A new take on cooking with Margaret Eby's You Gotta Eat

Not more than you can chew

Eby has been there. “I am a person who has been to culinary school,” she said in a recent interview. “I have assembled complicated pastries for fun and profit, but [I am] also someone who is a human being and has struggled with anxiety and depression and burnout and has days when the thing I eat for lunch is a frozen burrito or cheese and crackers.”

While most cookbooks are arranged by the chronology of a meal—appetizers, soup, salad, mains, desserts—Eby’s organizing principle was, “How much energy do you have?”

Chapters include “Open Something” (a bag, a can), “Assemble Something” (a “sandwich” of smashed canned beans on toast, for instance), and “Microwave Something” and “Blend Something,” each with a cornucopia of ideas and a “Do Exactly This” recipe, including ones for tomato sauce soup and three-ingredient mushroom bites.

Eby demystifies measurement: a teaspoon is about the size of your thumb from the tip to the first joint; a cup is equivalent to your fist. She doesn’t assume that your pantry holds preserved lemon paste or that your fridge contains fresh cilantro. She doesn’t expect you to own a food processor—or, if you do, to have the energy to plug it in and find the blade.

Instead, she counsels—in a voice like that of your dearest, funniest, and most benevolent friend—that you can feed yourself well even when you’re utterly undone. “Right now,” she said, “stressed from the election, I’ve been eating a lot of sheet-pan vegetables with tofu. I have this sauce that’s already made.”

Eby extols the virtues of “zhuzhing up” canned soup by tossing in some frozen veggies, bits of rotisserie chicken, or a dab of harissa for a flavor boost. She offers “roll the dice” options for putting together your own canapés, smoothies, and casseroles—for the latter, providing lists of six proteins, starches, vegetables, and binders (chicken or vegetable stock, tomato sauce, gravy) and suggesting users toss a die to choose among them.

She acknowledges that cooking can be a creative outlet and a communal joy, but it can also be like Groundhog Day—what, dinner, again?—and on those days, whether you’re stymied by depression, overwork, or a new baby who won’t stop crying, you can eat well with un-fancy ingredients and minimal effort.

“I was hoping to remove the element of shame [from cooking and eating],” she says. “I want this book to be a little bit of a pep talk.”

At top: Margaret Eby's new cookbook champions cooking. (Image courtesy of Quirk Books, Margaret Eby.)