On A Fourth Cookbook Chronicle

Here we go again!

Welcome to the Friday UnRecipe post for paid subscribers: the fourth in our cookbook chronicles series! A quick note about programming: this will be our last post on a Friday. We’re moving to a 1x/week newsletter from here on out! On Tuesday, all subscribers will receive an interview with the founder of my favorite book tracking app. As always, check out my past posts here and learn more about my day job here. Thanks for reading!

Welcome to the fourth installment of the cookbook chronicles! Every few weeks, I’m choosing a cookbook from the shelf and cooking from it. I’m following the recipe (mostly! seasonally!), and I’m telling you about it. Ta-dah! Catch up on the first, second, and third editions here.

Before we dive into this review, I also wanted to remind you that there are just three (single room!) spots available for the retreat I’m co-hosting this summer Red Clover Ranch in Wisconsin with pastry chef, herbalist, and artist Emily Spurlin. You can read more about the event and secure your room here.

Knowing that I am deep in the world of cookbooks, people often ask if I have a favorite. I defer, of course, because overall favorites are hard to come by. Are we talking photography? Design? Cookable recipes? Aspirational bakes? The categories are far too endless and wild for me to pick just one.

But if I really get down to it, there’s one cookbook that I fell in love with from the moment I brought it home from the library for the first time. One cookbook that is so insanely cookable I’ve been making dinner out of it for the last two weeks straight. One cookbook so smart, so concise, so radically different that I *actually* follow the recipes.

That cookbook? I Dream Of Dinner (So You Don’t Have To) by

Ali Slagle

, who also publishes a newsletter on Substack called 40 Ingredients Forever. Every time I check this book out from the library, I think to myself “I should really just buy this book,” and it is with great excitement that I finally hit purchase just this morning on a copy of my own. So there!

Packed—PACKED—with simple recipes, this book acknowledges what most cookbooks don’t: that the audience that Slagle writes for already has a certain level of comfort in the kitchen. The instructions here are not going to coddle you or teach you how to massage oil into kale. The ingredient list does not tell you how much you need of a certain ingredient (that information is in the body of a recipe). It reminds me of the cookbooks that my grandma used: they assume you already know how to cook and are instead in the business of helping you plan exciting meals with lower effort.

I Dream Of Dinner (So You Don’t Have To) by Ali Slagle

My heart!