Looking to become an impressive home cook?

We’re not talking impressive in the get your very own episode on Chef’s Table kind of way. We mean when you look at the finished plate of food you have prepared, or the loaf of bread, or the bowl of hummus and you take your first bite of it…an expletive escapes your lips and pats you on the back. It just.Tastes. Good. Like something you would definitely make again and again.

That’s an impressive home cook.

We put an extensive list together of what we feel are some of the best cookbooks worth owning if you’re interested in making self-impressing, expletive inducing food – from breakfast to desert and everything in between.

The Starter Cookbook

 

Super Easy Cookbook For Beginners by Lisa Grant

The best way to learn how to cook is to actually start cooking. When you’re ready to set foot in the kitchen, the Super Easy Cookbook for Beginners offers the easiest, 5-ingredient recipes to teach you how to cook―while cooking!

Beyond basic cooking skills, this beginner’s cookbook gets you started by serving up simple, home-style recipes that require only 5 main ingredients or less. Alongside step-by-step guidance for kitchen techniques―plus useful tips like how to hold a knife―the Super Easy Cookbook for Beginners is the easiest recipe to make anyone a good cook.

Source: Publisher

The Have All End All Cookbook

 

Tasty Ultimate: How To Cook Basically Everything by Tasty

150 recipes to help you master the cooking basics, hack the pantry, and make everything from vegetarian go-tos to crowd-pleasing snacks to irresistible desserts.

Tasty Ultimate is THE must-have companion for home cooks of all skill levels–whether you’re a sometimes cook or a master meal prepper. With 150 recipes, clever hacks, and must-know techniques, this cookbook will teach you how to kill it in the kitchen.

Source: Publisher

 

The Classic Cookbook

 

Better Homes & Gardens New Cookbook by Better Homes & Gardens

Since 1930, the Better Homes and Gardens New Cook Book has been a trusted staple in kitchens across America. The 17th edition is fully updated and revised to reflect both the best of today’s food trends and time-tested classics. With more than 1,000 recipes and a photo for each one, the book covers both traditional dishes such as Brownies and new favorites like Cold Brew Coffee. This newest edition has a fresh organization to reflect how we cook today–recipes have flavor variations, options to swap out ingredients, and ways to make them healthier. Clear directions and how-to photos teach techniques; identification photos clarify the broad range of today’s ingredients; charts for meat and poultry give at-a-glance cooking times; and “cheat sheets” throughout present information in easy-to-access bites.

Source: Publisher

 

The Breakfast and Brunch Cookbook

 

Posh Eggs by Quadrille Publishing 

Over 70 Recipes for Wonderful Eggy Things

Eggs are a kitchen basic. Most people buy them, and use them as a stand-by: a quick omelet or scrambled eggs. Posh Eggs makes the humble egg the star of the show, with over 70 recipes that make a meal out of this easy ingredient. From hearty dishes like Mediterranean red pepper eggs with tahini yogurt, to healthy salads like Quail’s eggs, beet, and tarragon, you’ll never again be stuck for a quick and original idea at mealtimes. With a guide to the basics of cooking eggs, plus a photo for every single recipe, this is the ultimate gifty cookbook or self-purchase for egg addicts, expert chefs, and novices alike.

Source: Publisher

Brunch Life by Matt Basile, Kyla Zanardi

For lazy days off or mid-week cravings, Brunch Life brings that bigger-than-brunch restaurant experience home with mouth-watering recipes that will ensure every day gets off to a great start.

