The book begins with foundational information (how to source ingredients, the tools to buy to make pie-making easier and more efficient) followed by chapters on crusts and crumbs and pie fillings. And while there are hundreds of ways to make pie, Paredez believes in the merits of a super-buttery crust. “If you only use one of my pastry dough recipes,” she writes, “I hope it’s my butter pastry dough.”

With recipes that are both sweet and savory (including quiches), Pie for Everyone covers the shop’s year-round signature pies, like maple whiskey walnut and chocolate cream, as well as seasonal favorites, like strawberry rhubarb and nesselrode, a New York specialty consisting of chestnut custard with black rum-soaked cherries. But whether you’re a fan of Petee’s Pie or you’ve never been, bakers and pie lovers will appreciate learning from Paredez, a baker for whom pie-making is a ribbon-worthy feat every single time. — Esra Erol

Modern Comfort Food: A Barefoot Contessa Cookbook

Ina Garten Random House, October 6

There are many cookbooks that you want to read more than cook from, but Modern Comfort Food: A Barefoot Contessa Cookbook is not one of them. In her 12th cookbook, Ina Garten, the queen of timeless, expertly tested dishes, shares 85 recipes for the kinds of comfort foods we’re craving more than ever. Dedicated home cooks may already know most of these unfussy foods by heart, but with Garten’s thoughtful techniques and guidance on how to find the best ingredients, dishes like chicken pot pie soup, baked rigatoni with lamb ragu, and skillet-roasted chicken with potatoes feel new and exciting. The skillet-roasted chicken and potatoes, for example, calls for a buttermilk marinade to make the bird juicy and moist, while potatoes are cooked with the chicken jus under the chicken, on the bottom of a hot skillet, to absorb extra chicken flavor, turning two humble ingredients into a fabulous dinner.

This being a Barefoot Contessa cookbook, it also comes with all the stories and aspirational photos (including many heart-melting pictures of Garten and husband Jeffrey) that have long inspired fans to want to live, cook, and eat like Ina. But, compared to Garten’s other books, Modern Comfort Food depicts the culinary star more as a loving neighbor who will bring you chocolate chip cookies on Sundays than the imposing queen of East Hampton. In the intro to this book, Garten admits that these days, she’s a little grumpier than usual (just like the rest of us), says it’s okay if we reach for a cold martini and a tub of ice cream for dinner, and reminds us once again how she managed to capture so many hearts over more than two decades as the Barefoot Contessa. — James Park

Good Drinks: Alcohol-Free Recipes for When You’re Not Drinking for Whatever Reason

Julia Bainbridge Ten Speed Press, October 6

A lot of people feel weird about drinking nowadays. Our spending habits show it, through products like low-ABV hard seltzers, chic nonalcoholic aperitifs, or just the ongoing popularity of sober months like Dry January. Author Julia Bainbridge understands the fluid nature of this type of sobriety, which is why she subtitled her book of spirit-free drinks as “for When You’re Not Drinking for Whatever Reason.” After all, you don’t need to eschew alcohol forever in order to enjoy a thoughtfully blended drink that isn’t trying to get you sloshed.

The drinks in Good Drinks are structured by the time of day you might enjoy them (brunch accompaniment, happy hour treat, aperitif), and are as complex and innovative (and labor-intensive) as anything at a fancy cocktail bar. They call for ingredients like black cardamom-cinnamon syrup, buckwheat tea, and tomato-watermelon juice, each of which get their own recipes. There’s even a whole recipe for a dupe of nonalcoholic Pimm’s (involving citus, rooibos tea, raspberry vinegar, and gentian root). The results are festive, celebratory drinks for any occasion, so the nondrinkers need not be stuck with cranberry juice and seltzer anymore. — JS

Ottolenghi Flavor: A Cookbook

Yotam Ottolenghi and Ixta Belfrage Ten Speed Press, October 13

It’s probably a good thing Yotam Ottolenghi’s new cookbook isn’t called Plenty 3 or More Plenty More, veering the chef’s cookbook oeuvre into Fast & Furious territory. But by the London chef’s own admission, that’s a good way to understand Flavor, his newest book, which like its Plenty predecessors focuses on vegetables and all the creative ways to prepare and combine them.

Co-written with Ixta Belfrage, a recipe developer in the Ottolenghi test kitchen, Flavor presents recipes from three perspectives. The “process” chapter explores specific techniques to transform vegetables, such as charring and fermenting. “Pairing” takes an angle that will sound familiar to Samin Nosrat fans, with recipes rooted in the perfect balance of fat, acid, “chile heat,” and sweetness. And “produce” focuses on the ingredients with such complex tastes, usages, and sub-categories that they deserve examination on their own: mushrooms, onions (and their allium cousins), nuts and seeds, and sugar in fruit and booze form.

The result, in typical Ottolenghi fashion, is multi-step, multi-ingredient, and multi-hued recipes whose promised flavors leap from the page — from cabbage “tacos” with celery root and date barbecue sauce to saffron tagliatelle with ricotta and crispy chipotle shallots. Chipotles and other chiles are actually in abundance here (as well as “a lime or two in places where lemons would appear in previous Ottolenghi books,” as the intro notes) thanks to Belfrage’s roots in Mexico City. Those flavors, as well as those from Brazilian, Italian, and multiple Asian cuisines (spy the shiitake congee and noodles with peanut laab), unite with the usual Ottolenghi suspects — za’atar, star anise, harissa, labneh — to make Flavor worth the look, even for the home chef who already has Plenty and Plenty More on the shelf. — Ellie Krupnick

Xi’an Famous Foods: The Cuisine of Western China, from New York’s Favorite Noodle Shop

Jason Wang with Jessica K. Chou Abrams, October 13

The debut cookbook from the New York City restaurant chain Xi’an Famous Foods is worth picking up whether or not you have slurped the restaurant’s hand-pulled noodles. This is a book on how to operate a food business — CEO Jason Wang outlines five lessons to know before diving into the business and strips away the glamor of running a restaurant empire. It’s also a food history of the flavors of Xi’an, China. With so many layers to appreciate, Xi’an Famous Foods is a prime example of what a restaurant cookbook can be.

Much of the book reads like a TV series. It’s broken into episodes covering Wang’s challenges, failures, and successes, from his life-changing move from Xi’an to a rural town in Michigan, to his nights out in New York City’s Koreatown, to taking over his father’s business, Xi’an Famous Foods. Interspersed with these anecdotes, there are recipes for the restaurant’s fiery, mouth-tingling dishes, including Xi’an Famous Foods’ famous noodle sauce (accented with salty and spicy flavors from black vinegar, oyster sauce, fennel seeds, and Sichuan peppercorns), along with techniques for making hand-pulled noodles paired with helpful illustrations and visual references. For avid home cooks who want a challenge, Xi’an Famous Foods also provides tips on putting together the best hot pot at home, and for those who are confused at Asian groceries, there’s a list of basic pantry items with flavor notes and how they are used in cooking. And whether it’s Wang’s personal connection to a dish or its wider history that draws you in, each recipe will broaden your knowledge and appreciation of Xi’an cooking. — JP

Coconut & Sambal: Recipes from my Indonesian Kitchen

Lara Lee Bloomsbury, October 13

In the introduction of her debut cookbook, Lara Lee writes that an overflowing generosity is central to Indonesian culture; meals are shared freely between neighbors and friends. This generosity fills the pages of Coconut & Sambal, each recipe heightening the sense that as a reader, you’ve been let in on something special.

Lee, who was born in Australia, didn’t spend time in Indonesia until later in life, so early memories of Indonesian cooking come from the trips her grandmother Margaret Thali — whom Lee lovingly refers to as Popo throughout the book — would take to Australia. Each of the cookbook’s chapter introductions is deeply researched: Some recount stories of Lee’s grandmother, and others focus on the Indonesia that Lee fell in love with as she traveled across the archipelago collecting stories and recipes for this book.

The recipes that fill Coconut & Sambal demonstrate that Indonesian cuisine cannot be painted with one brush. The food of the nation — made up of more than 15,000 islands — incorporates the sharp heat of chiles, the mellow hit of fermented shrimp, the sweetness of coconut in nearly every form, and always enough rice to go around. You’ll find curries fragrant with makrut lime leaf, ginger, and turmeric, and bright ceviches adorned with thinly sliced chiles, banana shallot, and palm sugar; I was particularly drawn to a fried chicken dish (page 142), its crisp shell smashed and laced with fiery sambal. Lee explains that recipes are typically passed down orally in Indonesian culture, which makes me even more grateful for these written ones. What Lee has given readers is a gorgeous document that sets in stone food traditions passed down through generations, as well as some she’s created herself. You’ll want to dedicate an evening to turning the pages of this book, planning out feasts of green chile braised duck, Balinese roasted pork belly, and perhaps some sticky ginger toffee pudding to top it all off. — Elazar Sontag

In Bibi’s Kitchen: The Recipes and Stories of Grandmothers from the Eight African Countries that Touch the Indian Ocean

Hawa Hassan and Julia Turshen Ten Speed Press, October 13

Recipes are almost always the main attraction in a cookbook. But In Bibi’s Kitchen, written by first-time author Hawa Hassan in collaboration with veteran cookbook writer Julia Turshen, there’s so much to enjoy before you even get to the first recipe. The book focuses on dishes from eight African countries, linked by their shared proximity to the Indian Ocean and involvement in the region’s spice trade.

Each chapter, divided by country, starts with a brief history of the region and question-and-answer-style interviews with one of the bibis, or grandmothers, who call these places home. The answers to these questions find the grandmothers speaking about the meaning of home, the gender roles in their communities, and the importance of passing on food traditions. Each interview is as beautiful and varied as the recipes that follow: kadaka akondro (green plantains and braised beef) from the home of Ma Baomaka in Ambohidratrimo, Madagascar; digaag qumbe, a Somalian chicken stew rich with yogurt and coconut milk, served with sweet banana; kaimati, crisp coconut dumplings in an ambrosial cardamom syrup, this batch cooked in Ma Shara’s kitchen in Zanzibar, but popular all along the Swahili coast. A practical advantage of collecting recipes from home cooks is that these recipes are all approachable, most calling for fewer than 10 ingredients.

In many ways, In Bibi’s Kitchen breaks ground. It pays tribute to a part of the world that has been criminally overlooked by American publishers, sharing the stories of these African countries from the perspectives of home cooks who actually live there. The book is full of intimate portraits of the grandmothers in their kitchens, captured by Kenyan photographer Khadija M. Farah, who joined these women in their homes. The result of this collaborative and ambitious effort is a collection of heartwarming photos, tidbits of history, and, of course, plenty of mouthwatering meals. — ES

This Will Make it Taste Good: A New Path to Simple Cooking

Vivian Howard Voracious, October 20

Reading through Vivian Howard’s This Will Make It Taste Good is like reading a cookbook by your real or imagined North Carolinian best friend. The design itself is cheerful, full of 1970s serif fonts and colorful badges that are reminiscent of a children’s workbook. Dishes are photographed from above, in the same style as Alison Roman’s Dining In and Nothing Fancy, often showing Howard’s hands as they work away chopping herbs or spooning chowder. The A Chef’s Life host’s goal is simple: to teach home cooks that easy meals can be exciting rather than bland.

Howard’s intended audience is the time-crunched kitchen novice, though a more experienced cook will surely find some useful tips, as well. Each section is based around a recipe that can be prepped in advance and then used throughout the week in a multitude of dishes: Among the most promising are the “Little Green Dress,” a dressing with flexible ingredients that can gussy up anything from mussels to crackers to soft-boiled eggs; the “R-Rated Onions,” which you can keep in an ice cube tray in the freezer to use at your convenience; and the “Citrus Shrine,” i.e., preserved citrus that promises to elevate dishes like shrimp cocktail and rice pilaf — you can even use it in margaritas! In any time, This Will Make It Taste Good would be a great help to those of us who prefer recipes that look and taste more complex than they are to prepare. That it happens to arrive at a moment when we’re likely all sick of the contents of our fridges and our own culinary limitations is just a bonus. — Madeleine Davies

The Rise: Black Cooks and the Soul of American Food

Marcus Samuelsson with Osayi Endolyn Voracious, October 27

“Black food is not just one thing,” chef Marcus Samuelsson writes in the introduction to The Rise. “It’s not a rigidly defined geography or a static set of tastes. It is an energy. A force. An engine.” The cookbook that follows is an invigorating, joyous, and deeply nuanced illustration of the complexity of Black foodways, one that weaves together conversations about history, artistry, authorship, race, class, and culture with 150 recipes that incorporate ingredients and techniques from around the globe.

Each of the book’s recipes was created in honor of “someone who is illuminating the space we share,” as Samuelsson writes: chefs, artists, activists, authors, and historians, all of whom are profiled by the book’s coauthor, Eater contributor Osayi Endolyn. The recipes are organized to demonstrate how culinary rituals and traditions evolve according to time, place, and cook. In the first chapter, “Next,” for example, you’ll find food that speaks of forward-thinking innovation, such as baked sweet potatoes with garlic-fermented shrimp butter, created in honor of David Zilber, the former director of fermentation at Noma. (That butter, pureed with avocado, sweet soy sauce, and fresh thyme, is not only easy to make, but so good that you can be forgiven for eating it straight from the food processor.) “Migration,” the third chapter, speaks of the American South, with recipes like spiced lemon chess pie, broken rice peanut seafood stew, and Papa Ed’s shrimp and grits, named for Ed Brumfield, the executive chef at Samuelsson’s Harlem restaurant the Red Rooster.

The Rise doesn’t claim to be an encyclopedic compendium of Black cooking; instead, it’s a celebration, one that honors the past while looking ahead, challenging assumptions even as it feeds you well. — Rebecca Flint Marx

The Flavor Equation: The Science of Great Cooking Explained in More Than 100 Essential Recipes

Nik Sharma Chronicle Books, October 27

Nik Sharma begins his second cookbook by explaining that we rely on a variety of senses and feelings when we eat: sight, sound, mouthfeel or texture, aroma, taste, and even our emotions and memories. These components make up what he refers to as the “Flavor Equation,” and this concept and the role it plays in everyday cooking is the guiding principle of his book of the same name.

