Homemade-ish: Recipes and Cooking Tips That Keep It Real

How to balance limited time to cook, incorporate vegetables, and choose grocery store products is a consistent challenge of adulthood. Enter this cookbook from McDuffie (Southern Lights), of the My Kitchen Little blog, which focuses on health in the midst of convenience foods and how to best use the local grocery store to support homemade-ish cooking. Yes, there is kale involved, but also donuts, pre-made tortellini, mixed greens, leftovers, and red curry mac and cheese from scratch. Think of this title as a hybrid. One can easily switch between from-scratch recipes to mixing and matching convenient food items. McDuffie’s goal is easy, fast, delicious recipes that meet the home cook where they are without being pretentious or intimidating. Only 13 kitchen tools are required, the hands-on time per recipe is about 20 minutes, and the ingredients are readily available. Readers may relate when they browse this work and see McDuffie’s photographs of her mismatched plates. Her tongue-in-cheek commentary and sense of humor add to the fun of reading the recipe introductions.