Leisurely weekend brunches have become the most anticipated meal of the week, and no two people know that better than Matt Basile and Kyla Zanardi. With their token humour, Matt and Kyla share their passion for this midday spread and showcase indulgent and creative takes on their favourite dishes. Sometimes, brunch is a comforting routine, where simple ingredients are whipped into fuss-free OG Buttermilk Pancakes, a Mascarpone Soft Scramble, or Good ol’ Hash Browns. Then there are irresistible dishes taken to a whole new level, like Coconut Fried Chicken and Pineapple Waffles, S’mores Panc…

Source: Publisher

The Healthy Home Café Cookbook

 

Posh Toast by Quadrille Publishing 

This is the new hot (and buttered) food trend—simple toast recipes that everyone can make. Hungry food fans everywhere are toasting sourdough, spelt, and rye and loading them with luscious ingredients to make a simple, satisfying meal. Posh Toast features every toast recipe you could ever need, covering breakfast, lunch, snacks, and supper, plus a guide to the basics of toasting. Every recipe has a photo and easy-to-follow instructions, making it the ultimate gift or self-purchase for toast addicts, novices, and expert cooks alike. It’s everything good. On toast. It’s Posh Toast.

Source: Publisher

The Best and Lightest

150 Healthy Recipes for Breakfast, Lunch and Dinner: A Cookbook by the Editors of Food Network Magazine

Healthy Recipes That Taste Anything But!

Using clever cooking techniques and ingredient swaps, Food Network Magazine’s test kitchen chefs have lightened up all the foods you crave. Each crowd-pleasing dish comes in under 500 calories with satisfying—not tiny—portions. With a visual table of contents—complete with icons that indicate vegan, vegetarian and gluten-free dishes—you can quickly find meal ideas for any diet. Plus, each recipe appears with nutritional information and a beautiful photograph, making eating right surprisingly simple and totally fun.

Take a look at what’s inside:
Polenta with Fontina and Eggs
Spiced Burgers with Cucumber Yogurt
Potato-Leek Soup with Bacon
Shrimp and Kale Pitas
Spicy Chicken Enchiladas
Chile-Rubbed Steak with Creamed Corn
Three-Cheese Macaroni
Banana-Almond Pudding
Strawberry Corn Cakes

Source: Publisher

The Vegetarian Café Cookbook

 

Plant Based Diet For Beginners by Gabriel Miller

Free from animal products, full of flavor–plant based recipes for beginners

Choosing a plant based diet is good for your health, your wallet, and the environment. The Plant-Based Diet for Beginners has dozens of tasty whole-food recipes for people who want to switch from eating meat, dairy, and eggs, to eating vegetables, whole grains, and other plant based foods.

Whether your doctor encouraged you to eat a plant based diet or you’re exploring a new way of eating, this cookbook has everything you need to get started. You’ll find nutritional information for each recipe, a guide to eating a plant based diet even when you don’t want to cook, tips for stocking your kitchen, and more. When it comes to your health and your taste buds, now you’re cooking!

Source: Publisher

 

Thug Kitchen: Eat Like You Give A F*ck by Thug Kitchen

#1 New York Times Bestseller, first in the bestselling series

Thug Kitchen started their wildly popular website to inspire people to eat some goddamn vegetables and adopt a healthier lifestyle. Beloved by Gwyneth Paltrow (‘This might be my favorite thing ever’) and with half a million Facebook fans and counting, Thug Kitchen wants to show everyone how to take charge of their plates and cook up some real f*cking food.

Yeah, plenty of blogs and cookbooks preach about how to eat more kale, why ginger fights inflammation, and how to cook with microgreens and nettles. But they are dull or pretentious as hell—and most people can’t afford the hype.

Thug Kitchen lives in the real world. In their first cookbook, they’re throwing down more than 100 recipes for their best-loved meals, snacks and sides for beginning cooks to home chefs.

Source: Publisher

The Bakery Cookbook

 

Bread Baking For Beginners by Bonnie Ohara

Free from animal products, full of flavor–plant based recipes for beginners

Choosing a plant based diet is good for your health, your wallet, and the environment. The Plant-Based Diet for Beginners has dozens of tasty whole-food recipes for people who want to switch from eating meat, dairy, and eggs, to eating vegetables, whole grains, and other plant based foods.

