Year-End Review of the Cookbooks and Recipes I Used and Loved Most
These are a few of my favorite things
Writing a one-off assessment of a cookbook is one thing, but I find you can’t really know how useful a book is to you until you’ve had it on your shelf for a while. I can have a lukewarm initial reaction to something, yet continually turn to it for its accessibility and ease or I can absolutely love it in the beginning, and then never pick it up.
So I thought it would be fun to look back and see what I actually used and enjoyed the most in 2024.
On top of that, I love reading end-of-year, best-of cookbook lists, but I find they rarely reflect what I’m actually using in the kitchen. So this is honest to goodness what I cook from time and again. I’m not here to juice any numbers and impress you with my range and eclectic tastes, I’m just here to say what worked on the ground for me.
My Most-Used Cookbooks of the Year
Most Used Overall: Pizza Night by Alexandra Stafford and What To Cook When You Don’t Feel Like Cooking by Caroline Chambers
I acquired Pizza Night by
in April (courtesy of Clarkson Potter) and What To Cook When You Don’t Feel Like Cooking by in August (courtesy of my birthday), both about which I have already written extensively. They have lived up to my own hype and I have used both nearly weekly since.I have, thus far, used Pizza Night mostly for the crust recipes, and I have experimented with the bulk of the cooking methods. I am most proud of the fact that the book helped me master a mean grilled pizza.
Making two grandma pizzas from Pizza Night became my go-to move for a steady rotation of guests in the spring and summer, and one of them offered to pay me to make the same for a party. There was no follow up, but I think that means it was good.
I hope to have more bandwidth for fun toppings soon. Let’s make that my New Year’s Resolution.
Similarly, I’ve put What To Cook to intense and repeated use. In heavy rotation are the tuna melts, chicken tinga, and cottage cheese pancakes. I made the short ribs for Christmas dinner (good!) and I’m making the bo ssam for New Year’s Day (tbd!). My husband requested the chicken parm sliders mentioned in my review for his birthday meal (high praise!) and they were just as good the second time. This is a highly cookable book.
Most Used Late Additions: The Ambitious Kitchen Cookbook by Monique Volz and My Mexican Kitchen by Eva Longoria
I’ve only been using The Ambitious Kitchen Cookbook and My Mexican Kitchen (thanks for the free book Clarkson Potter!) since October, so while I’ve used them quite a bit, I don’t have a long-term perspective.
I’ve found a lot in Ambitious Kitchen to be appealing and often quite good, though it occasionally seems needlessly labor intensive. I made an entire Canadian Thanksgiving meal from it, comprising Turkey Enchiladas and a Pumpkin Cake, that was overall really tasty, but at the same time a lot of work. There’s a fig jam and goat cheese pizza that was amazing, and a chicken and sweet potato sheet pan situation that was delicious, but again with the outsize effort. I am enjoying this one, if occasionally cursing at it.
I plan to write a full review of My Mexican Kitchen soon. As a preview, this has an excellent cocktail chapter, and it introduced our family to fideo soup. Anyone with even a glancing knowledge of Mexican food will know this is not a groundbreaking recipe, but it gets one of my kids regularly eating a meal without protest and that is no mean feat. We make Eva’s fideo soup one to two times per week. Time will tell how much this one gets used on the whole, but it’s coming off the shelf a lot currently. Full thoughts coming soon.
Most Used in the Single Recipe Category: Chloe Flavor by Chloe Coscarelli and The Real Food Table by Jessica Bascom and Stacie Hessing
I am a longtime Chloe Coscarelli fan. Her recipes are always reliable and delicious, and they have the added appeal of being kid-friendly. I memorized her cauliflower-based White Shells and Cheese Sauce from Chloe Flavor, altered to use frozen cauliflower rice and served with spaghetti. I made it every other week for months. And honorable mention for Pasta in Pink Sauce from Chloe’s Vegan Italian Kitchen, a runner-up to the cauliflower sauce for most cooked. (I reviewed Chloe Flavor on Amazon way back when it came out in 2018!)
As for The Real Food Table, from the creators of The Real Food Dietitians, I make the Oven-Baked French Toast Casserole about once a month to use up the random bread crusts/buns/bread heels on my freezer door. This is a good little book that I got when I had gestational diabetes a few years ago and that I have had consistently good results with. But it’s the French toast casserole that puts it on the list. Pairing this with a smoothie is my go-to move for fending off my kids’ diehard attempts at developing scurvy.
Most Used in the Baby/Toddler Feeding Category: More Veggies Please! by Nikki Dinki and Fast Family Food by Rebecca Wilson
(Alternate tile: best books bought out of desperation on Book Outlet late one night when I was despairing about my children’s diets)
Are you a person who disagrees with sneaking veggies into kid food? Not me! I sneak away. And these books help!
