What kinds of recipes best suit the current cultural vibe? Cookbook author Adeena Sussman, for one, says she’s advocating “simple cooking for complicated times” in her latest, Zariz (Avery, Apr.). With this collection of Israeli-inspired, weeknight-friendly dishes, she encourages readers to streamline their cooking without compromising flavor. “The world continues to be challenging on every level for every person, and we still have to go to work, be emotionally present for our friends and family, take care of ourselves, and get food on the table,” Sussman says. “Food should have a place of pride, but cooking should not suck us dry.”
Zariz—Hebrew for “quick”—is one of several forthcoming books that meet home cooks where they are: in busy kitchens and with ingredients already on hand.
World tour, home kitchen
Sussman’s pared-down style leans on time-saving techniques and pantry hacks. For her caramelized onion and labneh dip, she oven roasts the onions, which is less labor intensive than the typical sauté method; her grilled hoisin-harissa lamb chops and plums recipe uses store-bought condiments. “I want people to experience the spiritual and tactile elements of cooking but take it down to an essential level,” she says. “Every single thing you’re doing has meaning and has a lot of deep flavor without being too taxing.”
Like Sussman, Ham El-Waylly is bolstering the idea that global cuisines need not be intimidating. As a young chef in New York City, he never cooked at home, he recalls in his debut, Hello, Home Cooking (Clarkson Potter, Mar.). “A part of me even looked down on home cooking. If it wasn’t plated with tweezers, I didn’t want it.”
When the pandemic temporarily brought the restaurant industry to a halt, El-Waylly decided to reacquaint himself with his apartment kitchen and with the foods of his Bolivian and Egyptian heritage and his upbringing in Qatar. The book translates that knowledge for novices, drawing on his many influences and using staple ingredients in unexpected ways: toasted thin spaghetti, black beans, and parmesan; tahini-roasted swordfish; Frito ganache tart.
Japanese Comfort Cooking (Ten Speed, June), the fourth collaboration between chef Tadashi Ono and food writer Harris Salat, showcases cooking that, they write, is “raku-raku”—Japanese slang akin to “easy peasy” or “piece of cake.” The coauthors encourage improvisation, inviting readers to conjure meals from whatever’s in the fridge, with the aid of seasonings like dashi, soy sauce, mirin, sake, and miso. Recipes include a four-ingredient asparagus and fried tofu miso soup, kama-age udon (five ingredients), and salmon teriyaki with sansho (seven ingredients).
Archana Doshi launched the website Archana’s Kitchen in 2007 as a way to document her cooking experiences and share recipes; it’s since grown to connect with a global audience. The 100 recipes in Everyday Indian from Archana’s Kitchen (Weldon Owen, Apr.), favorites of her millions of online followers, emphasize the importance of maintaining the authenticity of Indian cuisine while making it accessible to a broader readership. She explains dum cooking (a slow-cooking method used for biryanis and rice gravies) and extols the virtues of pressure cookers, which significantly reduce cooking times for dals and legumes.
Doshi also encourages readers to appreciate how dishes differ across the subcontinent—“There are 30 different variations of biryani,” she notes—and to understand how traditional Indian meals are structured, so they can mix and match her recipes with confidence. “It’s not fusion, but it aims to break the monotony of traditional eating,” she says. “At home, I make thepla, a Gujarati flatbread, and serve it with carrot beet thoran, a vegetable dish from Kerala. I hope that readers experiment to create unique meals.”
Fast foods
Speed and simplicity dominate online cooking culture—think 15-second TikTok pasta hacks and three-ingredient “lazy girl” dinners engineered for the algorithm. So, it’s unsurprising that online creators are parlaying viral, minimal-effort recipes into polished cookbooks destined for the kitchen counter rather than the “for you” page.
In Dig In! (Simon Element, May), Erin O’Brien provides 100 achievable recipes, including many solutions to the evergreen quandary of “WTF to Make for Dinner”—a chapter title inspired by an Instagram series shared with her 1.2 million followers. Her crowd-pleasing mains include twice-baked broccoli cheddar potatoes with extra butter, cheddar, and cream cheese (bacon optional), as well as “The Only Roast Chicken You’ll Need.” Elsewhere, in the “Pasta: My Love Language” chapter, she shares the three-ingredient fettuccine Alfredo whose online version has racked up more than 23 million views since 2024.