Following a thorough and captivating science lesson on the equation, Sharma lays out seven chapters dedicated to basic tastes and flavor boosters — brightness, bitterness, saltiness, sweetness, savoriness, fieriness, and richness — each with its own set of recipes: pomegranate and poppy seed wings exemplify brightness, roasted figs with coffee miso tahini or hazelnut flan highlight bitterness, “pizza” toast for saltiness, masala cheddar cornbread in the sweetness section, and more. Through these achievable recipes, many of which rely mostly on pantry essentials, Sharma helps readers better understand how flavor works and how to use that to their advantage to become more confident home cooks. Whatever your skill level in the kitchen, with its more than 100 recipes, illustrated diagrams, and Sharma’s own evocative photography, The Flavor Equation is an engrossing guide to elevating simple dishes into holistic experiences. — EE

Time to Eat: Delicious Meals for Busy Lives

Nadiya Hussain Clarkson Potter, November 10 (originally published June 27, 2019)

Nadiya Hussain is just like you and me. That’s the guiding principle behind her public persona, her BBC Two cooking show Time to Eat (now on Netflix), and her cookbook Time to Eat: Delicious Meals for Busy Lives. “I know what it’s like to have just one head and one pair of hands,” the Great British Bake Off winner writes in the introduction of Time to Eat, a new stateside version of her U.K. cookbook of the same title. Her book, she promises, will help you become a smarter home cook in between chores and kids, thanks to heavy use of the freezer and other time savers.

On the page, that looks like tips for prepping and freezing, recipes that leave you with enough leftovers to make a second dish, and ideas for remixes and variations. There are more than 100 recipes, divided into breakfast, lunch, dinner, dessert, and basics. Many of these dishes may be unfamiliar to American audiences — hello, kedgeree and fish pie burgers! — but the instructions are as approachable as Hussain’s on-camera demonstrations. With enough variety to keep it interesting, balanced with dishes easy enough to work into your weekly rotation of meals, e.g., eggs rolled onto tortillas, Time to Eat offers something for any home cook looking for new ideas and time-tested, time-saving methods. — Jenny G. Zhang

Fäviken: 4015 Days, Beginning to End

Magnus Nilsson Phaidon, November 11

Last December, after more than a decade of acclaim, accolades, and meals rooted in seasonality and locally produced ingredients, Magnus Nilsson closed his restaurant Fäviken in Jämtland, Sweden. In the lead-up to the closing, he told the LA Times that he wanted to focus on the restaurant, not elegies or explanations. Now, the explanation has arrived in the form of Fäviken: 4015 Days, Beginning to End, Nilsson’s latest monograph with publisher Phaidon.

Although the book covers the lifespan of Fäviken, including lookbacks at the first title Nilsson published about the restaurant, it is not an elegy. There are no laments here, but rather a thorough catalogue of all the dishes that Fäviken served, ruminations about craft and haute cuisine and sustainability, and a long-awaited account of “Why Fäviken had to close, really.” The book contains recipes for many of the restaurant’s dishes — ranging from the simple berry ice to the more demanding “Scallop I skalet ur elden cooked over burning juniper branches,” with extensive headnotes — but its purpose is not as a cookbook. It is a tome (beautifully put together, as is typical for Phaidon) that is made for fans of Fäviken’s, of Nilsson’s, and more importantly, of the way of life he espouses, one that is passionate but measured.

That is best expressed in one of the book’s final essays, one dated May 12, 2020, in which Nilsson articulates gratitude that he was able to close his restaurant on his own terms, for Fäviken would not have survived the pandemic. “If one day some years from now I wake up in the morning and feel the same burning desire to run a restaurant that I felt for many years at Fäviken, I won’t think twice about it,” Nilsson writes. “But if that doesn’t happen, that’s okay too. There are many other things to do in life.” — JGZ

A Good Bake: The Art and Science of Making Perfect Pastries, Cakes, Cookies, Pies, and Breads at Home

Melissa Weller with Carolynn Carreño Knopf, November 17

There are people who treat baking like a hobby and there are people who treat baking as a raison d’etre, a life’s purpose. Melissa Weller’s A Good Bake is for the latter, which shouldn’t surprise anyone considering Weller’s resume, which includes creating pastry for some of New York City’s most revered restaurants, such as Per Se, Roberta’s, and her acclaimed SoHo bagel shop, Sadelle’s. Before she became an expert baker, Weller was a chemical engineer, and as such, she tackles recipes with a scientific approach, getting the fermentation, proofing, and pH balance of her dough down to, well, a science.

If you’re a quarantine baker who’s mastered sourdough and is ready for the next challenge, consider Weller’s takes on NYC classics like chocolate babka, spelt scones with raspberry jam, and even traditional hot dog buns. A Good Bake will thrill bakers who rejoice in doing things the difficult way (but note that there are beautiful and detailed photos of her process to help guide ambitious bakers through the recipe). Of course, this means that failing will hurt all the more, considering the hours (or days, even!) of work that you’ve put into your bake, but success? It will taste all the sweeter... or more savory. It depends on your tastes, and Weller expertly caters to both. — MD

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New cookbooks from Ina Garten, Vivian Howard, Yotam Ottolenghi, and more will restore some much-needed joy to cooking

For many of us, cooking has taken on a different role in our lives over the past six months. As restaurants closed, cooking — and cooking well — became essential even for those who previously spent little time in the kitchen. It also became a chore. At this point, six months into the pandemic, I’m impressed by anyone who still considers cooking a creative, joyful pastime, not just a means to food.

But here to change that is a stellar lineup of fall cookbooks, bringing with them new inspiration and new comforts, and, at last, a reason to enter the kitchen with excitement. There are anticipated titles from beloved culinary figures, whose time-saving guidance and easy meal upgrades feel especially welcome now. There are books from some of the restaurants we miss the most, offering recreations of their dishes and insights that make us nostalgic for the time before shutdowns. There are primers on international cuisines; books for the adept home cook that take a studied, even scientific approach to flavor; and books that reflect the trends of the moment, including baking books for the person who has spent hours perfecting their bread game as well as the one who feels the occasional urge to bake a cake to be eaten immediately.

I’m confident that even the most reluctant cook is sure to find at least one new cookbook among these 17 to dip a fork into. And for those for whom cooking never lost its luster, it’s a feast. — Monica Burton

One Tin Bakes: Sweet and simple traybakes, pies, bars and buns

Edd Kimber Kyle Books, out now

The philosophy of Edd Kimber’s One Tin Bakes is pleasingly minimalist: Invest in one good 9-by-13-inch aluminum pan — or “tin,” in British parlance — and bake everything in it. Kimber has published three other books since winning the inaugural season of The Great British Bake Off in 2010, but this is the first that’s themed around a specific piece of equipment, and by focusing on the versatility of a single pan, One Tin Bakes prioritizes simplicity for both novice bakers and those who already know their way around a stand mixer.

For the most part, these are not show-stopper, highly technical bakes — though some, like the “Giant Portuguese Custard Tart,” are impressive by nature. The recipes are unfussy, undemanding, and a pleasure to cook. They’re all sweet, with chapters spanning cakes, pies, breads, bars, cookies, and some no-bake desserts too. And while 9-by-13-inch sheets and slabs of baked goods are the stars of the book, Kimber’s collection also includes non-rectangular treats: rolled cakes, ice cream sandwiches, and babka buns, among others. Six months ago I might have described this book as a party baking companion — most of the recipes feed eight to 12 people — but parties are in short supply for the foreseeable future. That said, even without feeding my coworkers or friends, there is something so joyful (surface area, perhaps?) about pulling a magnificent rectangular pan of streusel-topped coffee cake or gigantic British scone from the oven. — Adam Moussa

Parwana: Recipes and Stories from an Afghan Kitchen

Durkhanai Ayubi with recipes by Farida Ayubi Interlink, out now

The story of Parwana, the popular Afghan restaurant in South Adelaide, Australia, has always been intertwined with history. Owners Zelmai and Farida Ayubi fled Afghanistan for Australia in 1987, during the Cold War, itself the result of hundreds of years of conflict. So it’s no surprise that the restaurant’s cookbook, written by Zelmai and Farida’s daughter Durkhanai Ayubi, would double as a history lesson. Interspersed between recipes are stories of the Silk Road, the Mughal empire, and the Great Game, which illustrate how because of trade, plunder, and cultural exchange, Afghan cuisine is both beloved and recognizable.

The book walks through classics like kabuli palaw, shaami kebab, and falooda (all of which, unlike so many restaurant dishes adapted to cookbooks, are incredibly achievable for the home cook) and demonstrate how Afghan cuisine both influenced and was influenced by nearly all of Asia. No matter what cuisine you’re most used to cooking, you’ll find a recipe, or even just a flavor, that feels familiar here. — Jaya Saxena

The Sourdough School: Sweet Baking: Nourishing the Gut & the Mind

Vanessa Kimbell Kyle Books, out now

The first thing to know about the sweets-focused follow-up to 2018’s The Sourdough School cookbook, the groundbreaking gut-health baking book by food writer and BBC radio host Vanessa Kimbell, is this: “It is not a book about baking,” she writes. “This is a book about understanding.” She’s right, sort of. It is not just a book about baking. It is, like its predecessor, a manifesto on the gut-brain connection — a guide to caring for the magical ecosystem within our own bodies, a fragile environment that, she says, our modern way of eating has ravaged, grimly affecting both our physical and mental health. It’s a book about science and bacteria and flour milling and fermenting and strategies for adjusting our lives in such a way to allow for four-day cupcake-making.

But then... it is also very much a book about baking. There are loads of delicious (if unabashedly healthy-looking) recipes with ingredients that prioritize your gut’s microbiome, everything from chocolate chip “biscuits” and Bangladeshi jalebis to swirly miso-prune danishes and a pudgy lemon-poppyseed cake with a hit of saffron. Nothing about these multi-day recipes is what anyone might call simple (I’ve never been so tempted to whip up my own couture flour blends), but Kimbell is as lovely a hand-holder as she is a writer, giving out lifelines like detailed schedules for each recipe, including the crucial pre-bake starter feedings so many other sourdough books leave out. She also is not above compromise, allowing for store-bought flours and dolling out assurances like, “if you are not into the scientific details, feel free to skip this entire section. I totally get just wanting to get on and bake.” A thorough reader, though, will be rewarded with a whole new way of thinking about the human body, along with a whole bunch of yummy new ways to indulge it. — Lesley Suter

The Mexican Home Kitchen: Traditional Home-Style Recipes That Capture the Flavors and Memories of Mexico

Mely Martinez Rock Point, September 15

Mely Martínez comes to publishing by way of the old-school world of recipe blogging on her website, Mexico in My Kitchen. Martínez was born in Mexico and traveled throughout different regions as a teacher and again later in her life, learning from local women along the way, before eventually settling in the United States. After bouncing around recipe forums, she established the site in 2008 as a way to record family recipes for her teenage son. Through the internet, she reached a far wider audience of Mexican immigrants craving their abuela’s recipes. Now, her debut cookbook, The Mexican Home Kitchen, reflects that well-traveled savvy, but it’s forgiving, too, providing helpful tips on variations of recipes and alternative methods of food preparation or ingredients.

Martínez’s book is about the basics of Mexican home cooking; recipes include comfort foods like caldo de pollo dressed up with slices of avocado and diced jalapeño and special occasion meals like mole poblano. The recipes are simple enough for people just getting into Mexican cooking, but also have a nostalgic quality that will appeal to those who grew up with homemade arroz con leche or chicharrón en salsa verde. Flipping through The Mexican Home Kitchen, I remembered my own childhood visits with my stepmother’s family, where I would sit around the table with the many other grandkids swirling Ritz crackers in steaming bowls of atole. I turned to Martínez’s atole blanco recipe on page 178, and headed to the store for some masa harina, newly inspired. — Brenna Houck

Pie for Everyone: Recipes and Stories from Petee’s Pie, New York’s Best Pie Shop

Petra “Petee” Paredez Abrams, September 22

If you’re not a pie person, then clearly you’ve never had a slice of Petra Paredez’s black-bottom almond chess pie. Growing up in a baking and farming family (her parents started northern Virginia treasure Mom’s Apple Pie Company in 1981), Paredez has considerable pie-making expertise. In 2014, she and her husband, Robert Paredez, opened their Lower East Side shop Petee’s Pie Company on a shoestring budget, and today, the sweet, sunny cafe on Delancey Street is considered one of the best pie shops in New York City.

At the heart of Petee’s Pie, the goal is simple: a flavorful, flaky, tender crust and perfectly balanced filling. Pie for Everyone teaches readers how to achieve this at home. The book begins with foundational information (how to source ingredients, the tools to buy to make pie-making easier and more efficient) followed by chapters on crusts and crumbs and pie fillings. And while there are hundreds of ways to make pie, Paredez believes in the merits of a super-buttery crust. “If you only use one of my pastry dough recipes,” she writes, “I hope it’s my butter pastry dough.”

With recipes that are both sweet and savory (including quiches), Pie for Everyone covers the shop’s year-round signature pies, like maple whiskey walnut and chocolate cream, as well as seasonal favorites, like strawberry rhubarb and nesselrode, a New York specialty consisting of chestnut custard with black rum-soaked cherries. But whether you’re a fan of Petee’s Pie or you’ve never been, bakers and pie lovers will appreciate learning from Paredez, a baker for whom pie-making is a ribbon-worthy feat every single time. — Esra Erol

Modern Comfort Food: A Barefoot Contessa Cookbook

Ina Garten Random House, October 6

There are many cookbooks that you want to read more than cook from, but Modern Comfort Food: A Barefoot Contessa Cookbook is not one of them. In her 12th cookbook, Ina Garten, the queen of timeless, expertly tested dishes, shares 85 recipes for the kinds of comfort foods we’re craving more than ever. Dedicated home cooks may already know most of these unfussy foods by heart, but with Garten’s thoughtful techniques and guidance on how to find the best ingredients, dishes like chicken pot pie soup, baked rigatoni with lamb ragu, and skillet-roasted chicken with potatoes feel new and exciting. The skillet-roasted chicken and potatoes, for example, calls for a buttermilk marinade to make the bird juicy and moist, while potatoes are cooked with the chicken jus under the chicken, on the bottom of a hot skillet, to absorb extra chicken flavor, turning two humble ingredients into a fabulous dinner.

