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Fluctuating energy culinary skills

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

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Book cover with 'You Gotta Eat' in bold, black letters with illustrations of various foods

Sometimes, lunch can be a handful of trail mix, some deli turkey and those fancy crackers you saved from the party. Or dinner: Tuesday’s Chinese take-out bundled in a tortilla and warmed up (but only if you have the energy).

Margaret Eby, deputy food editor at the Philadelphia Inquirer and former senior editor at Food & Wine, wants you to know that such meals can be tasty, enjoyable and guilt-free. That’s why she wrote You Gotta Eat: Real-Life Strategies for Feeding Yourself When Cooking Feels Impossible, a concise, cheeky, and reassuring guide for people who want to cook but can’t quite manage the effort—which will see a book release party on Tuesday, November 19.

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), “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 veg 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.”

What, When, Where

You Gotta Eat: Real-Life Strategies for Feeding Yourself When Cooking Feels Impossible. By Margaret Eby. Philadelphia: Quirk Books, November 19, 2024. 192 pages, hardcover, $19.99. Get it here.

You Gotta Eat book release party. Tuesday, November 19, 2024, 6-9pm. Bloomsday, 414 South 2nd Street. $45-$65, includes drinks and food. resy.com.

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

Image description: Book cover with 'You Gotta Eat' in bold, black letters with illustrations of various foods

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