The Everlasting Meal Cookbook: Leftovers A-Z

Anyone who aspires to be a thoughtful cook will find The Everlasting Meal Cookbook a bountiful resource of ideas and motivation.

To be clear: if your goal is dinner on the table as fast as possible, or a meal made with the minimum number of ingredients, this is not your book. Tamar Adler, a former cook at Chez Panisse and an award-winning food writer, is much more interested in the things we rush past in our quests for efficiency and optimization: the leftovers, the odds and ends, the not-quite enough ingredients which you could easily discard.

But with this surprisingly comprehensive book, you don’t have to discard them. And you don’t have to employ them out of a sense of thrift or frugality. You’ll use them because Adler gives you good ideas.

In nearly 500 pages of recipes, arranged by type of ingredient, Adler helps you realize that fibrous asparagus bottoms can make a lovely soup, that a little bit of sweetened condensed milk can make a handy little batch of simple cookies, that a few slices of pepperoni will add zest to a tomato sauce, and cooked quinoa can be dressed up to use in a tart shell.

You may never have an epiphany browsing this book—we never smacked our foreheads after realizing we could use eggshells in some astonishing way. But all the same, the solidity of its advice is a way of reconnecting to a wealth of culinary experience that everyday life sometimes leads us to forget.

Hardcover. Line illustrations by Caitlin Winner.