This being a Barefoot Contessa cookbook, it also comes with all the stories and aspirational photos (including many heart-melting pictures of Garten and husband Jeffrey) that have long inspired fans to want to live, cook, and eat like Ina. But, compared to Garten’s other books, Modern Comfort Food depicts the culinary star more as a loving neighbor who will bring you chocolate chip cookies on Sundays than the imposing queen of East Hampton. In the intro to this book, Garten admits that these days, she’s a little grumpier than usual (just like the rest of us), says it’s okay if we reach for a cold martini and a tub of ice cream for dinner, and reminds us once again how she managed to capture so many hearts over more than two decades as the Barefoot Contessa. — James Park

Good Drinks: Alcohol-Free Recipes for When You’re Not Drinking for Whatever Reason

Julia Bainbridge Ten Speed Press, October 6

A lot of people feel weird about drinking nowadays. Our spending habits show it, through products like low-ABV hard seltzers, chic nonalcoholic aperitifs, or just the ongoing popularity of sober months like Dry January. Author Julia Bainbridge understands the fluid nature of this type of sobriety, which is why she subtitled her book of spirit-free drinks as “for When You’re Not Drinking for Whatever Reason.” After all, you don’t need to eschew alcohol forever in order to enjoy a thoughtfully blended drink that isn’t trying to get you sloshed.

The drinks in Good Drinks are structured by the time of day you might enjoy them (brunch accompaniment, happy hour treat, aperitif), and are as complex and innovative (and labor-intensive) as anything at a fancy cocktail bar. They call for ingredients like black cardamom-cinnamon syrup, buckwheat tea, and tomato-watermelon juice, each of which get their own recipes. There’s even a whole recipe for a dupe of nonalcoholic Pimm’s (involving citus, rooibos tea, raspberry vinegar, and gentian root). The results are festive, celebratory drinks for any occasion, so the nondrinkers need not be stuck with cranberry juice and seltzer anymore. — JS

Ottolenghi Flavor: A Cookbook

Yotam Ottolenghi and Ixta Belfrage Ten Speed Press, October 13

It’s probably a good thing Yotam Ottolenghi’s new cookbook isn’t called Plenty 3 or More Plenty More, veering the chef’s cookbook oeuvre into Fast & Furious territory. But by the London chef’s own admission, that’s a good way to understand Flavor, his newest book, which like its Plenty predecessors focuses on vegetables and all the creative ways to prepare and combine them.

Co-written with Ixta Belfrage, a recipe developer in the Ottolenghi test kitchen, Flavor presents recipes from three perspectives. The “process” chapter explores specific techniques to transform vegetables, such as charring and fermenting. “Pairing” takes an angle that will sound familiar to Samin Nosrat fans, with recipes rooted in the perfect balance of fat, acid, “chile heat,” and sweetness. And “produce” focuses on the ingredients with such complex tastes, usages, and sub-categories that they deserve examination on their own: mushrooms, onions (and their allium cousins), nuts and seeds, and sugar in fruit and booze form.

The result, in typical Ottolenghi fashion, is multi-step, multi-ingredient, and multi-hued recipes whose promised flavors leap from the page — from cabbage “tacos” with celery root and date barbecue sauce to saffron tagliatelle with ricotta and crispy chipotle shallots. Chipotles and other chiles are actually in abundance here (as well as “a lime or two in places where lemons would appear in previous Ottolenghi books,” as the intro notes) thanks to Belfrage’s roots in Mexico City. Those flavors, as well as those from Brazilian, Italian, and multiple Asian cuisines (spy the shiitake congee and noodles with peanut laab), unite with the usual Ottolenghi suspects — za’atar, star anise, harissa, labneh — to make Flavor worth the look, even for the home chef who already has Plenty and Plenty More on the shelf. — Ellie Krupnick

Xi’an Famous Foods: The Cuisine of Western China, from New York’s Favorite Noodle Shop

Jason Wang with Jessica K. Chou Abrams, October 13

The debut cookbook from the New York City restaurant chain Xi’an Famous Foods is worth picking up whether or not you have slurped the restaurant’s hand-pulled noodles. This is a book on how to operate a food business — CEO Jason Wang outlines five lessons to know before diving into the business and strips away the glamor of running a restaurant empire. It’s also a food history of the flavors of Xi’an, China. With so many layers to appreciate, Xi’an Famous Foods is a prime example of what a restaurant cookbook can be.

Much of the book reads like a TV series. It’s broken into episodes covering Wang’s challenges, failures, and successes, from his life-changing move from Xi’an to a rural town in Michigan, to his nights out in New York City’s Koreatown, to taking over his father’s business, Xi’an Famous Foods. Interspersed with these anecdotes, there are recipes for the restaurant’s fiery, mouth-tingling dishes, including Xi’an Famous Foods’ famous noodle sauce (accented with salty and spicy flavors from black vinegar, oyster sauce, fennel seeds, and Sichuan peppercorns), along with techniques for making hand-pulled noodles paired with helpful illustrations and visual references. For avid home cooks who want a challenge, Xi’an Famous Foods also provides tips on putting together the best hot pot at home, and for those who are confused at Asian groceries, there’s a list of basic pantry items with flavor notes and how they are used in cooking. And whether it’s Wang’s personal connection to a dish or its wider history that draws you in, each recipe will broaden your knowledge and appreciation of Xi’an cooking. — JP

Coconut & Sambal: Recipes from my Indonesian Kitchen

Lara Lee Bloomsbury, October 13

In the introduction of her debut cookbook, Lara Lee writes that an overflowing generosity is central to Indonesian culture; meals are shared freely between neighbors and friends. This generosity fills the pages of Coconut & Sambal, each recipe heightening the sense that as a reader, you’ve been let in on something special.

Lee, who was born in Australia, didn’t spend time in Indonesia until later in life, so early memories of Indonesian cooking come from the trips her grandmother Margaret Thali — whom Lee lovingly refers to as Popo throughout the book — would take to Australia. Each of the cookbook’s chapter introductions is deeply researched: Some recount stories of Lee’s grandmother, and others focus on the Indonesia that Lee fell in love with as she traveled across the archipelago collecting stories and recipes for this book.

The recipes that fill Coconut & Sambal demonstrate that Indonesian cuisine cannot be painted with one brush. The food of the nation — made up of more than 15,000 islands — incorporates the sharp heat of chiles, the mellow hit of fermented shrimp, the sweetness of coconut in nearly every form, and always enough rice to go around. You’ll find curries fragrant with makrut lime leaf, ginger, and turmeric, and bright ceviches adorned with thinly sliced chiles, banana shallot, and palm sugar; I was particularly drawn to a fried chicken dish (page 142), its crisp shell smashed and laced with fiery sambal. Lee explains that recipes are typically passed down orally in Indonesian culture, which makes me even more grateful for these written ones. What Lee has given readers is a gorgeous document that sets in stone food traditions passed down through generations, as well as some she’s created herself. You’ll want to dedicate an evening to turning the pages of this book, planning out feasts of green chile braised duck, Balinese roasted pork belly, and perhaps some sticky ginger toffee pudding to top it all off. — Elazar Sontag

In Bibi’s Kitchen: The Recipes and Stories of Grandmothers from the Eight African Countries that Touch the Indian Ocean

Hawa Hassan and Julia Turshen Ten Speed Press, October 13

Recipes are almost always the main attraction in a cookbook. But In Bibi’s Kitchen, written by first-time author Hawa Hassan in collaboration with veteran cookbook writer Julia Turshen, there’s so much to enjoy before you even get to the first recipe. The book focuses on dishes from eight African countries, linked by their shared proximity to the Indian Ocean and involvement in the region’s spice trade.

Each chapter, divided by country, starts with a brief history of the region and question-and-answer-style interviews with one of the bibis, or grandmothers, who call these places home. The answers to these questions find the grandmothers speaking about the meaning of home, the gender roles in their communities, and the importance of passing on food traditions. Each interview is as beautiful and varied as the recipes that follow: kadaka akondro (green plantains and braised beef) from the home of Ma Baomaka in Ambohidratrimo, Madagascar; digaag qumbe, a Somalian chicken stew rich with yogurt and coconut milk, served with sweet banana; kaimati, crisp coconut dumplings in an ambrosial cardamom syrup, this batch cooked in Ma Shara’s kitchen in Zanzibar, but popular all along the Swahili coast. A practical advantage of collecting recipes from home cooks is that these recipes are all approachable, most calling for fewer than 10 ingredients.

In many ways, In Bibi’s Kitchen breaks ground. It pays tribute to a part of the world that has been criminally overlooked by American publishers, sharing the stories of these African countries from the perspectives of home cooks who actually live there. The book is full of intimate portraits of the grandmothers in their kitchens, captured by Kenyan photographer Khadija M. Farah, who joined these women in their homes. The result of this collaborative and ambitious effort is a collection of heartwarming photos, tidbits of history, and, of course, plenty of mouthwatering meals. — ES

This Will Make it Taste Good: A New Path to Simple Cooking

Vivian Howard Voracious, October 20

Reading through Vivian Howard’s This Will Make It Taste Good is like reading a cookbook by your real or imagined North Carolinian best friend. The design itself is cheerful, full of 1970s serif fonts and colorful badges that are reminiscent of a children’s workbook. Dishes are photographed from above, in the same style as Alison Roman’s Dining In and Nothing Fancy, often showing Howard’s hands as they work away chopping herbs or spooning chowder. The A Chef’s Life host’s goal is simple: to teach home cooks that easy meals can be exciting rather than bland.

Howard’s intended audience is the time-crunched kitchen novice, though a more experienced cook will surely find some useful tips, as well. Each section is based around a recipe that can be prepped in advance and then used throughout the week in a multitude of dishes: Among the most promising are the “Little Green Dress,” a dressing with flexible ingredients that can gussy up anything from mussels to crackers to soft-boiled eggs; the “R-Rated Onions,” which you can keep in an ice cube tray in the freezer to use at your convenience; and the “Citrus Shrine,” i.e., preserved citrus that promises to elevate dishes like shrimp cocktail and rice pilaf — you can even use it in margaritas! In any time, This Will Make It Taste Good would be a great help to those of us who prefer recipes that look and taste more complex than they are to prepare. That it happens to arrive at a moment when we’re likely all sick of the contents of our fridges and our own culinary limitations is just a bonus. — Madeleine Davies

The Rise: Black Cooks and the Soul of American Food

Marcus Samuelsson with Osayi Endolyn Voracious, October 27

“Black food is not just one thing,” chef Marcus Samuelsson writes in the introduction to The Rise. “It’s not a rigidly defined geography or a static set of tastes. It is an energy. A force. An engine.” The cookbook that follows is an invigorating, joyous, and deeply nuanced illustration of the complexity of Black foodways, one that weaves together conversations about history, artistry, authorship, race, class, and culture with 150 recipes that incorporate ingredients and techniques from around the globe.

Each of the book’s recipes was created in honor of “someone who is illuminating the space we share,” as Samuelsson writes: chefs, artists, activists, authors, and historians, all of whom are profiled by the book’s coauthor, Eater contributor Osayi Endolyn. The recipes are organized to demonstrate how culinary rituals and traditions evolve according to time, place, and cook. In the first chapter, “Next,” for example, you’ll find food that speaks of forward-thinking innovation, such as baked sweet potatoes with garlic-fermented shrimp butter, created in honor of David Zilber, the former director of fermentation at Noma. (That butter, pureed with avocado, sweet soy sauce, and fresh thyme, is not only easy to make, but so good that you can be forgiven for eating it straight from the food processor.) “Migration,” the third chapter, speaks of the American South, with recipes like spiced lemon chess pie, broken rice peanut seafood stew, and Papa Ed’s shrimp and grits, named for Ed Brumfield, the executive chef at Samuelsson’s Harlem restaurant the Red Rooster.

The Rise doesn’t claim to be an encyclopedic compendium of Black cooking; instead, it’s a celebration, one that honors the past while looking ahead, challenging assumptions even as it feeds you well. — Rebecca Flint Marx

The Flavor Equation: The Science of Great Cooking Explained in More Than 100 Essential Recipes

Nik Sharma Chronicle Books, October 27

Nik Sharma begins his second cookbook by explaining that we rely on a variety of senses and feelings when we eat: sight, sound, mouthfeel or texture, aroma, taste, and even our emotions and memories. These components make up what he refers to as the “Flavor Equation,” and this concept and the role it plays in everyday cooking is the guiding principle of his book of the same name.

Following a thorough and captivating science lesson on the equation, Sharma lays out seven chapters dedicated to basic tastes and flavor boosters — brightness, bitterness, saltiness, sweetness, savoriness, fieriness, and richness — each with its own set of recipes: pomegranate and poppy seed wings exemplify brightness, roasted figs with coffee miso tahini or hazelnut flan highlight bitterness, “pizza” toast for saltiness, masala cheddar cornbread in the sweetness section, and more. Through these achievable recipes, many of which rely mostly on pantry essentials, Sharma helps readers better understand how flavor works and how to use that to their advantage to become more confident home cooks. Whatever your skill level in the kitchen, with its more than 100 recipes, illustrated diagrams, and Sharma’s own evocative photography, The Flavor Equation is an engrossing guide to elevating simple dishes into holistic experiences. — EE

Time to Eat: Delicious Meals for Busy Lives

Nadiya Hussain Clarkson Potter, November 10 (originally published June 27, 2019)

Nadiya Hussain is just like you and me. That’s the guiding principle behind her public persona, her BBC Two cooking show Time to Eat (now on Netflix), and her cookbook Time to Eat: Delicious Meals for Busy Lives. “I know what it’s like to have just one head and one pair of hands,” the Great British Bake Off winner writes in the introduction of Time to Eat, a new stateside version of her U.K. cookbook of the same title. Her book, she promises, will help you become a smarter home cook in between chores and kids, thanks to heavy use of the freezer and other time savers.

On the page, that looks like tips for prepping and freezing, recipes that leave you with enough leftovers to make a second dish, and ideas for remixes and variations. There are more than 100 recipes, divided into breakfast, lunch, dinner, dessert, and basics. Many of these dishes may be unfamiliar to American audiences — hello, kedgeree and fish pie burgers! — but the instructions are as approachable as Hussain’s on-camera demonstrations. With enough variety to keep it interesting, balanced with dishes easy enough to work into your weekly rotation of meals, e.g., eggs rolled onto tortillas, Time to Eat offers something for any home cook looking for new ideas and time-tested, time-saving methods. — Jenny G. Zhang

Fäviken: 4015 Days, Beginning to End

Magnus Nilsson Phaidon, November 11

Last December, after more than a decade of acclaim, accolades, and meals rooted in seasonality and locally produced ingredients, Magnus Nilsson closed his restaurant Fäviken in Jämtland, Sweden. In the lead-up to the closing, he told the LA Times that he wanted to focus on the restaurant, not elegies or explanations. Now, the explanation has arrived in the form of Fäviken: 4015 Days, Beginning to End, Nilsson’s latest monograph with publisher Phaidon.

