This New York Times Cookbook Wants to Teach You to Make a Meal Without A Recipe

In a year when people have been staying at home more than ever, many have turned to home cooking as a creative outlet. To make things easier for amateur chefs, Sam Sifton, food editor of The New York Times and co-founder of the wildly popular NYT Cooking, suggests "no-recipe" cooking. Simply put, these "recipes" act as abbreviated guides for cooking unfussy, delicious meals, and Sifton collected some of his favorites in The New York Times Cooking No-Recipe Recipes.

The cookbook features 100 no-recipe meals with beautiful and vibrant photography. For each meal, you'll see what is essentially a brief rundown on how to make it, complete with pressure-free suggestions and plenty of leeway for personal taste and improvisation. Meals like Fried Egg Quesadillas, Weeknight Fried Rice, and Teriyaki Salmon with Mixed Greens are presented in the book with a photo, a basic breakdown of the ingredients, some tips, and potential modifications.

Don't want to use chicken thighs for the pressure-cooker tacos? That's fine in Sifton's book, and he lets you know it. It's a lot more fluid than traditional recipes with their strict ingredient lists and measurements. Sifton is confident that you'll be able to use your common sense to put everything together. And the picture of each dish provides users with an end goal to shoot for.

Sifton makes clear in the book that the beauty of these recipes is their flexibility and the ability to make them your own, adapted to your tastes and sensibilities.

Get it on Amazon here.

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