Whether your doctor encouraged you to eat a plant based diet or you’re exploring a new way of eating, this cookbook has everything you need to get started. You’ll find nutritional information for each recipe, a guide to eating a plant based diet even when you don’t want to cook, tips for stocking your kitchen, and more. When it comes to your health and your taste buds, now you’re cooking!

Source: Publisher

French Pastry 101 By Betty Hung

French Pastry is as Easy as Un, Deux, Trois

French baking is now more approachable than ever with Beaucoup Bakery co-owner and Yummy Workshop founder Betty Hung’s beginner-friendly, easy-to-follow recipes.

Start with basics like pastry cream and pâté sucrée, then work your way up to indulgent all-time favorites such as Lemon Madeleines, Crème Brûlée, Éclairs, Lady Fingers and Chocolate Torte. You’ll learn how to simplify recipes without sacrificing taste—like using ready-made puff pastry—or, if you prefer, how to whip up these sweet treats from scratch.

Source: Publisher

Baking With Mary Berry – By Mary Berry

The Easy Baked Donut Cookbook By Sara Mellas

The deliciously easy donut cookbook for heavenly homemade baked donuts

Who doesn’t love a good donut? From sugared or sprinkled to frosted or filled, donuts are sure to satisfy your sweet tooth and sweeten your day. The best part is you don’t need to fuss with frying to whip up these fun, flavorful treats at home. The Easy Baked Donut Cookbook shows you how mouthwatering–and mess-free–donuts can be right from your oven or donut maker, providing plenty of tried-and-true tricks and tasty recipes for beautifully baked donuts, donut holes, mini donuts, and more.

From sweet staples, such as Old-Fashioned Cake Donuts to creative savory bakes like Jalapeno-Cheddar Cornbread Donuts, this donut cookbook serves you dozens of delightfully simple recipes to match every craving, along with perfectly paired frostings, glazes, and toppings.

Source: Publisher

Vegetarian Desert Cookbook

Rawesome Baking by Emily Von Euw

Make Undeniably Delicious and Eye-Catching Raw, Vegan and Gluten-Free Treats

Emily Von Euw, creator of the popular blog This Rawsome Vegan Life, makes treats that are so phenomenal and so stunning they should be considered masterpieces. Oh yeah, and they’re raw, vegan AND gluten-free. So whether you’re a vegetarian, a raw vegan or even a meat-lover just looking for something healthy, new and delicious, this book has something for you.

Emily’s popular blog won the Vegan Woman’s 2013 Vegan Food Blog Award, was named one of the Top 50 Raw Food Blogs of 2012 and is nominated for “Favorite Blog” for the 2013 VegNews Veggie Awards. Every recipe is accompanied by a photograph so you can see each brilliant sweet before you eat.
Emily’s beautiful and easy-to-make recipes, like her Peppermint Chocolate Molten Lava Cakes, S’mores Cupcakes and Go-Nuts Donuts with Frosting & Fruit Sprinkles, are so tasty that you won’t even realize they’re vegan. Quite simply, Rawsome Vegan Baking will wow your taste buds and impress your friends and family with new great tastes in dessert.

Source: Publisher

Healthy Desert Cookbook

Clean Sweets – By Arman Liew

High-protein desserts that taste great, are easy to make, and serve one or two.

Giving up dessert is no fun, so health-savvy folks have long tried to find ways to satisfy a sweet tooth. But so many Paleo-style desserts are complicated, with long lists of hard-to-find ingredients. They also often make too much of a good thing, which is almost as bad as not having it at all. Arman Liew discovered a way to have his cake and eat it too–in decadent creations that indulge the appetite and pack in the nutrients. From breakfast reinvented to no-bake treats, recipes include: Protein Peanut Butter Cups Dark Chocolate and Salted Caramel Waffles Molten Lava Cake White Chocolate Raspberry Bars

There’s no tapioca flour, coconut nectar, or xanthan gum to be found here. Make something sweet the moment the craving hits, from foods that are already in the cabinet. Add in terrific photography and this is a book every health-conscious person should have on hand.