Although the book covers the lifespan of Fäviken, including lookbacks at the first title Nilsson published about the restaurant, it is not an elegy. There are no laments here, but rather a thorough catalogue of all the dishes that Fäviken served, ruminations about craft and haute cuisine and sustainability, and a long-awaited account of “Why Fäviken had to close, really.” The book contains recipes for many of the restaurant’s dishes — ranging from the simple berry ice to the more demanding “Scallop I skalet ur elden cooked over burning juniper branches,” with extensive headnotes — but its purpose is not as a cookbook. It is a tome (beautifully put together, as is typical for Phaidon) that is made for fans of Fäviken’s, of Nilsson’s, and more importantly, of the way of life he espouses, one that is passionate but measured.

That is best expressed in one of the book’s final essays, one dated May 12, 2020, in which Nilsson articulates gratitude that he was able to close his restaurant on his own terms, for Fäviken would not have survived the pandemic. “If one day some years from now I wake up in the morning and feel the same burning desire to run a restaurant that I felt for many years at Fäviken, I won’t think twice about it,” Nilsson writes. “But if that doesn’t happen, that’s okay too. There are many other things to do in life.” — JGZ

A Good Bake: The Art and Science of Making Perfect Pastries, Cakes, Cookies, Pies, and Breads at Home

Melissa Weller with Carolynn Carreño Knopf, November 17

There are people who treat baking like a hobby and there are people who treat baking as a raison d’etre, a life’s purpose. Melissa Weller’s A Good Bake is for the latter, which shouldn’t surprise anyone considering Weller’s resume, which includes creating pastry for some of New York City’s most revered restaurants, such as Per Se, Roberta’s, and her acclaimed SoHo bagel shop, Sadelle’s. Before she became an expert baker, Weller was a chemical engineer, and as such, she tackles recipes with a scientific approach, getting the fermentation, proofing, and pH balance of her dough down to, well, a science.

If you’re a quarantine baker who’s mastered sourdough and is ready for the next challenge, consider Weller’s takes on NYC classics like chocolate babka, spelt scones with raspberry jam, and even traditional hot dog buns. A Good Bake will thrill bakers who rejoice in doing things the difficult way (but note that there are beautiful and detailed photos of her process to help guide ambitious bakers through the recipe). Of course, this means that failing will hurt all the more, considering the hours (or days, even!) of work that you’ve put into your bake, but success? It will taste all the sweeter... or more savory. It depends on your tastes, and Weller expertly caters to both. — MD

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[thorias]

Random thoughts watching Riverdale episode 9

Why exactly would Cheryl not inherit the Blossoms’ maple syrup business? No reason is given, they just say that it certainly wouldn’t be her. Why not? 

Polly has cut off all communication with her family for some reason, even with Betty. This might be a little out there, but I’m starting to think that Polly might not be the innocent victim she appears to be. A lot of things about her recent actions just don’t quite add up. I think it’s possible that she’s manipulating this situation somehow, though to what end, I can’t say. 

Alice barges in and stops Betty and Jughead from sucking face. God help me, I am now on Alice Cooper’s side. Lord, this show has messed me up. 

Why is Hermione afraid to tell Fred the whole truth about the ownership of the drive-in property for fear that he’ll walk off the project? She’s seen his books, she knows he needs this project to stay in business. He’s committed whether he likes it or not, so what harm could coming clean do at this point? 

It’s a credit to Madelaine Petsch’s acting that when Cheryl asks Archie to be her escort to the tree tapping ceremony while giving him some pretty obvious ‘fuck me’ eyes, that I’m honestly not sure what her intentions are. This could be her manipulating him for one reason or another, or she could be genuinely interested in him or it could be both. Neither one would surprise me. 

Ethyl reading a poem in front of the class was a startlingly emotionally naked moment that makes me wonder if this girl has grappled with depression or suicidal thoughts. I should have known that no aspect of my childhood was safe from this show by now. 

Archie declines to be Cheryl’s escort because he has a girlfriend, but then agrees to it once Cheryl’s mom offers to put in a good word for him at some fancy music academy. This really shouldn’t be a problem as long as Archie explains the situation to Val first and then behaves himself. 

“Being ruined sucks,” says Veronica Lodge, who lives in a huge luxury apartment. I appreciate her trying to make Ethyl feel better by bonding over their similar experiences, but the two situations are hardly the same. 

Why is everyone at this tree tapping thing dressed in black and red? Was the wardrobe department instructed to make this get together look like a cult? Because they succeeded. Also, I don’t think I’ve ever seen this many gingers in one place before. 

When Archie tries to talk to Polly about Betty and she kind of avoids the issue, I think the implication is that Blossoms are luring Polly into their sick, twisted web, but why do I get the strange feeling that she’s not the one getting played here? 

Archie actually defends Cheryl from the asshole board members of the Blossoms’ company. It’s an admirable thing for him to do, but Cheryl is probably going get the wrong idea about this. And I can’t really blame her for that either. Given the peeks we’ve gotten into how emotionally abusive her home life is, any simple act of kindness she receives is bound to be misinterpreted. 

Archie quickly gets roped into being Cheryl’s escort at some other Blossom family function and I have no idea what’s going on. Is this Cheryl’s dad wanting to make his daughter happy (unlikely) because she’s taken a shine to the big dunce or because he wants to use Archie for some reason or another because -- as this show can’t stop pointing out -- he looks a lot like Jason? 

Archie is going along with this for now, though it seems that helping Betty figure out what’s going on with Polly is a big motivating factor. How many awkward situations is he going to let that get him into before he pulls the plug? If I know Archie, too damn many. 

Betty’s parents might be the most spiteful characters on this whole show. Her dad doesn’t want his own daughter living with them just because she’s pregnant with a Blossom’s babies, so her mom kicks him out of the house. In turn, he fires her from her job at the newspaper just to be a dick. Why are so many of the adults on this show complete assholes? 

Archie asks Mr. Blossom to forget about the music school thing in exchange for giving his dad a break. Archie is doing so many nice things for people this week that I can’t help but feel that the other shoe is about to drop and he’s going to revert to form any minute now.

Mr. Blossom calls Archie “son” while dressing him up like Jason. Do I even need to comment on this? 

Everyone is telling Archie that the Blossoms are trying to buy him and I’m inclined to agree. Val asks him if he wouldn’t rather get into this music school on his own merits, but Archie seems to think he needs that door opened for him. I suspect there’s a part of Archie that doesn’t really believe in himself, which is probably why he puts so much stock in these mentor figures he’s always seeking out. Grundy “believed in him” and he valued that so much, he wound up in a forbidden relationship with her, Mr. Castillo wasn’t impressed with him and he almost gave up as a result, and then there was the stage fright thing. Archie seems to suffer from a lack of confidence that isn’t overtly noticeable until you look closer. 

Veronica dissolves into tears upon hearing of Ethyl’s dad’s attempted suicide because he lost all his family’s money from being in business with the Lodges. Betty comforting her is sweet, but I’m pretty sure Ethyl is in more need of comfort right about now. I suggest Ronnie suck it up and go find Ethyl instead. She could use a hug too. 

I think if arranged marriage was a thing in this country, Clifford would have suggested it on the spot when he talks to Archie during dinner. He’s pretty much struggling to not bring it up. How little faith must the board of directors have in Cheryl (again, why?) that they think having freaking Archie by her side would make her better suited to run the company? Archie may have good character deep down, but why is everyone just acting like the first half of the season didn’t happen here? 

Ah ha! So Polly IS masterminding this situation! I’m not sure why she thinks the Blossoms had something to do with Jason’s death since losing him appears to have screwed them in several different ways, but who knows where this is going. Cheryl’s crazy grandma doesn’t seem entirely trustworthy; maybe she’s the culprit. 

It was good of Veronica to own up to what her father did to Ethyl and her mom, but did Ethyl seriously not know Ronnie’s last name? How on earth is this new information for her? 

Archie tries to make Cheryl feel better and she’s so touched, she kisses him. He doesn’t exactly stop her, but he doesn’t give the impression that he enjoyed it either and then leaves immediately, so Archie is ironically displaying more self-control than his comics counterpart here. Didn’t see that one coming. 

Archie actually leaves the Blossoms’ party, throwing away everything they promised him in the process. Huh. I think Archie actually deserves a lot of credit for this. He’s recognizing a toxic situation and choosing to get out before it gets worse even though he’s screwing himself over by doing so. Kudos, Red. There’s hope for you yet. 

Jughead thinks the Blue & Gold’s operating budget is bigger than that of the town newspaper? Um... how? 

Val breaks up with Archie, weirdly enough, NOT because he let Cheryl kiss him, but because he’s supposedly ignored her and ditched her ever since they started dating. I’m confused. In what way has he done that prior to this episode? Seriously, I don’t remember this ever being a thing. From what little we’ve seen of their relationship, Archie looked to be treating Val just fine. Where is this coming from? 

Fred putting the breaks on this thing with him and Hermione is a wise decision. Whatever problems Archie has when it comes to dealing with women, he probably gets them from his mom. 

If the Blossoms conspired to get Hiram Lodge sent to prison, does that mean that they just exposed Hiram’s crimes or that they framed him for something? Since this show has gone to such lengths to hammer into us what a rotten, scheming lowlife Hiram is, my guess is it’s the latter. 

That last scene indicates that Cheryl is about to go full blown super villain on Archie and Polly. Just because Archie backed off when she kissed him? Good grief, Cheryl’s ego must be more fragile than Betty’s mental state and that’s really saying something. And what exactly did Polly do to piss Cheryl off (that she knows about)?

[eggzy]

I’m honestly just dying to write somethingggg -- I’d really love a mumu?? maybe just two of us or throw in another person?? it could be anything from apartment wing, college roommates... riot club, a secret history, the raven boys..... rich kids???? or something supernatural maybe??? here’s some plot/connection ideas we could go for too!!

under the cut are the characters/faces in the mumu I’d be interested in playing.

IVAN BISHOP | janis ancens | 22-26 years old

his family has had money for decades bc they’ve always managed to deal with corrupt government officials and whatnot. the bishop family make profit off war/violence bc they sell weapons!! they tend to sell to both sides of wars, even if in secret!! 

um he’s a perfectionist. has to be the best at everything. everything. he was head boy in the private boarding school he attended, president of whatever fraternity that rich young men like him get into the kind with bad hazing and shit, was president of his university’s SGA, has perfect grades and a perfect record!!! he strives to be the best and ambition has taken him far. he doesn’t just rely on his family but the name does open A LOT of doors for him

he’s very stoic but can charm the pants off people!! but he’s very manipulative in this, can often get people to do what he wants. he once had his whole fraternity turn against this kid on campus who was running against him for SGA… he’s got a real cruel streak. hope you never see it. ://

he’s like ALLLLMOST greysexual but he still likes the act of sex from time to time. its hard to catch him with his guard down. doesn’t have a good relationship with either of his parents. mother cheats while away at one of their many beach condos. father is absent, busy with work && hunting. he’s good at gaslighting ivan so, as you can imagine, the boy has some real daddy issues.

he has younger brother and sister who are twins!! they’re about middle school aged and super smart and talented, as is the Bishop way lol

MALLORY LEWIS | nicola peltz | 21-23 years old

so mal is an only child and her young parents were very excited to have a girl, especially her mother. she was pretty much a tiny doll in her mother’s eyes. she was an only child and the woman saw her daughter as something to dress up and parade around rather than really take care of. so, unsurprisingly, she’s been to a decent amount of pageants, a few Ws under her belt, in fact.

her parents got divorced when she was three! the highschool sweethearts didn’t last but five years! and so she was never really close with her father because her mother monopolized her time. she grew pretty resentful towards him as she got older because of their lack of time together and because he never really tried to see her or get her away from her mother. after a while, her father didn’t even try  to stay in touch. he helped a bit with expenses for a time but once he was remarried, there was no hearing from him.

mal was primarily raised by her mother who jumped from boyfriend to boyfriend and husband to husband!! when she was especially young, there were a lot of boundary lines that were blurred between her and her mother. she slept in bed with her until she was nine, she wouldn’t ever be far from her. her mother would get them matching outfits and she’d always do mal’s hair, make sure she was perfect, and she had to be exactly the way that her mother wanted her to be. no questions.

so being left alone with her mother and being groomed by her mother alone, she kind of became a mini version of her!! she didn’t care about anything other than getting what she wanted. men were tools. they were just bank accounts and pretty things to surround herself with. if she wanted it, she could get it – she knew what her appearance did to others, men especially. ever so manipulative, she has her own harem of men, ages all varying from twenties to sixties, that she spends her time with. she’s easily a homewrecker to a handful of relationships out there.

she relies on some of her daddies forreal though because between them and hustling, she can only resort to criminal acts to support herself!

“GK” STARR | madison mclaughlin | 19-23 years old

my baby is like the human form of peach tea. is that weird to say? gk is a super sweetheart and most people genuinely like her when they meet her. she makes it easy, bc she’s bit of a pushover and people-pleaser so she gets walked on a lot. still learning how to stand up for herself!!

she’s an art freak. loves oil painting the most as that’s the one she’s more experienced with. learning how to use water colors and gouache just as well. wants to be graphic designer one day!!

with a short and small stature, most underestimate her, if not all who cencounter her. she is no impressive figure, by any means, so her goal of becoming a superhero seems farfetched to many. with the appearance of such fragility, gk attracts those who wish to protect without meaning to, often due to her size. her skin is very tanned with a decently clear complexion as she still struggles with acne and such occasionally. freckles are scattered across the bridge of her nose and over the tips of her shoulders. A dark mole is one of her most striking features, location just under her right eye.

gk is very friendly and very loud. so basically, one of those people who just makes themselves known, no matter the room they enter into. very much a people-person, loves to be in the company of anyone, even strangers. she’s extremely naive, so constantly people are using her for her powers, abusing her kindness and willingness to help. questions are constantly on her tongue, because she doesn’t know about anything and is so very curious! she’s not everyone’s cup of tea, that’s for sure – but she’ll never know unless you tell her upfront, she’s very oblivious at times.

gk stands for georgia katherine, so as you can imagine she’s pretty southern. her accent is thick like molasses!! her family moved here from louisiana about five years ago. it had been a tough move and she struggled for a bit, bc people aren’t always kind and the starrs aren’t necessarily well off. they’re barely pushing by, one might say.

