Simple cookbooks for easy cooking

Love and Lemons Every Day

This is the second cookbook from Jeanine Donofrio and Jack Mathews, the husband-and-wife duo behind the popular Love & Lemons blog. These vibrant recipes celebrate market produce and encourage readers to get inspired by local ingredients.

Jeanine explains how to properly season and cook vegetables (using plenty of lemon, of course) to enhance their natural goodness, and suggests ways to combine flavours and ingredients to make each vegetable stand out. This cookbook includes a seasonal produce guide, vegetarian protein info and menu ideas for special occasions, and is filled with bright and innovative dishes that will elevate your everyday cooking. Many recipes also have vegan and gluten-free options, making them easily adaptable to please everyone at the table.

With additional tips for time-saving, reinventing leftovers, and how to use food scraps to cut down on waste, Love & Lemons Every Day is an indispensable reference for uncomplicated vegetarian cooking that tastes great and makes you feel good. 

Gennaro's Fast Cook Italian

Gennaro Contaldo's most recent cookbook presents authentic Italian food that delivers the comfort and flavour of traditional dishes, without all of the effort. The simplicity of Gennaro's approach is based on selecting quality ingredients and having all the basics on hand so that you can put together a beautiful meal quickly and with minimal fuss.

His straightforward cooking style and advice for planning ahead will help you create nourishing meals any day of the week and will simplify your time spent in the kitchen.Gennaro shares recipes for colourful and fresh salads for lunch or to serve alongside a flavourful pasta dish, and hearty mains that use quality meat, fish or seasonal vegetables as the base for elegant meals.

These dishes will become your go-to favourites for simple weeknight dinners and for entertaining guests. Gennaro's Fast Cook Italian makes homemade Italian food easy to achieve and proves that cooking doesn't have to be complicated to be delicious.  

Ruffage: A Practical Guide to Vegetables

A professional chef and former farmer, Abra Berens has become an expert on how to grow and prepare vegetables to bring out their best flavour and texture. Ruffage is her debut cookbook and resembles a vegetable encyclopedia — it includes growth information, tips on how to buy and store produce, and an essay that highlights the qualities of each vegetable.

Abra recommends buying the freshest produce available and deciding what to cook based on those ingredients. Her recipes are organized alphabetically by vegetable, so you can easily find what you'd like to cook. Each one is presented with a few different preparations, inviting you to create a variety of exciting dishes from the same primary ingredients.

Ruffage is a comprehensive guide to vegetable-focused cooking that will inspire you to discover the versatility of humble produce and the delicious possibilities of eating with the seasons.