On More Cookbook Chronicles

Installment two!

Welcome to the Friday UnRecipe post for paid subscribers: the second in our cookbook chronicles series! Next Friday, paid subscribers will receive a recipe for cranberry baklava. As always, check out my past posts here and learn more about my day job here. Thanks for reading!

Welcome to the second installment of the cookbook chronicles! Every week, 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! If you missed the first edition, and you’re now confused about what we’re doing, you can catch up here.

So far, I’ve been absolutely loving this project. Cooking from cookbooks is great fun—who knew?!

There’s nothing that gives me more pleasure than getting a good recommendation. From novels to TV shows to recipes, all forms of media become more appealing to me when someone I know/love/trust pre-vets something for me. In this case, the recommendation came from someone who had a hand in making this book as amazing as it is—my friend and cookbook pal Jeanelle from

Book & Salt

. Jeanelle is a fabulously talented writer and cook, and she supports cookbook projects through recipe development and testing. One of the projects she worked on recently was this book: Pass the Plate by Carolina Gelen.

Carolina Gelen

’s newsletter, SCRAPS, has been one of my favorites to peruse for a while now. I’m extremely into recipes that are low-effort, high-reward. Does this feel like an overly obvious, wildly privileged sentence to write? Absolutely. But, unfortunately, that doesn’t make it any less true, and so I’m lucky there are people like Carolina out there to make recipes that fit that bill. I was thrilled when she announced her book, and even more excited when I realized that one of my very talented friends (hi, Jeanelle!) helped bring it to life.

Jeanelle was kind enough to pass along a list of her favorites from the book, but I’m pleased to report that there’s simply no shortage to the recipes I want to cook from this book. They’re everything I love about Carolina’s recipes in a beautiful package. What more could you want?!

Pass the Plate by Carolina Gelen