TRENTON LEROY | chris wood | 20-25 years old

CHILD ABUSE TW, VIOLENCE TW, MENTAL ILLNESS TW

so like!! trenton is from lyon, france! he has a SLIGHT accent but its not strong anymore because he hasn’t been back to france in like ten years.

his mother and father are not married. he was born out of wedlock because his mother was his father’s mistress. the man left after the idea of trenton was even mentioned. he was a married man with hands in politics, he couldn’t afford to have this out.

so labeaux family paid off the leroy family, sending money every month to keep them quiet.

the leroy family is kind of a TRASHY family living in the countryside near lyon. it was just trenton, his mother, grandmother and uncle. a small family that lived on the checks sent by a man worlds away.

he adored his mother more than any person!! like almost an obsession!! but thats because out of that house, she was the only one to ever show him kindness. his grandmother and uncle both were quite unkind to him, blaming him for their misfortunes and taking out their stress. unfortunately, his mother left the family and ran off with a boyfriend. trenton was only seven at the time but the sense of loneliness and abandonment following her departure REALLY affected him in ways that weren’t good. and the abuse he took from other family members only pushed him further.

his father took an interest back into his life at age twelve, realizing that the boy was his only current heir. he quickly took the boy from that house and placed him into a boarding school in england to learn everything from ENGLISH itself to business and other ways of the world.

the setting wasn’t much better tbh!! he was mistreated by older kids for a while, bullied for a variety of things until he finally shot up between age 15 & 16. he really grew into his awkward limbs, a charming face to match!! it was a surprise to everyone that the awkward boy had transformed into that. trenton started to get attention he had never received before. and it delighted him. but he didn’t know how to handle it.

he began abusing his friends, girlfriends… anyone who was close to him. violence was the ONLY language he would ever be fluent in – his family made sure of that.

when he graduated, he was a shadow of the boy he once was. dark and twisted with desires that no good person should have. but still he passed it off like a charm, being the perfect son that his father had never wanted.

trenton was moved to be with his father for a few years, learning the ways of the family business and politics. the drastic change didn’t go well for him...

but eventually everything got to him and he SNAPPED. the incident had him sent away once more but this time to a mental institution on the west coast. he was heavily guarded secret so no one really knew where he disappeared to. his father only claimed traveling the world.

FOX KINSLEY | matt hitt | 19-22 years old

ALCOHOLISM TW, DRUGS TW

okay so this is atticus fawkes kinsley!! he goes by fox because he hates those names and he’s bitter af towards his family right now.

his dad lost his dream job when fox was about ten or so and he took to the bottle and stayed with it. he wasn’t abusive or anything, just yelled sometimes. Mostly laid around the house, sulking. he’s attempted other jobs, but it always ends up with him fired because of a DUI or something. so that’s where fox got most of his lazy traits from

his mom is this SUPER ambitious woman who’s really great honestly but she really cares about how people view her. so witnessing her husband in the state he was in really embarrassed her?? that destroyed their relationship. she thinks pretty lowly of the man. they fought A LOT. after the man’s fourth DUI in two years, she left.

she tried to convince fox to come with her, but he refused. he didn’t like the idea of abandoning his father. they used to be really close once. :’) so she left seventeen year old fox as well and took his sister to live with her parents for a while.

fox and his father did okay for a year or so. it was a bit rough because he had to get a shitty job with shitty hours to handle the bills and stuff. because good ole dad was still just doing his thing, drinking himself silly and sleeping at the oddest hours. fox had to leave on his last year of high school, which at the time didn’t bother him. but now, he’s starting to regret that more and more.

he’s a stoner through and through. mostly just sticks to weed. he’s really sloping down that path towards harder drugs though so he wears long sleeves occasionally to cover track marks.

things started to get really shitty one late saturday night when he returned after a double at work to find the house empty. only a note from his father, detailing that he needed to find himself and work out his problems on his own, was left. it fucked him up.

the loneliness and desperation he’ll never forget. it’s been carved into his bones and burned into his skin. he’ll never forget that pain. and because of that, he’s very very bitter. he’s been going out and partying doing every drug you can imagine. trying to destroy himself for the past year. sick, unhealthy living.

he’s still working at the gas station, still manning the slushie machines even if he has no one to go home to. no one to teach him how to be an adult in the real world.

WHAT I’M LOOKING FOR:

maybe like more family members? mother/father... sister/brother??? rival family??  platonic to romantic relationships! any and all connections!!

ANGST. DRAMA. PAIN. 

all faceclaims, for the most part, can be changed if my partner has a problem with any of them!!

a partner that can put up with me and my work/lazy schedule! I’ve been dying to write and rps are just dwindling around here so they’re just not gonna cut it... but I’m determined to have this plot because I NEEEED the creative outlet.

[instantdeerlover]

The Best Cookbooks of Fall 2020 added to Google Docs

The Best Cookbooks of Fall 2020

New cookbooks from Ina Garten, Vivian Howard, Yotam Ottolenghi, and more will restore some much-needed joy to cooking

For many of us, cooking has taken on a different role in our lives over the past six months. As restaurants closed, cooking — and cooking well — became essential even for those who previously spent little time in the kitchen. It also became a chore. At this point, six months into the pandemic, I’m impressed by anyone who still considers cooking a creative, joyful pastime, not just a means to food.

But here to change that is a stellar lineup of fall cookbooks, bringing with them new inspiration and new comforts, and, at last, a reason to enter the kitchen with excitement. There are anticipated titles from beloved culinary figures, whose time-saving guidance and easy meal upgrades feel especially welcome now. There are books from some of the restaurants we miss the most, offering recreations of their dishes and insights that make us nostalgic for the time before shutdowns. There are primers on international cuisines; books for the adept home cook that take a studied, even scientific approach to flavor; and books that reflect the trends of the moment, including baking books for the person who has spent hours perfecting their bread game as well as the one who feels the occasional urge to bake a cake to be eaten immediately.

I’m confident that even the most reluctant cook is sure to find at least one new cookbook among these 17 to dip a fork into. And for those for whom cooking never lost its luster, it’s a feast. — Monica Burton

 One Tin Bakes: Sweet and simple traybakes, pies, bars and buns

Edd Kimber

Kyle Books, out now

The philosophy of Edd Kimber’s One Tin Bakes is pleasingly minimalist: Invest in one good 9-by-13-inch aluminum pan — or “tin,” in British parlance — and bake everything in it. Kimber has published three other books since winning the inaugural season of The Great British Bake Off in 2010, but this is the first that’s themed around a specific piece of equipment, and by focusing on the versatility of a single pan, One Tin Bakes prioritizes simplicity for both novice bakers and those who already know their way around a stand mixer.

For the most part, these are not show-stopper, highly technical bakes — though some, like the “Giant Portuguese Custard Tart,” are impressive by nature. The recipes are unfussy, undemanding, and a pleasure to cook. They’re all sweet, with chapters spanning cakes, pies, breads, bars, cookies, and some no-bake desserts too. And while 9-by-13-inch sheets and slabs of baked goods are the stars of the book, Kimber’s collection also includes non-rectangular treats: rolled cakes, ice cream sandwiches, and babka buns, among others. Six months ago I might have described this book as a party baking companion — most of the recipes feed eight to 12 people — but parties are in short supply for the foreseeable future. That said, even without feeding my coworkers or friends, there is something so joyful (surface area, perhaps?) about pulling a magnificent rectangular pan of streusel-topped coffee cake or gigantic British scone from the oven. — Adam Moussa

 Parwana: Recipes and Stories from an Afghan Kitchen

Durkhanai Ayubi with recipes by Farida Ayubi

Interlink, out now

The story of Parwana, the popular Afghan restaurant in South Adelaide, Australia, has always been intertwined with history. Owners Zelmai and Farida Ayubi fled Afghanistan for Australia in 1987, during the Cold War, itself the result of hundreds of years of conflict. So it’s no surprise that the restaurant’s cookbook, written by Zelmai and Farida’s daughter Durkhanai Ayubi, would double as a history lesson. Interspersed between recipes are stories of the Silk Road, the Mughal empire, and the Great Game, which illustrate how because of trade, plunder, and cultural exchange, Afghan cuisine is both beloved and recognizable.

The book walks through classics like kabuli palaw, shaami kebab, and falooda (all of which, unlike so many restaurant dishes adapted to cookbooks, are incredibly achievable for the home cook) and demonstrate how Afghan cuisine both influenced and was influenced by nearly all of Asia. No matter what cuisine you’re most used to cooking, you’ll find a recipe, or even just a flavor, that feels familiar here. — Jaya Saxena

 The Sourdough School: Sweet Baking: Nourishing the Gut & the Mind

Vanessa Kimbell

Kyle Books, out now

The first thing to know about the sweets-focused follow-up to 2018’s The Sourdough School cookbook, the groundbreaking gut-health baking book by food writer and BBC radio host Vanessa Kimbell, is this: “It is not a book about baking,” she writes. “This is a book about understanding.” She’s right, sort of. It is not just a book about baking. It is, like its predecessor, a manifesto on the gut-brain connection — a guide to caring for the magical ecosystem within our own bodies, a fragile environment that, she says, our modern way of eating has ravaged, grimly affecting both our physical and mental health. It’s a book about science and bacteria and flour milling and fermenting and strategies for adjusting our lives in such a way to allow for four-day cupcake-making.

But then... it is also very much a book about baking. There are loads of delicious (if unabashedly healthy-looking) recipes with ingredients that prioritize your gut’s microbiome, everything from chocolate chip “biscuits” and Bangladeshi jalebis to swirly miso-prune danishes and a pudgy lemon-poppyseed cake with a hit of saffron. Nothing about these multi-day recipes is what anyone might call simple (I’ve never been so tempted to whip up my own couture flour blends), but Kimbell is as lovely a hand-holder as she is a writer, giving out lifelines like detailed schedules for each recipe, including the crucial pre-bake starter feedings so many other sourdough books leave out. She also is not above compromise, allowing for store-bought flours and dolling out assurances like, “if you are not into the scientific details, feel free to skip this entire section. I totally get just wanting to get on and bake.” A thorough reader, though, will be rewarded with a whole new way of thinking about the human body, along with a whole bunch of yummy new ways to indulge it. — Lesley Suter

 The Mexican Home Kitchen: Traditional Home-Style Recipes That Capture the Flavors and Memories of Mexico

Mely Martinez

Rock Point, September 15

Mely Martínez comes to publishing by way of the old-school world of recipe blogging on her website, Mexico in My Kitchen. Martínez was born in Mexico and traveled throughout different regions as a teacher and again later in her life, learning from local women along the way, before eventually settling in the United States. After bouncing around recipe forums, she established the site in 2008 as a way to record family recipes for her teenage son. Through the internet, she reached a far wider audience of Mexican immigrants craving their abuela’s recipes. Now, her debut cookbook, The Mexican Home Kitchen, reflects that well-traveled savvy, but it’s forgiving, too, providing helpful tips on variations of recipes and alternative methods of food preparation or ingredients.

Martínez’s book is about the basics of Mexican home cooking; recipes include comfort foods like caldo de pollo dressed up with slices of avocado and diced jalapeño and special occasion meals like mole poblano. The recipes are simple enough for people just getting into Mexican cooking, but also have a nostalgic quality that will appeal to those who grew up with homemade arroz con leche or chicharrón en salsa verde. Flipping through The Mexican Home Kitchen, I remembered my own childhood visits with my stepmother’s family, where I would sit around the table with the many other grandkids swirling Ritz crackers in steaming bowls of atole. I turned to Martínez’s atole blanco recipe on page 178, and headed to the store for some masa harina, newly inspired. — Brenna Houck

 Pie for Everyone: Recipes and Stories from Petee’s Pie, New York’s Best Pie Shop

Petra “Petee” Paredez

Abrams, September 22

If you’re not a pie person, then clearly you’ve never had a slice of Petra Paredez’s black-bottom almond chess pie. Growing up in a baking and farming family (her parents started northern Virginia treasure Mom’s Apple Pie Company in 1981), Paredez has considerable pie-making expertise. In 2014, she and her husband, Robert Paredez, opened their Lower East Side shop Petee’s Pie Company on a shoestring budget, and today, the sweet, sunny cafe on Delancey Street is considered one of the best pie shops in New York City.

At the heart of Petee’s Pie, the goal is simple: a flavorful, flaky, tender crust and perfectly balanced filling. Pie for Everyone teaches readers how to achieve this at home. The book begins with foundational information (how to source ingredients, the tools to buy to make pie-making easier and more efficient) followed by chapters on crusts and crumbs and pie fillings. And while there are hundreds of ways to make pie, Paredez believes in the merits of a super-buttery crust. “If you only use one of my pastry dough recipes,” she writes, “I hope it’s my butter pastry dough.”

With recipes that are both sweet and savory (including quiches), Pie for Everyone covers the shop’s year-round signature pies, like maple whiskey walnut and chocolate cream, as well as seasonal favorites, like strawberry rhubarb and nesselrode, a New York specialty consisting of chestnut custard with black rum-soaked cherries. But whether you’re a fan of Petee’s Pie or you’ve never been, bakers and pie lovers will appreciate learning from Paredez, a baker for whom pie-making is a ribbon-worthy feat every single time. — Esra Erol

 Modern Comfort Food: A Barefoot Contessa Cookbook

Ina Garten

Random House, October 6

There are many cookbooks that you want to read more than cook from, but Modern Comfort Food: A Barefoot Contessa Cookbook is not one of them. In her 12th cookbook, Ina Garten, the queen of timeless, expertly tested dishes, shares 85 recipes for the kinds of comfort foods we’re craving more than ever. Dedicated home cooks may already know most of these unfussy foods by heart, but with Garten’s thoughtful techniques and guidance on how to find the best ingredients, dishes like chicken pot pie soup, baked rigatoni with lamb ragu, and skillet-roasted chicken with potatoes feel new and exciting. The skillet-roasted chicken and potatoes, for example, calls for a buttermilk marinade to make the bird juicy and moist, while potatoes are cooked with the chicken jus under the chicken, on the bottom of a hot skillet, to absorb extra chicken flavor, turning two humble ingredients into a fabulous dinner.

