Smitten Kitchen Keepers: New Classics for Your Forever Files

Keeper recipes, in Deb Perelman’s own words, “accumulate everything I’ve learned that makes shopping easier, cooking more doable and enjoyable, and food more reliably delicious.” They’re the ones she hopes you’ll rely on for years and years.

As the author of the landmark cooking blog smittenkitchen.com, which she founded in 2006, Perelman has enormous experience with home cooks, the food they want to cook, the questions they ask, the struggles they face. She has steadily held the public attention not because she caves to it, but because she’s one of those same home cooks with a gift for recipe development and writing.

Perelman’s inspirations are practical. Instead of filling her frittata with ingredient after ingredient so that the eggs become background, she lets the eggs stand on their own, with the would-be filling “heaped on top, where they keep their crunch and provide a bright contrast.”

After reviving store-bought snow peas in ice water, she tosses them with toasted walnuts, olive oil, vinegar, and pecorino cheese. She mixes kielbasa with its soulmates cabbage and rye bread for a sheet-pan dinner that whispers of mustard and vinegar dressing.

Need to know more? How about: a carrot tarte tatin; toasted ricotta gnocchi with pistachio pesto; coconut rice with chili-lime vegetables; a mango curd tart?

So many satisfactions.

Hardcover. Color photographs throughout.