Vol. 4, The Kitchen Library
Breaking the rules, cooking for real life, and other things I learned this month 💛
When I was a new mom, I spent a lot of my days walking my neighborhood while pushing a stroller and listening to audiobooks. One of my favorite audiobooks from that season was Bread and Wine: A Love Letter to Life Around the Table with Recipes by
. I remember the THRILL of discovering a person who talked about food and cooking and connection in such a joyful, honest, and embodied way. This book became a north star for me, encouraging my love of cookbooks and deepening my enthusiasm for feeding the people I love.1But I gotta be honest: part of Shauna’s approach to cooking has always intimated me. In the book, she writes:
“Recipes are how we learn all the rules, and cooking is knowing how to break them to suit our tastes or preferences.”
Listen. As someone who loves to bake (me! 🙋🏼♀️), this idea of breaking rules or adjusting recipes does NOT come naturally to me. What if I mess up a good thing? What if it doesn’t work? WHAT IF I REGRET IT ALL?
This is a long prelude to say that the cookbook I picked for April was the BEST teacher and guide for helping me lean into Shauna’s wisdom of breaking the rules and changing up recipes for what’s needed in the moment. It’s been the most delicious, most delightful month of trying new things and embracing the freedom of cooking real-life recipes that work for me and my fam.
Here’s what I’ve been up to this past month!
Cookbooks:
THAT SOUNDS SO GOOD: 100 Real-Life Recipes for Every Day of the Week |
I don’t know how to reign in my enthusiasm, so I’m not going to. I LOVED THIS COOKBOOK SO MUCH. The minute I picked it for my cookbook of the month, I sent a message off to and then she sent back the sweetest response and all that to say, I think we’re friends now? 😉 I hope so, because she’s exactly the type of friend you want: someone who loves food, knows how to have fun in the kitchen, and isn’t too afraid to take risks and try new things.
—> It’s impossible to sum up all the things I loved about this cookbook, but if I had to pick one, it would be the “spin it” section at the bottom of every single recipe. In this section she suggests a range of substitutions, freeing her readers to break the rules, use different ingredients, and change it up—for every single dish.
Come for the FRIED BREAD, stay for the game-changing way to cook chicken that will have you questioning every other chicken recipe in your life. Learn that cooking can be adjusted for your actual life (I struggle with this sometimes!!), and that you can cook differently on busy weeknights vs. on the weekends.
In short, take this cookbook, make it your own, and try out every recipe that sounds good to you. 😘
I ended up making 19 recipes from this book in April!
What I loved:
The Blank Slate Whole Grains + Fernando’s Famous Burned Broccoli + Spicy Creamy Sauce is a combo I put together by combining three recipes! It was exactly as fantastic as I hoped and such a great thing to throw together after coming home from the grocery store and having no idea what to make for dinner.
The Low-and-Slow Spiced Chicken Legs with Garlic Crunch-Crumbs is so absurdly good, I can’t gush about it enough. The GENIUS of this recipe is the slow-roasting of the chicken (I picked chicken thighs, b/c we love those!) at a low heat. The result: insanely juicy chicken that literally falls off the bone with perfectly crispy skin. The garlic crunch-crumbs just push them over the edge in the best way and please stop reading this and just go make it, ok? 😉
The Little Gems w/ Sugar Snap Peas is the perfect spring salad. It’s so bright and flavorful and great with parmesan on top. The dressing is this creamy/salty/tangy buttermilk ranch of sorts that’s easy to whip together and endlessly dippable for any other snacks/veggies you have around.
The Carole’s Fried Bread recipe is something I’ve made three times already, with zero plans to stop. It’s bread, it’s fried, there’s flaky salt and a garlic clove and every time I eat it, I’m very very happy.
Honorable mentions:
Pork & Pozole Stew: Oooo this was a fun one. You soak some dried hominy, you brown some pork, you throw some things together in a dutch oven. And then you let it do its thing in the oven for 3 hrs. I tackled this on a Sunday afternoon and it was sooo great to enjoy this for dinner AND have a crazy amount of leftovers ready for the week ahead! Great with all the toppings, including onions, sour cream, avocado, and thick, salty tortilla chips.