This being a Barefoot Contessa cookbook, it also comes with all the stories and aspirational photos (including many heart-melting pictures of Garten and husband Jeffrey) that have long inspired fans to want to live, cook, and eat like Ina. But, compared to Garten’s other books, Modern Comfort Food depicts the culinary star more as a loving neighbor who will bring you chocolate chip cookies on Sundays than the imposing queen of East Hampton. In the intro to this book, Garten admits that these days, she’s a little grumpier than usual (just like the rest of us), says it’s okay if we reach for a cold martini and a tub of ice cream for dinner, and reminds us once again how she managed to capture so many hearts over more than two decades as the Barefoot Contessa. — James Park

 Good Drinks: Alcohol-Free Recipes for When You’re Not Drinking for Whatever Reason

Julia Bainbridge

Ten Speed Press, October 6

A lot of people feel weird about drinking nowadays. Our spending habits show it, through products like low-ABV hard seltzers, chic nonalcoholic aperitifs, or just the ongoing popularity of sober months like Dry January. Author Julia Bainbridge understands the fluid nature of this type of sobriety, which is why she subtitled her book of spirit-free drinks as “for When You’re Not Drinking for Whatever Reason.” After all, you don’t need to eschew alcohol forever in order to enjoy a thoughtfully blended drink that isn’t trying to get you sloshed.

The drinks in Good Drinks are structured by the time of day you might enjoy them (brunch accompaniment, happy hour treat, aperitif), and are as complex and innovative (and labor-intensive) as anything at a fancy cocktail bar. They call for ingredients like black cardamom-cinnamon syrup, buckwheat tea, and tomato-watermelon juice, each of which get their own recipes. There’s even a whole recipe for a dupe of nonalcoholic Pimm’s (involving citus, rooibos tea, raspberry vinegar, and gentian root). The results are festive, celebratory drinks for any occasion, so the nondrinkers need not be stuck with cranberry juice and seltzer anymore. — JS

 Ottolenghi Flavor: A Cookbook

Yotam Ottolenghi and Ixta Belfrage

Ten Speed Press, October 13

It’s probably a good thing Yotam Ottolenghi’s new cookbook isn’t called Plenty 3 or More Plenty More, veering the chef’s cookbook oeuvre into Fast & Furious territory. But by the London chef’s own admission, that’s a good way to understand Flavor, his newest book, which like its Plenty predecessors focuses on vegetables and all the creative ways to prepare and combine them.

Co-written with Ixta Belfrage, a recipe developer in the Ottolenghi test kitchen, Flavor presents recipes from three perspectives. The “process” chapter explores specific techniques to transform vegetables, such as charring and fermenting. “Pairing” takes an angle that will sound familiar to Samin Nosrat fans, with recipes rooted in the perfect balance of fat, acid, “chile heat,” and sweetness. And “produce” focuses on the ingredients with such complex tastes, usages, and sub-categories that they deserve examination on their own: mushrooms, onions (and their allium cousins), nuts and seeds, and sugar in fruit and booze form.

The result, in typical Ottolenghi fashion, is multi-step, multi-ingredient, and multi-hued recipes whose promised flavors leap from the page — from cabbage “tacos” with celery root and date barbecue sauce to saffron tagliatelle with ricotta and crispy chipotle shallots. Chipotles and other chiles are actually in abundance here (as well as “a lime or two in places where lemons would appear in previous Ottolenghi books,” as the intro notes) thanks to Belfrage’s roots in Mexico City. Those flavors, as well as those from Brazilian, Italian, and multiple Asian cuisines (spy the shiitake congee and noodles with peanut laab), unite with the usual Ottolenghi suspects — za’atar, star anise, harissa, labneh — to make Flavor worth the look, even for the home chef who already has Plenty and Plenty More on the shelf. — Ellie Krupnick

 Xi’an Famous Foods: The Cuisine of Western China, from New York’s Favorite Noodle Shop

Jason Wang with Jessica K. Chou

Abrams, October 13

The debut cookbook from the New York City restaurant chain Xi’an Famous Foods is worth picking up whether or not you have slurped the restaurant’s hand-pulled noodles. This is a book on how to operate a food business — CEO Jason Wang outlines five lessons to know before diving into the business and strips away the glamor of running a restaurant empire. It’s also a food history of the flavors of Xi’an, China. With so many layers to appreciate, Xi’an Famous Foods is a prime example of what a restaurant cookbook can be.

Much of the book reads like a TV series. It’s broken into episodes covering Wang’s challenges, failures, and successes, from his life-changing move from Xi’an to a rural town in Michigan, to his nights out in New York City’s Koreatown, to taking over his father’s business, Xi’an Famous Foods. Interspersed with these anecdotes, there are recipes for the restaurant’s fiery, mouth-tingling dishes, including Xi’an Famous Foods’ famous noodle sauce (accented with salty and spicy flavors from black vinegar, oyster sauce, fennel seeds, and Sichuan peppercorns), along with techniques for making hand-pulled noodles paired with helpful illustrations and visual references. For avid home cooks who want a challenge, Xi’an Famous Foods also provides tips on putting together the best hot pot at home, and for those who are confused at Asian groceries, there’s a list of basic pantry items with flavor notes and how they are used in cooking. And whether it’s Wang’s personal connection to a dish or its wider history that draws you in, each recipe will broaden your knowledge and appreciation of Xi’an cooking. — JP

 Coconut & Sambal: Recipes from my Indonesian Kitchen

Lara Lee

Bloomsbury, October 13

In the introduction of her debut cookbook, Lara Lee writes that an overflowing generosity is central to Indonesian culture; meals are shared freely between neighbors and friends. This generosity fills the pages of Coconut & Sambal, each recipe heightening the sense that as a reader, you’ve been let in on something special.

Lee, who was born in Australia, didn’t spend time in Indonesia until later in life, so early memories of Indonesian cooking come from the trips her grandmother Margaret Thali — whom Lee lovingly refers to as Popo throughout the book — would take to Australia. Each of the cookbook’s chapter introductions is deeply researched: Some recount stories of Lee’s grandmother, and others focus on the Indonesia that Lee fell in love with as she traveled across the archipelago collecting stories and recipes for this book.

The recipes that fill Coconut & Sambal demonstrate that Indonesian cuisine cannot be painted with one brush. The food of the nation — made up of more than 15,000 islands — incorporates the sharp heat of chiles, the mellow hit of fermented shrimp, the sweetness of coconut in nearly every form, and always enough rice to go around. You’ll find curries fragrant with makrut lime leaf, ginger, and turmeric, and bright ceviches adorned with thinly sliced chiles, banana shallot, and palm sugar; I was particularly drawn to a fried chicken dish (page 142), its crisp shell smashed and laced with fiery sambal. Lee explains that recipes are typically passed down orally in Indonesian culture, which makes me even more grateful for these written ones. What Lee has given readers is a gorgeous document that sets in stone food traditions passed down through generations, as well as some she’s created herself. You’ll want to dedicate an evening to turning the pages of this book, planning out feasts of green chile braised duck, Balinese roasted pork belly, and perhaps some sticky ginger toffee pudding to top it all off. — Elazar Sontag

 In Bibi’s Kitchen: The Recipes and Stories of Grandmothers from the Eight African Countries that Touch the Indian Ocean

Hawa Hassan and Julia Turshen

Ten Speed Press, October 13

Recipes are almost always the main attraction in a cookbook. But In Bibi’s Kitchen, written by first-time author Hawa Hassan in collaboration with veteran cookbook writer Julia Turshen, there’s so much to enjoy before you even get to the first recipe. The book focuses on dishes from eight African countries, linked by their shared proximity to the Indian Ocean and involvement in the region’s spice trade.

Each chapter, divided by country, starts with a brief history of the region and question-and-answer-style interviews with one of the bibis, or grandmothers, who call these places home. The answers to these questions find the grandmothers speaking about the meaning of home, the gender roles in their communities, and the importance of passing on food traditions. Each interview is as beautiful and varied as the recipes that follow: kadaka akondro (green plantains and braised beef) from the home of Ma Baomaka in Ambohidratrimo, Madagascar; digaag qumbe, a Somalian chicken stew rich with yogurt and coconut milk, served with sweet banana; kaimati, crisp coconut dumplings in an ambrosial cardamom syrup, this batch cooked in Ma Shara’s kitchen in Zanzibar, but popular all along the Swahili coast. A practical advantage of collecting recipes from home cooks is that these recipes are all approachable, most calling for fewer than 10 ingredients.

In many ways, In Bibi’s Kitchen breaks ground. It pays tribute to a part of the world that has been criminally overlooked by American publishers, sharing the stories of these African countries from the perspectives of home cooks who actually live there. The book is full of intimate portraits of the grandmothers in their kitchens, captured by Kenyan photographer Khadija M. Farah, who joined these women in their homes. The result of this collaborative and ambitious effort is a collection of heartwarming photos, tidbits of history, and, of course, plenty of mouthwatering meals. — ES

 This Will Make It Taste Good: A New Path to Simple Cooking

Vivian Howard

Voracious, October 20

Reading through Vivian Howard’s This Will Make It Taste Good is like reading a cookbook by your real or imagined North Carolinian best friend. The design itself is cheerful, full of 1970s serif fonts and colorful badges that are reminiscent of a children’s workbook. Dishes are photographed from above, in the same style as Alison Roman’s Dining In and Nothing Fancy, often showing Howard’s hands as they work away chopping herbs or spooning chowder. The A Chef’s Life host’s goal is simple: to teach home cooks that easy meals can be exciting rather than bland.

Howard’s intended audience is the time-crunched kitchen novice, though a more experienced cook will surely find some useful tips, as well. Each section is based around a recipe that can be prepped in advance and then used throughout the week in a multitude of dishes: Among the most promising are the “Little Green Dress,” a dressing with flexible ingredients that can gussy up anything from mussels to crackers to soft-boiled eggs; the “R-Rated Onions,” which you can keep in an ice cube tray in the freezer to use at your convenience; and the “Citrus Shrine,” i.e., preserved citrus that promises to elevate dishes like shrimp cocktail and rice pilaf — you can even use it in margaritas! In any time, This Will Make It Taste Good would be a great help to those of us who prefer recipes that look and taste more complex than they are to prepare. That it happens to arrive at a moment when we’re likely all sick of the contents of our fridges and our own culinary limitations is just a bonus. — Madeleine Davies

 The Rise: Black Cooks and the Soul of American Food

Marcus Samuelsson with Osayi Endolyn

Voracious, October 27

“Black food is not just one thing,” chef Marcus Samuelsson writes in the introduction to The Rise. “It’s not a rigidly defined geography or a static set of tastes. It is an energy. A force. An engine.” The cookbook that follows is an invigorating, joyous, and deeply nuanced illustration of the complexity of Black foodways, one that weaves together conversations about history, artistry, authorship, race, class, and culture with 150 recipes that incorporate ingredients and techniques from around the globe.

Each of the book’s recipes was created in honor of “someone who is illuminating the space we share,” as Samuelsson writes: chefs, artists, activists, authors, and historians, all of whom are profiled by the book’s coauthor, Eater contributor Osayi Endolyn. The recipes are organized to demonstrate how culinary rituals and traditions evolve according to time, place, and cook. In the first chapter, “Next,” for example, you’ll find food that speaks of forward-thinking innovation, such as baked sweet potatoes with garlic-fermented shrimp butter, created in honor of David Zilber, the former director of fermentation at Noma. (That butter, pureed with avocado, sweet soy sauce, and fresh thyme, is not only easy to make, but so good that you can be forgiven for eating it straight from the food processor.) “Migration,” the third chapter, speaks of the American South, with recipes like spiced lemon chess pie, broken rice peanut seafood stew, and Papa Ed’s shrimp and grits, named for Ed Brumfield, the executive chef at Samuelsson’s Harlem restaurant the Red Rooster.

The Rise doesn’t claim to be an encyclopedic compendium of Black cooking; instead, it’s a celebration, one that honors the past while looking ahead, challenging assumptions even as it feeds you well. — Rebecca Flint Marx

 The Flavor Equation: The Science of Great Cooking Explained in More Than 100 Essential Recipes

Nik Sharma

Chronicle Books, October 27

Nik Sharma begins his second cookbook by explaining that we rely on a variety of senses and feelings when we eat: sight, sound, mouthfeel or texture, aroma, taste, and even our emotions and memories. These components make up what he refers to as the “Flavor Equation,” and this concept and the role it plays in everyday cooking is the guiding principle of his book of the same name.

Following a thorough and captivating science lesson on the equation, Sharma lays out seven chapters dedicated to basic tastes and flavor boosters — brightness, bitterness, saltiness, sweetness, savoriness, fieriness, and richness — each with its own set of recipes: pomegranate and poppy seed wings exemplify brightness, roasted figs with coffee miso tahini or hazelnut flan highlight bitterness, “pizza” toast for saltiness, masala cheddar cornbread in the sweetness section, and more. Through these achievable recipes, many of which rely mostly on pantry essentials, Sharma helps readers better understand how flavor works and how to use that to their advantage to become more confident home cooks. Whatever your skill level in the kitchen, with its more than 100 recipes, illustrated diagrams, and Sharma’s own evocative photography, The Flavor Equation is an engrossing guide to elevating simple dishes into holistic experiences. — EE

 Time to Eat: Delicious Meals for Busy Lives

Nadiya Hussain

Clarkson Potter, November 10 (originally published June 27, 2019)

Nadiya Hussain is just like you and me. That’s the guiding principle behind her public persona, her BBC Two cooking show Time to Eat (now on Netflix), and her cookbook Time to Eat: Delicious Meals for Busy Lives. “I know what it’s like to have just one head and one pair of hands,” the Great British Bake Off winner writes in the introduction of Time to Eat, a new stateside version of her U.K. cookbook of the same title. Her book, she promises, will help you become a smarter home cook in between chores and kids, thanks to heavy use of the freezer and other time savers.

On the page, that looks like tips for prepping and freezing, recipes that leave you with enough leftovers to make a second dish, and ideas for remixes and variations. There are more than 100 recipes, divided into breakfast, lunch, dinner, dessert, and basics. Many of these dishes may be unfamiliar to American audiences — hello, kedgeree and fish pie burgers! — but the instructions are as approachable as Hussain’s on-camera demonstrations. With enough variety to keep it interesting, balanced with dishes easy enough to work into your weekly rotation of meals, e.g., eggs rolled onto tortillas, Time to Eat offers something for any home cook looking for new ideas and time-tested, time-saving methods. — Jenny G. Zhang

 Fäviken: 4015 Days, Beginning to End

Magnus Nilsson

Phaidon, November 11

Last December, after more than a decade of acclaim, accolades, and meals rooted in seasonality and locally produced ingredients, Magnus Nilsson closed his restaurant Fäviken in Jämtland, Sweden. In the lead-up to the closing, he told the LA Times that he wanted to focus on the restaurant, not elegies or explanations. Now, the explanation has arrived in the form of Fäviken: 4015 Days, Beginning to End, Nilsson’s latest monograph with publisher Phaidon.