Source: Publisher

College Student Cookbook (Easy Cooking)

5-Ingredient College Cookbook By Pamela Ellgen

Fast, easy and healthy eating at college and ever after.

College food has developed quite the culinary “reputation.” Most students don’t have the time, money, or space to make meals like mom used to, so words like fast, cheap, and microwavable have become synonymous with college eating. But there IS a better way!

Healthy cooking expert and cookbook author Pamela Ellgen brings you the latest in college cooking with The 5-Ingredient College Cookbook–the simplest college cookbook yet. By sticking to 5 easy-to-find main ingredients per recipe, The 5-Ingredient College Cookbook makes it easier than ever for students to cook tasty, high quality, healthy food for themselves.

Source: Publisher

Easy Frugal Cookbook By Sarah Walker Caron

It’s easier than you think to make hearty meals that are tasty, budget-friendly, and nutritious. Discover an easy cookbook that shows you how, with 100 inexpensive family recipes that use basic ingredients, and can be made in just a few steps.

This easy cookbook will help you whip up satisfying dishes like Crispy Coconut Drumsticks or Open-Face Turkey Sandwiches for everyone in the house for just $5. All it takes is the right recipe, a few tricks, and a little planning to make the most of your food budget.

Discover how versatile and flavorful cheap eating can be with an easy cookbook that offers:

Budget tricks–Recipes are sorted by estimated cost of ingredients, from $5 to $15 dollars per batch, and include tips to lower the cost of ingredients even further.Shop smart–This easy cookbook includes tips about shopping efficiently and optimizing ingredients and leftovers.Menu plan–A sample meal plan and shopping list will help simplify meal prep and save you money and time.

Source: Publisher

The Gifting Cookbook

 

Antoni in The Kitchen By Mindy Fox

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER!
*One of Food & Wine’s Essential New Cookbooks for Fall*
*One of Eater’s Best Fall Cookbooks 2019*
*One of Amazon’s Best Cookbooks for Fall 2020*

Antoni Porowski, the food and wine guru on Netflix’s sensation Queer Eye, meets people where they live–literally. With appealing vulnerability, he shows cooks of all levels how to become more confident and casual in the kitchen. The verve and naturalness of his approach earned raves from Food & Wine and Bon Appétit to GQ and the New York Times, which noted his dishes prove that “sometimes simple is anything but simplistic.”

Some of the recipes in this book are weeknight healthyish meals, while others are perfect for off-the-cuff entertaining. Visual stunners, they’re often composed of fewer than five ingredients. Whether Bastardized Easy Ramen; Malaysian Chili Shrimp; Roasted Carrots with Carrot-Top Pesto; or Salty Lemon Squares, all are visual stunners and can be carried off with panache, even by beginners.

Source: Publisher

Friends The Official Cookbook By Amanda Yee

“The ultimate Friends fan needs this ‘Friends: The Official Cookbook‘ ” – POPSUGAR

Gather your friends and prepare to say “How you doin’?” to more than 100 recipes inspired by the beloved hit sitcom. Whether you’re a seasoned chef like Monica Geller, just starting a catering business like Phoebe Buffay, or a regular old food enthusiast like Joey Tribbiani, Friends: The Official Cookbook offers a variety of recipes for chefs of all levels. From appetizers to main courses and from drinks to desserts, each chapter includes iconic treats such as Monica’s Friendsgiving Feast, Rachel’s Trifle, Just for Joey Fries, Chandler’s “Milk You Can Chew,” Phoebe’s Grandmother’s Cookies, and of course, The Moist Maker. Complete with more than seventy recipes and beautiful full-color photography, this charming cookbook is both a helpful companion for home cooks and a fun homage to the show that’s always been there for you.

Source: Amazon

Friends Cookbook Releases Sept 22, 2020