Chef and recipe developer Christine Flynn speaks the language of social media, posting dinner inspo Instagram stories and sharing recipe collabs. Her third cookbook, Easy Does It (Penguin Canada, Mar.), combines a conversational style with decades of restaurant experience to help readers get satisfying meals on the table. “Easy food can still be thoughtful,” says Flynn, who reflects on her personal experience of making ends meet. “It wasn’t easy being a single mom to twin girls and having to stretch that dollar. The secret is making your food from scratch, using whole foods, and thinking critically about how to use the stuff that’s left over.”
The book’s “Use It Twice to Use It All” chapter is devoted to repurposing recipes from earlier in the book: dill pickle poached cod with scallion sauce is transformed into cod cakes with dilly mayo; pepperoncini-braised pork shoulder is refashioned into cheesy-porky tacos—“which are, I would argue, better than the original dishes,” she says. “The book emphasizes how, with a little bit of time and creative thought, there’s so much you can do with a sad container of leftovers.”
In We Use What We Have (Countryman, Aug.), self-taught cook and digital creator Alex MacLaren—her Instagram tagline is “easy budget friendly meals with a side of mom life & chaos”—employs the frugal, clean-out-the-fridge approach that’s attracted almost 800,000 TikTok followers. “My philosophy is, buy what’s affordable and then figure it out,” she says. “I’ve always been a bargain girlie.” MacLaren’s signature moves include a dish she calls “an adult version of chicken nuggets and butter noodles,” and in the spirit of improvisation, her book features substitution charts to help readers not feel beholden to recipes. “I always say, It’s not that deep. It’s just dinner.”
Crowed Pleasers
Susan Roxborough, executive editor at Clarkson Potter, acquired Matthew Bounds’s self-published 2024 title, Keep It Simple Y’all, after watching its quick rise up Amazon’s charts; the traditionally published version has sold very well for the imprint. His follow-up, Keep It Simple Y’all Every Day (Apr.), includes chapters titled “Date Night,” “Feelin’ Like a Snack,” and “Every Damn Day”—that last, Roxborough notes, acknowledges how often we have to make dinner and includes recipes that rely on set-it-and-forget-it techniques, like sheet-pan Caprese chicken, one-pot French onion pasta, and air-fryer taquitos.
“Matthew learned how to cook during the pandemic,” she says. “His story is very relatable, and his recipes are easy and budget-friendly. This all resonates with his audience, the majority of whom have families to cook for, who may be short on time, and for whom affordability is important.”
Steph de Sousa is a former MasterChef Australia contestant who has built a large following on social media—1.3 million on Instagram—by sharing approachable, budget-friendly recipes. In No Stress Recipe Queen (HarperCollins, May), de Sousa helps time-strapped cooks master the basics—whipping up a vinaigrette, roasting vegetables, and preparing a stir-fry sauce—and prepare easy meals with eight or fewer ingredients and in 30 minutes or less, such as curry sauce dumplings (with frozen dumplings and pre-made red curry paste) and a one-pan chicken and pasta bake (with cream cheese and jarred pesto).The book is for readers who are “racing home, throwing dinner together, and running out the door again,” she says. “They’re not spending all day thinking about what they’re cooking for dinner. I want readers to see themselves in my approach to cooking. If they can, they might think: maybe I can do that, too.”
The 100-plus paleo-friendly recipes in Everyday Eats (Morrow Cookbooks, Aug.) by Alex Snodgrass, author of three bestselling cookbooks and founder of the popular social media outlet the Defined Dish, are “simple ones to have in your back pocket all the time,” she says. Sheet pan salmon with asparagus relies on a hot oven to speed things up, while kung pao–inspired ground chicken stir fry requires no knife work. “I grew up in a small town where home cooked meals were the norm,” she explains. “I see the importance of that to who I am today, and in my connections with my family.”
Echoing others PW spoke with, Snodgrass acknowledges the twin desires to save time and to feel rewarded by and connected through cooking. “Encouraging people to get dinner on the table during hard times or busy times keeps us grounded and rooted,” she says. “This book just makes dinnertime feel a little bit more doable.”
Pooja Makhijani is the author of the new picture book Bread Is Love (Roaring Brook), illustrated by Lavanya Naidu.
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