Although the book covers the lifespan of Fäviken, including lookbacks at the first title Nilsson published about the restaurant, it is not an elegy. There are no laments here, but rather a thorough catalogue of all the dishes that Fäviken served, ruminations about craft and haute cuisine and sustainability, and a long-awaited account of “Why Fäviken had to close, really.” The book contains recipes for many of the restaurant’s dishes — ranging from the simple berry ice to the more demanding “Scallop I skalet ur elden cooked over burning juniper branches,” with extensive headnotes — but its purpose is not as a cookbook. It is a tome (beautifully put together, as is typical for Phaidon) that is made for fans of Fäviken’s, of Nilsson’s, and more importantly, of the way of life he espouses, one that is passionate but measured.

That is best expressed in one of the book’s final essays, one dated May 12, 2020, in which Nilsson articulates gratitude that he was able to close his restaurant on his own terms, for Fäviken would not have survived the pandemic. “If one day some years from now I wake up in the morning and feel the same burning desire to run a restaurant that I felt for many years at Fäviken, I won’t think twice about it,” Nilsson writes. “But if that doesn’t happen, that’s okay too. There are many other things to do in life.” — JGZ

 A Good Bake: The Art and Science of Making Perfect Pastries, Cakes, Cookies, Pies, and Breads at Home

Melissa Weller with Carolynn Carreño

Knopf, November 17

There are people who treat baking like a hobby and there are people who treat baking as a raison d’etre, a life’s purpose. Melissa Weller’s A Good Bake is for the latter, which shouldn’t surprise anyone considering Weller’s resume, which includes creating pastry for some of New York City’s most revered restaurants, such as Per Se, Roberta’s, and her acclaimed SoHo bagel shop, Sadelle’s. Before she became an expert baker, Weller was a chemical engineer, and as such, she tackles recipes with a scientific approach, getting the fermentation, proofing, and pH balance of her dough down to, well, a science.

If you’re a quarantine baker who’s mastered sourdough and is ready for the next challenge, consider Weller’s takes on NYC classics like chocolate babka, spelt scones with raspberry jam, and even traditional hot dog buns. A Good Bake will thrill bakers who rejoice in doing things the difficult way (but note that there are beautiful and detailed photos of her process to help guide ambitious bakers through the recipe). Of course, this means that failing will hurt all the more, considering the hours (or days, even!) of work that you’ve put into your bake, but success? It will taste all the sweeter... or more savory. It depends on your tastes, and Weller expertly caters to both. — MD