The great thing about both these books is that they focus on kid food without emphasizing abstemious food, a surprisingly hard thing to find. Once you wade into the little-kid-food world, you’ll start finding things that don’t seem to fit, like the avoidance of grains, fat, and dairy for no discernible reason. That is why I like both of these books. They focus on delicious food without shoehorning any other kind of diets in.
More Veggies Please! is aimed at a broad range of kids. The recipes can be labor intensive and the end results can have a laughably small amount of vegetables per serving. But there are a lot of winners in here and most everything I’ve made—never again to the bean chocolate chip cookies, though—has tasted great and has a high acceptance rate with my tiny tough crowd. I’ve been using this one since 2022 regularly.
This book is best for toddlers through kindergarteners, but it’s good for anyone who wants to sneak in some more nutrition without reducing things like calories and fat. Off the top of my head, maybe pregnant folks, or anyone in a caretaking role of an older person who needs both nutrition and calories.
Fast Family Food by Rebecca Wilson, on the other hand, is aimed at the youngest eaters. The premise of all Wilson’s books, and I have three of them, is that both weaning babies and the people that eat with them should be able to eat the same thing. Sounds easy until you start looking at some of the baby dietary guidelines—there’s only so much after-cooking-seasoned soup this mom can take.
Wilson loads up recipes with cheese, butter, and spices, that make food tasty for little weaners and palatable for others with small additions. I had a high success rate with these, particularly the baked goods, which got my kid eating things he might not otherwise—green bean muffins, salmon muffins, and cabbage flatbread. They sometimes even worked on my preschooler. Fast Family Food was my favorite of the Wilson set. It’s best for kids around one year old, maybe two, though, making it a short shelf life book.
Most Used Online Resources
I mentioned this way back, but I cooked a ton from Thriving Home’s 1 Hour Freezer Prep. Mostly breakfasts, but also lots of meat in marinade to throw on the grill in the summer, largely with good results. On top of that, my whole family likes this recipe for tortellini soup, and I cling to that for dear life, because it rarely happens.
By far my most used blog is Pinch of Yum, which I find super reliable and generally good. I like the beef stew, zucchini muffins, pecan pie energy bites, harissa meatballs, lasagna Florentine, and sheet-pan pitas.
My favorite online menu was Caroline Chambers’s Easy-But-Fancy Holiday Menu, from which I drew heavy inspiration this year to good effect.
And, of course, to Hoopla and Libby and public libraries for being the best and helping me not buy every single book ever—or maybe convincing me I need every book? Not sure yet.
Standout Recipes of the Year
Standout Single Recipes
I had a lot of hits from the Ina extended universe this year. And while it was not so long ago that I wrote a fairly tepid review of Cooking in Real Life by Lidey Heuck, I must admit I have used it a lot. It might even fit in the above categories. But I am writing now about the Ice Cream Sprinkle Cake, which is a top recipe this year. Special mention also to the Crunchy Cucumber Salad with Peanuts & Chili Flakes.
The Cheddar and Scallion Creamed Corn from Modern Comfort Food was outstanding.
The Lemon Squares from
’s Baking in the American South were fantastic, easy to make, and fed a large horde of people. (I actually received an ARC of this way back, and I still aim to write a review because the book is a true treasure.)The Detroit Pizza from Pizza Night was a big favorite, as were the Chicken Parm sliders from What to Cook, as mentioned above. Olive Oil Snack Cake from At My Italian Table by Laura Vitale was great, too.
Standout Meal: Roast Chicken with Schmaltzy Potatoes + Garlic Sauce + Chile Crisp + Watermelon Salad from Kismet by Sara Kramer and Sarah Hymanson
This meal from Kismet was so good and the best single meal I’ve eaten all year. However, now is the part when I admit I have not picked this book up again since I wrote a review of it.
Not most used, then, but very much loved.
Favorite $1 Find
I wrote all about Marian Burros after taking a deep-dive into her old columns, so I was so excited when I came across her 1981 book, Keep it Simple, at my library store. I haven’t been through it in any depth yet, but it was definitely one of the ones I wanted. I love when that happens.
That’s all for now. Happy New Year! I hope you eat so many delicious things and find piles of good $1 books in 2025! (OR successfully purge your collection—I haven’t decided which direction I’m going in on this one, yet.)
I mostly check out cookbooks from the library but purchased What To Cook and Pizza Night and I'm glad we're in agreement that they are mainstays! Will be referencing this post in the future for recipe ideas and library checkouts 😊
Thank you, Robynne! I can't tell you how much I've enjoyed your newsletter this year. It is so hard to be honest when writing cookbook reviews, and you do it beautifully. I bought Kismet after reading your review, it's been such a fun addition to my library. I'm making the Harissa Party Wings tonight and the Not-Just-for-Chanukah Latkes tomorrow. Happy New Year!