Pork + Pozole Stew Purple Cabbage & Parm: Perhaps the easiest recipe in the whole book? Slice some cabbage, make a quick dressing, top it with parmesan and DIVE IN. So yummy! I will totally make this when I need a quick salad but don’t want to spend a bunch of time prepping a lot of things.
Mocha Hazelnut Biscotti: Yeah, this was just so good. Fun to make, fun to eat, fun to share with friends and family. Amazing with a hot cup of coffee!
THE BIG BOOK OF BREAD | King Arthur Baking Company
Hey hey, guess who finally resurrected her sourdough starter (just in time for Easter!) and started making bread with it? This girl!
I finally realized that I can’t get better at sourdough if I’m not actually trying, failing, practicing, and learning. This probably applies to a lot of life. 🫠 So I’m trying to be okay with the loafs that don’t turn out (jk, I obsessively googled and watched youtube videos on sourdough for hours just last week, haha) and keep going!
What I made: Pain au Levain, which was mostly a complete flop for me! One loaf was so tragically over-proofed, it went immediately into the trash. But then I made the Pain au Campagne, and it turned out much better! A good beginner sourdough recipe. I’m excited to keep flexing my sourdough skills. I’ve got lots to learn!
Books:
Stolen Focus: Why you Can’t Pay Attention, and How to Think Deeply Again by Johann Hari
📚 Whew, this book! I still have to go back and write down all the things I want to remember (notice all the tabs sticking out of the book in my pic!). A thoughtful, compassionate, well-researched argument on how our attention is being stolen, why it’s not our fault, and ways to regain some of our ability to think without distraction.
Dark Rye and Honey Cake: Festival Baking from the Heart of the Low Countries by Regula Ysewijn
📚 I first learned about this cookbook from the fabulous
He Leadeth Me by Fr. Walter J. Ciszek, S.J., with Fr. Daniel Flaherty, S.J.
📚 I joined a few of my friends from book club in reading this book together during the Lenten season. A remarkable story about a Catholic priest who spent 23 years in Soviet prisons and in the labor camps of Siberia. An incredible story of faith, devotion, and fortitude, one that will stick with me for a long time.
Night by Elie Wiesel
📚 There’s no way to soften this read: it’s brutal, haunting, and heavy. In this autobiography, Elie recounts his experience as a Holocaust survivor who lived in Auschwitz and then in Buchenwald. The book is fairly short, but certainly not easy to get through because of the content. However, I think it’s an incredibly important read and I’m thankful my friend suggested it to me.
Other enthusiasms:
🍩 My husband went on a work trip to Indy a few weeks ago and he made sure to return with a box of Parlor Doughnuts, which is the truest form of love. 😍
Other things that brought me joy this month:
Discovering hiking trails near our house, watching Paradise (so good!), cooking with the windows open, listening to Mumford’s new album, seeing the Hadestown Broadway tour (!!), getting new book ideas from
, and drinking this flavor of Bonsai on repeat.
See you next month for more kitchen library chronicles!
-Amanda
I don’t have paid subscriptions turned on, which means everything you’re getting from me is free! If you enjoyed this post, I would be so grateful if you considered supporting my work by buying me a coffee (or ensuring I have enough cookies on hand to fuel my writing!)
“Instructions for living a life: Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.”
-Mary Oliver
Shauna is writing a cookbook and I have ZERO chill about this. Her blueberry crisp recipe is so delicious and has certainly stood the test of time around here!
Not sure where in Indiana you are, but there's also a Parlor Doughnuts in Bloomington! Was the happiest discovery for me 😍
Aaaaalright. I'm not a cookbook person in general, but your enthusiasm has inspired me, and I definitely just ordered a copy. This has landed your Substack in my "dangerous" category bc I foresee doing this every month. Love, love, love.