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New cookbooks from Ina Garten, Vivian Howard, Yotam Ottolenghi, and more will restore some much-needed joy to cooking For many of us, cooking has taken on a different role in our lives over the past six months. As restaurants closed, cooking — and cooking well — became essential even for those who previously spent little time in the kitchen. It also became a chore. At this point, six months into the pandemic, I’m impressed by anyone who still considers cooking a creative, joyful pastime, not just a means to food. But here to change that is a stellar lineup of fall cookbooks, bringing with them new inspiration and new comforts, and, at last, a reason to enter the kitchen with excitement. There are anticipated titles from beloved culinary figures, whose time-saving guidance and easy meal upgrades feel especially welcome now. There are books from some of the restaurants we miss the most, offering recreations of their dishes and insights that make us nostalgic for the time before shutdowns. There are primers on international cuisines; books for the adept home cook that take a studied, even scientific approach to flavor; and books that reflect the trends of the moment, including baking books for the person who has spent hours perfecting their bread game as well as the one who feels the occasional urge to bake a cake to be eaten immediately. I’m confident that even the most reluctant cook is sure to find at least one new cookbook among these 17 to dip a fork into. And for those for whom cooking never lost its luster, it’s a feast. — Monica Burton One Tin Bakes: Sweet and simple traybakes, pies, bars and buns Edd Kimber Kyle Books, out now The philosophy of Edd Kimber’s One Tin Bakes is pleasingly minimalist: Invest in one good 9-by-13-inch aluminum pan — or “tin,” in British parlance — and bake everything in it. Kimber has published three other books since winning the inaugural season of The Great British Bake Off in 2010, but this is the first that’s themed around a specific piece of equipment, and by focusing on the versatility of a single pan, One Tin Bakes prioritizes simplicity for both novice bakers and those who already know their way around a stand mixer. For the most part, these are not show-stopper, highly technical bakes — though some, like the “Giant Portuguese Custard Tart,” are impressive by nature. The recipes are unfussy, undemanding, and a pleasure to cook. They’re all sweet, with chapters spanning cakes, pies, breads, bars, cookies, and some no-bake desserts too. And while 9-by-13-inch sheets and slabs of baked goods are the stars of the book, Kimber’s collection also includes non-rectangular treats: rolled cakes, ice cream sandwiches, and babka buns, among others. Six months ago I might have described this book as a party baking companion — most of the recipes feed eight to 12 people — but parties are in short supply for the foreseeable future. That said, even without feeding my coworkers or friends, there is something so joyful (surface area, perhaps?) about pulling a magnificent rectangular pan of streusel-topped coffee cake or gigantic British scone from the oven. — Adam Moussa Parwana: Recipes and Stories from an Afghan Kitchen Durkhanai Ayubi with recipes by Farida Ayubi Interlink, out now The story of Parwana, the popular Afghan restaurant in South Adelaide, Australia, has always been intertwined with history. Owners Zelmai and Farida Ayubi fled Afghanistan for Australia in 1987, during the Cold War, itself the result of hundreds of years of conflict. So it’s no surprise that the restaurant’s cookbook, written by Zelmai and Farida’s daughter Durkhanai Ayubi, would double as a history lesson. Interspersed between recipes are stories of the Silk Road, the Mughal empire, and the Great Game, which illustrate how because of trade, plunder, and cultural exchange, Afghan cuisine is both beloved and recognizable. The book walks through classics like kabuli palaw, shaami kebab, and falooda (all of which, unlike so many restaurant dishes adapted to cookbooks, are incredibly achievable for the home cook) and demonstrate how Afghan cuisine both influenced and was influenced by nearly all of Asia. No matter what cuisine you’re most used to cooking, you’ll find a recipe, or even just a flavor, that feels familiar here. — Jaya Saxena The Sourdough School: Sweet Baking: Nourishing the Gut & the Mind Vanessa Kimbell Kyle Books, out now The first thing to know about the sweets-focused follow-up to 2018’s The Sourdough School cookbook, the groundbreaking gut-health baking book by food writer and BBC radio host Vanessa Kimbell, is this: “It is not a book about baking,” she writes. “This is a book about understanding.” She’s right, sort of. It is not just a book about baking. It is, like its predecessor, a manifesto on the gut-brain connection — a guide to caring for the magical ecosystem within our own bodies, a fragile environment that, she says, our modern way of eating has ravaged, grimly affecting both our physical and mental health. It’s a book about science and bacteria and flour milling and fermenting and strategies for adjusting our lives in such a way to allow for four-day cupcake-making. But then... it is also very much a book about baking. There are loads of delicious (if unabashedly healthy-looking) recipes with ingredients that prioritize your gut’s microbiome, everything from chocolate chip “biscuits” and Bangladeshi jalebis to swirly miso-prune danishes and a pudgy lemon-poppyseed cake with a hit of saffron. Nothing about these multi-day recipes is what anyone might call simple (I’ve never been so tempted to whip up my own couture flour blends), but Kimbell is as lovely a hand-holder as she is a writer, giving out lifelines like detailed schedules for each recipe, including the crucial pre-bake starter feedings so many other sourdough books leave out. She also is not above compromise, allowing for store-bought flours and dolling out assurances like, “if you are not into the scientific details, feel free to skip this entire section. I totally get just wanting to get on and bake.” A thorough reader, though, will be rewarded with a whole new way of thinking about the human body, along with a whole bunch of yummy new ways to indulge it. — Lesley Suter The Mexican Home Kitchen: Traditional Home-Style Recipes That Capture the Flavors and Memories of Mexico Mely Martinez Rock Point, September 15 Mely Martínez comes to publishing by way of the old-school world of recipe blogging on her website, Mexico in My Kitchen. Martínez was born in Mexico and traveled throughout different regions as a teacher and again later in her life, learning from local women along the way, before eventually settling in the United States. After bouncing around recipe forums, she established the site in 2008 as a way to record family recipes for her teenage son. Through the internet, she reached a far wider audience of Mexican immigrants craving their abuela’s recipes. Now, her debut cookbook, The Mexican Home Kitchen, reflects that well-traveled savvy, but it’s forgiving, too, providing helpful tips on variations of recipes and alternative methods of food preparation or ingredients. Martínez’s book is about the basics of Mexican home cooking; recipes include comfort foods like caldo de pollo dressed up with slices of avocado and diced jalapeño and special occasion meals like mole poblano. The recipes are simple enough for people just getting into Mexican cooking, but also have a nostalgic quality that will appeal to those who grew up with homemade arroz con leche or chicharrón en salsa verde. Flipping through The Mexican Home Kitchen, I remembered my own childhood visits with my stepmother’s family, where I would sit around the table with the many other grandkids swirling Ritz crackers in steaming bowls of atole. I turned to Martínez’s atole blanco recipe on page 178, and headed to the store for some masa harina, newly inspired. — Brenna Houck Pie for Everyone: Recipes and Stories from Petee’s Pie, New York’s Best Pie Shop Petra “Petee” Paredez Abrams, September 22 If you’re not a pie person, then clearly you’ve never had a slice of Petra Paredez’s black-bottom almond chess pie. Growing up in a baking and farming family (her parents started northern Virginia treasure Mom’s Apple Pie Company in 1981), Paredez has considerable pie-making expertise. In 2014, she and her husband, Robert Paredez, opened their Lower East Side shop Petee’s Pie Company on a shoestring budget, and today, the sweet, sunny cafe on Delancey Street is considered one of the best pie shops in New York City. At the heart of Petee’s Pie, the goal is simple: a flavorful, flaky, tender crust and perfectly balanced filling. Pie for Everyone teaches readers how to achieve this at home. The book begins with foundational information (how to source ingredients, the tools to buy to make pie-making easier and more efficient) followed by chapters on crusts and crumbs and pie fillings. And while there are hundreds of ways to make pie, Paredez believes in the merits of a super-buttery crust. “If you only use one of my pastry dough recipes,” she writes, “I hope it’s my butter pastry dough.” With recipes that are both sweet and savory (including quiches), Pie for Everyone covers the shop’s year-round signature pies, like maple whiskey walnut and chocolate cream, as well as seasonal favorites, like strawberry rhubarb and nesselrode, a New York specialty consisting of chestnut custard with black rum-soaked cherries. But whether you’re a fan of Petee’s Pie or you’ve never been, bakers and pie lovers will appreciate learning from Paredez, a baker for whom pie-making is a ribbon-worthy feat every single time. — Esra Erol Modern Comfort Food: A Barefoot Contessa Cookbook Ina Garten Random House, October 6 There are many cookbooks that you want to read more than cook from, but Modern Comfort Food: A Barefoot Contessa Cookbook is not one of them. In her 12th cookbook, Ina Garten, the queen of timeless, expertly tested dishes, shares 85 recipes for the kinds of comfort foods we’re craving more than ever. Dedicated home cooks may already know most of these unfussy foods by heart, but with Garten’s thoughtful techniques and guidance on how to find the best ingredients, dishes like chicken pot pie soup, baked rigatoni with lamb ragu, and skillet-roasted chicken with potatoes feel new and exciting. The skillet-roasted chicken and potatoes, for example, calls for a buttermilk marinade to make the bird juicy and moist, while potatoes are cooked with the chicken jus under the chicken, on the bottom of a hot skillet, to absorb extra chicken flavor, turning two humble ingredients into a fabulous dinner. This being a Barefoot Contessa cookbook, it also comes with all the stories and aspirational photos (including many heart-melting pictures of Garten and husband Jeffrey) that have long inspired fans to want to live, cook, and eat like Ina. But, compared to Garten’s other books, Modern Comfort Food depicts the culinary star more as a loving neighbor who will bring you chocolate chip cookies on Sundays than the imposing queen of East Hampton. In the intro to this book, Garten admits that these days, she’s a little grumpier than usual (just like the rest of us), says it’s okay if we reach for a cold martini and a tub of ice cream for dinner, and reminds us once again how she managed to capture so many hearts over more than two decades as the Barefoot Contessa. — James Park Good Drinks: Alcohol-Free Recipes for When You’re Not Drinking for Whatever Reason Julia Bainbridge Ten Speed Press, October 6 A lot of people feel weird about drinking nowadays. Our spending habits show it, through products like low-ABV hard seltzers, chic nonalcoholic aperitifs, or just the ongoing popularity of sober months like Dry January. Author Julia Bainbridge understands the fluid nature of this type of sobriety, which is why she subtitled her book of spirit-free drinks as “for When You’re Not Drinking for Whatever Reason.” After all, you don’t need to eschew alcohol forever in order to enjoy a thoughtfully blended drink that isn’t trying to get you sloshed. The drinks in Good Drinks are structured by the time of day you might enjoy them (brunch accompaniment, happy hour treat, aperitif), and are as complex and innovative (and labor-intensive) as anything at a fancy cocktail bar. They call for ingredients like black cardamom-cinnamon syrup, buckwheat tea, and tomato-watermelon juice, each of which get their own recipes. There’s even a whole recipe for a dupe of nonalcoholic Pimm’s (involving citus, rooibos tea, raspberry vinegar, and gentian root). The results are festive, celebratory drinks for any occasion, so the nondrinkers need not be stuck with cranberry juice and seltzer anymore. — JS Ottolenghi Flavor: A Cookbook Yotam Ottolenghi and Ixta Belfrage Ten Speed Press, October 13 It’s probably a good thing Yotam Ottolenghi’s new cookbook isn’t called Plenty 3 or More Plenty More, veering the chef’s cookbook oeuvre into Fast & Furious territory. But by the London chef’s own admission, that’s a good way to understand Flavor, his newest book, which like its Plenty predecessors focuses on vegetables and all the creative ways to prepare and combine them. Co-written with Ixta Belfrage, a recipe developer in the Ottolenghi test kitchen, Flavor presents recipes from three perspectives. The “process” chapter explores specific techniques to transform vegetables, such as charring and fermenting. “Pairing” takes an angle that will sound familiar to Samin Nosrat fans, with recipes rooted in the perfect balance of fat, acid, “chile heat,” and sweetness. And “produce” focuses on the ingredients with such complex tastes, usages, and sub-categories that they deserve examination on their own: mushrooms, onions (and their allium cousins), nuts and seeds, and sugar in fruit and booze form. The result, in typical Ottolenghi fashion, is multi-step, multi-ingredient, and multi-hued recipes whose promised flavors leap from the page — from cabbage “tacos” with celery root and date barbecue sauce to saffron tagliatelle with ricotta and crispy chipotle shallots. Chipotles and other chiles are actually in abundance here (as well as “a lime or two in places where lemons would appear in previous Ottolenghi books,” as the intro notes) thanks to Belfrage’s roots in Mexico City. Those flavors, as well as those from Brazilian, Italian, and multiple Asian cuisines (spy the shiitake congee and noodles with peanut laab), unite with the usual Ottolenghi suspects — za’atar, star anise, harissa, labneh — to make Flavor worth the look, even for the home chef who already has Plenty and Plenty More on the shelf. — Ellie Krupnick Xi’an Famous Foods: The Cuisine of Western China, from New York’s Favorite Noodle Shop Jason Wang with Jessica K. Chou Abrams, October 13 The debut cookbook from the New York City restaurant chain Xi’an Famous Foods is worth picking up whether or not you have slurped the restaurant’s hand-pulled noodles. This is a book on how to operate a food business — CEO Jason Wang outlines five lessons to know before diving into the business and strips away the glamor of running a restaurant empire. It’s also a food history of the flavors of Xi’an, China. With so many layers to appreciate, Xi’an Famous Foods is a prime example of what a restaurant cookbook can be. Much of the book reads like a TV series. It’s broken into episodes covering Wang’s challenges, failures, and successes, from his life-changing move from Xi’an to a rural town in Michigan, to his nights out in New York City’s Koreatown, to taking over his father’s business, Xi’an Famous Foods. Interspersed with these anecdotes, there are recipes for the restaurant’s fiery, mouth-tingling dishes, including Xi’an Famous Foods’ famous noodle sauce (accented with salty and spicy flavors from black vinegar, oyster sauce, fennel seeds, and Sichuan peppercorns), along with techniques for making hand-pulled noodles paired with helpful illustrations and visual references. For avid home cooks who want a challenge, Xi’an Famous Foods also provides tips on putting together the best hot pot at home, and for those who are confused at Asian groceries, there’s a list of basic pantry items with flavor notes and how they are used in cooking. And whether it’s Wang’s personal connection to a dish or its wider history that draws you in, each recipe will broaden your knowledge and appreciation of Xi’an cooking. — JP Coconut & Sambal: Recipes from my Indonesian Kitchen Lara Lee Bloomsbury, October 13 In the introduction of her debut cookbook, Lara Lee writes that an overflowing generosity is central to Indonesian culture; meals are shared freely between neighbors and friends. This generosity fills the pages of Coconut & Sambal, each recipe heightening the sense that as a reader, you’ve been let in on something special. Lee, who was born in Australia, didn’t spend time in Indonesia until later in life, so early memories of Indonesian cooking come from the trips her grandmother Margaret Thali — whom Lee lovingly refers to as Popo throughout the book — would take to Australia. Each of the cookbook’s chapter introductions is deeply researched: Some recount stories of Lee’s grandmother, and others focus on the Indonesia that Lee fell in love with as she traveled across the archipelago collecting stories and recipes for this book. The recipes that fill Coconut & Sambal demonstrate that Indonesian cuisine cannot be painted with one brush. The food of the nation — made up of more than 15,000 islands — incorporates the sharp heat of chiles, the mellow hit of fermented shrimp, the sweetness of coconut in nearly every form, and always enough rice to go around. You’ll find curries fragrant with makrut lime leaf, ginger, and turmeric, and bright ceviches adorned with thinly sliced chiles, banana shallot, and palm sugar; I was particularly drawn to a fried chicken dish (page 142), its crisp shell smashed and laced with fiery sambal. Lee explains that recipes are typically passed down orally in Indonesian culture, which makes me even more grateful for these written ones. What Lee has given readers is a gorgeous document that sets in stone food traditions passed down through generations, as well as some she’s created herself. You’ll want to dedicate an evening to turning the pages of this book, planning out feasts of green chile braised duck, Balinese roasted pork belly, and perhaps some sticky ginger toffee pudding to top it all off. — Elazar Sontag In Bibi’s Kitchen: The Recipes and Stories of Grandmothers from the Eight African Countries that Touch the Indian Ocean Hawa Hassan and Julia Turshen Ten Speed Press, October 13 Recipes are almost always the main attraction in a cookbook. But In Bibi’s Kitchen, written by first-time author Hawa Hassan in collaboration with veteran cookbook writer Julia Turshen, there’s so much to enjoy before you even get to the first recipe. The book focuses on dishes from eight African countries, linked by their shared proximity to the Indian Ocean and involvement in the region’s spice trade. Each chapter, divided by country, starts with a brief history of the region and question-and-answer-style interviews with one of the bibis, or grandmothers, who call these places home. The answers to these questions find the grandmothers speaking about the meaning of home, the gender roles in their communities, and the importance of passing on food traditions. Each interview is as beautiful and varied as the recipes that follow: kadaka akondro (green plantains and braised beef) from the home of Ma Baomaka in Ambohidratrimo, Madagascar; digaag qumbe, a Somalian chicken stew rich with yogurt and coconut milk, served with sweet banana; kaimati, crisp coconut dumplings in an ambrosial cardamom syrup, this batch cooked in Ma Shara’s kitchen in Zanzibar, but popular all along the Swahili coast. A practical advantage of collecting recipes from home cooks is that these recipes are all approachable, most calling for fewer than 10 ingredients. In many ways, In Bibi’s Kitchen breaks ground. It pays tribute to a part of the world that has been criminally overlooked by American publishers, sharing the stories of these African countries from the perspectives of home cooks who actually live there. The book is full of intimate portraits of the grandmothers in their kitchens, captured by Kenyan photographer Khadija M. Farah, who joined these women in their homes. The result of this collaborative and ambitious effort is a collection of heartwarming photos, tidbits of history, and, of course, plenty of mouthwatering meals. — ES This Will Make it Taste Good: A New Path to Simple Cooking Vivian Howard Voracious, October 20 Reading through Vivian Howard’s This Will Make It Taste Good is like reading a cookbook by your real or imagined North Carolinian best friend. The design itself is cheerful, full of 1970s serif fonts and colorful badges that are reminiscent of a children’s workbook. Dishes are photographed from above, in the same style as Alison Roman’s Dining In and Nothing Fancy, often showing Howard’s hands as they work away chopping herbs or spooning chowder. The A Chef’s Life host’s goal is simple: to teach home cooks that easy meals can be exciting rather than bland. Howard’s intended audience is the time-crunched kitchen novice, though a more experienced cook will surely find some useful tips, as well. Each section is based around a recipe that can be prepped in advance and then used throughout the week in a multitude of dishes: Among the most promising are the “Little Green Dress,” a dressing with flexible ingredients that can gussy up anything from mussels to crackers to soft-boiled eggs; the “R-Rated Onions,” which you can keep in an ice cube tray in the freezer to use at your convenience; and the “Citrus Shrine,” i.e., preserved citrus that promises to elevate dishes like shrimp cocktail and rice pilaf — you can even use it in margaritas! In any time, This Will Make It Taste Good would be a great help to those of us who prefer recipes that look and taste more complex than they are to prepare. That it happens to arrive at a moment when we’re likely all sick of the contents of our fridges and our own culinary limitations is just a bonus. — Madeleine Davies The Rise: Black Cooks and the Soul of American Food Marcus Samuelsson with Osayi Endolyn Voracious, October 27 “Black food is not just one thing,” chef Marcus Samuelsson writes in the introduction to The Rise. “It’s not a rigidly defined geography or a static set of tastes. It is an energy. A force. An engine.” The cookbook that follows is an invigorating, joyous, and deeply nuanced illustration of the complexity of Black foodways, one that weaves together conversations about history, artistry, authorship, race, class, and culture with 150 recipes that incorporate ingredients and techniques from around the globe. Each of the book’s recipes was created in honor of “someone who is illuminating the space we share,” as Samuelsson writes: chefs, artists, activists, authors, and historians, all of whom are profiled by the book’s coauthor, Eater contributor Osayi Endolyn. The recipes are organized to demonstrate how culinary rituals and traditions evolve according to time, place, and cook. In the first chapter, “Next,” for example, you’ll find food that speaks of forward-thinking innovation, such as baked sweet potatoes with garlic-fermented shrimp butter, created in honor of David Zilber, the former director of fermentation at Noma. (That butter, pureed with avocado, sweet soy sauce, and fresh thyme, is not only easy to make, but so good that you can be forgiven for eating it straight from the food processor.) “Migration,” the third chapter, speaks of the American South, with recipes like spiced lemon chess pie, broken rice peanut seafood stew, and Papa Ed’s shrimp and grits, named for Ed Brumfield, the executive chef at Samuelsson’s Harlem restaurant the Red Rooster. The Rise doesn’t claim to be an encyclopedic compendium of Black cooking; instead, it’s a celebration, one that honors the past while looking ahead, challenging assumptions even as it feeds you well. — Rebecca Flint Marx The Flavor Equation: The Science of Great Cooking Explained in More Than 100 Essential Recipes Nik Sharma Chronicle Books, October 27 Nik Sharma begins his second cookbook by explaining that we rely on a variety of senses and feelings when we eat: sight, sound, mouthfeel or texture, aroma, taste, and even our emotions and memories. These components make up what he refers to as the “Flavor Equation,” and this concept and the role it plays in everyday cooking is the guiding principle of his book of the same name. Following a thorough and captivating science lesson on the equation, Sharma lays out seven chapters dedicated to basic tastes and flavor boosters — brightness, bitterness, saltiness, sweetness, savoriness, fieriness, and richness — each with its own set of recipes: pomegranate and poppy seed wings exemplify brightness, roasted figs with coffee miso tahini or hazelnut flan highlight bitterness, “pizza” toast for saltiness, masala cheddar cornbread in the sweetness section, and more. Through these achievable recipes, many of which rely mostly on pantry essentials, Sharma helps readers better understand how flavor works and how to use that to their advantage to become more confident home cooks. Whatever your skill level in the kitchen, with its more than 100 recipes, illustrated diagrams, and Sharma’s own evocative photography, The Flavor Equation is an engrossing guide to elevating simple dishes into holistic experiences. — EE Time to Eat: Delicious Meals for Busy Lives Nadiya Hussain Clarkson Potter, November 10 (originally published June 27, 2019) Nadiya Hussain is just like you and me. That’s the guiding principle behind her public persona, her BBC Two cooking show Time to Eat (now on Netflix), and her cookbook Time to Eat: Delicious Meals for Busy Lives. “I know what it’s like to have just one head and one pair of hands,” the Great British Bake Off winner writes in the introduction of Time to Eat, a new stateside version of her U.K. cookbook of the same title. Her book, she promises, will help you become a smarter home cook in between chores and kids, thanks to heavy use of the freezer and other time savers. On the page, that looks like tips for prepping and freezing, recipes that leave you with enough leftovers to make a second dish, and ideas for remixes and variations. There are more than 100 recipes, divided into breakfast, lunch, dinner, dessert, and basics. Many of these dishes may be unfamiliar to American audiences — hello, kedgeree and fish pie burgers! — but the instructions are as approachable as Hussain’s on-camera demonstrations. With enough variety to keep it interesting, balanced with dishes easy enough to work into your weekly rotation of meals, e.g., eggs rolled onto tortillas, Time to Eat offers something for any home cook looking for new ideas and time-tested, time-saving methods. — Jenny G. Zhang Fäviken: 4015 Days, Beginning to End Magnus Nilsson Phaidon, November 11 Last December, after more than a decade of acclaim, accolades, and meals rooted in seasonality and locally produced ingredients, Magnus Nilsson closed his restaurant Fäviken in Jämtland, Sweden. In the lead-up to the closing, he told the LA Times that he wanted to focus on the restaurant, not elegies or explanations. Now, the explanation has arrived in the form of Fäviken: 4015 Days, Beginning to End, Nilsson’s latest monograph with publisher Phaidon. Although the book covers the lifespan of Fäviken, including lookbacks at the first title Nilsson published about the restaurant, it is not an elegy. There are no laments here, but rather a thorough catalogue of all the dishes that Fäviken served, ruminations about craft and haute cuisine and sustainability, and a long-awaited account of “Why Fäviken had to close, really.” The book contains recipes for many of the restaurant’s dishes — ranging from the simple berry ice to the more demanding “Scallop I skalet ur elden cooked over burning juniper branches,” with extensive headnotes — but its purpose is not as a cookbook. It is a tome (beautifully put together, as is typical for Phaidon) that is made for fans of Fäviken’s, of Nilsson’s, and more importantly, of the way of life he espouses, one that is passionate but measured. That is best expressed in one of the book’s final essays, one dated May 12, 2020, in which Nilsson articulates gratitude that he was able to close his restaurant on his own terms, for Fäviken would not have survived the pandemic. “If one day some years from now I wake up in the morning and feel the same burning desire to run a restaurant that I felt for many years at Fäviken, I won’t think twice about it,” Nilsson writes. “But if that doesn’t happen, that’s okay too. There are many other things to do in life.” — JGZ A Good Bake: The Art and Science of Making Perfect Pastries, Cakes, Cookies, Pies, and Breads at Home Melissa Weller with Carolynn Carreño Knopf, November 17 There are people who treat baking like a hobby and there are people who treat baking as a raison d’etre, a life’s purpose. Melissa Weller’s A Good Bake is for the latter, which shouldn’t surprise anyone considering Weller’s resume, which includes creating pastry for some of New York City’s most revered restaurants, such as Per Se, Roberta’s, and her acclaimed SoHo bagel shop, Sadelle’s. Before she became an expert baker, Weller was a chemical engineer, and as such, she tackles recipes with a scientific approach, getting the fermentation, proofing, and pH balance of her dough down to, well, a science. If you’re a quarantine baker who’s mastered sourdough and is ready for the next challenge, consider Weller’s takes on NYC classics like chocolate babka, spelt scones with raspberry jam, and even traditional hot dog buns. A Good Bake will thrill bakers who rejoice in doing things the difficult way (but note that there are beautiful and detailed photos of her process to help guide ambitious bakers through the recipe). Of course, this means that failing will hurt all the more, considering the hours (or days, even!) of work that you’ve put into your bake, but success? It will taste all the sweeter... or more savory. It depends on your tastes, and Weller expertly caters to both. — MD from Eater - All https://ift.tt/32cznPz

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