This New Year’s, I set a goal to read more books. Not only that, but any book, whatever is around or whatever someone will recommend without question. I chose to do this as a challenge to move outside my comfort zone. Chugging along in this challenge, my mother handed me a book she dug out of storage and stated, “you’ll like this one.”
I began to read Julie & Julia, a novel (and later, a movie) written about the true story of an author who cooked her way through one of America’s most notorious cookbooks: Julia Child’s, Mastering the Art of French Cooking.
Feeling inspired and a little less willing to eat lobster after the overly descriptive cooking process, I’m now looking to cook through a cookbook myself. Not in some intense challenge, like 524 recipes in 365 days as in Julie & Julia, but to expand my cooking horizons as a lover of food and cooking.
The idea of cooking through a cookbook, rather than merely vowing to challenge yourself with recipes, is appealing because you lose agency in your food choices. You cook what you cook, figure it out and learn along the way.
As I’ve researched my cooking bible, so to speak, I’ve come across many great cookbooks that could pose a challenge to anyone else looking to raise the bar of their culinary skills.
The following cookbooks are collections of recipes, significantly less challenging than Mastering the Art of French Cooking, and chosen for the reasons of affordability, time and a personal choice not to boil live lobsters. However, they are nonetheless fun and challenging.
Oh She Glows Everyday by Angela Liddon
This cookbook is for vegans or anyone who wants to incorporate and learn more plant-based methods of cooking. There are over a hundred vegan recipes to work through, all of which include totally accessible ingredients and call for a little bit of a challenge in terms of preparation. There are sections for breakfast, lunch, dinner, dessert, snacks and extras, so there are plenty of different times and situations to pull out this book and knock a recipe off your list. This cookbook has been in my kitchen for years now, and I’ve practically made every single recipe. All of them are delicious.
Ultimate Veg by Jamie Oliver
Firstly, if you don’t know who Jamie Oliver is, you should. He is an amazing and extremely well-accomplished chef with a wide variety of cookbooks and hundreds of free recipes on his website that never disappoint. I chose the Ultimate Veg for the vegetarians out there or anyone who wants to eat healthier. All the recipes are meat-free and designed to have easy-to-find and affordable ingredients.
In Bibi’s Kitchen by Hawa Hassan and Julia Turshen
Unlike the previous cookbooks, this book is a collection of recipes compiled from eight different grandmothers’ personal recipes from across Africa, including South Africa, Mozambique, Madagascar, Comoros, Tanzania, Kenya, Somalia and Eritrea. Not only is this cookbook well known for giving real accounts of culinary practices in the homes of these nations, but the book also takes you through a journey of how migration and war have shaped the culinary traditions of these grandmothers. This is an excellent book if you want to learn more about cooking across Africa’s continent and are looking to approach food in a more domestic, rather than sensationalized, manner.
Kiin by Nuit Regular
If you’re a lover of Thai food, like me, and want to learn more about traditional Thai cooking beyond your Friday night Uber eats go-to, then this cookbook is for you. Nuit Regular is a Thai Canadian who learned to cook with her mother in Thailand. This cookbook is reminiscent of the food she grew up eating and first learned to cook. Nuit Regular also has a restaurant in Toronto named Kiin that serves similar dishes to those in her cookbook.
Hopefully, one of these four cookbooks has caught your eye, or this article has inspired you to challenge yourself more in the kitchen. Gaining more confidence in the kitchen is super easy. You just have to put in a bit more time and energy into your food, and the rewards are remarkable.