The Everlasting Meal Cookbook by Tamar Adler

The Everlasting Meal Cookbook

by Tamar Adler

* A James Beard Award Nominee *

* A National Bestseller * Named a Best Book of the Year by Financial Times, Los Angeles Times, Wired, Smithsonian, Publishers Weekly, and more *

Award-winning author Tamar Adler’s inspiring, money-saving, environmentally responsible, A-to-Z collection of simple recipes that utilize all leftovers—perfect for solo meals or for feeding the whole family.

Food waste is a serious issue—nearly forty percent of the food we buy gets tossed out. Most of us look around the kitchen and struggle to use everything we buy, and when it comes to leftovers we’re stuck. Tamar Adler can help—her area of culinary expertise is finding delicious destinies for leftovers. Whether it’s extra potatoes or meat, citrus peels or cold rice, a few final olives in a jar or the end of a piece of cheese, she has an appetizing solution.

The Everlasting Meal Cookbook offers more than 1,500 easy and creative ideas for nearly every kind of leftover. Now you can easily transform a leftover burrito into a lunch of fried rice, or stale breakfast donuts into bread pudding. These inspiring and tasty recipes don’t require any precise measurements, making this cookbook a go-to resource for when your kitchen seems full of meal endings with no clear meal beginnings. From applesauce to truffles, potato chip crumbs to cabbage—this comprehensive guide makes it easy to find a use for all everything.

Sensible, frugal, and consistently delicious, the recipes in The Everlasting Meal Cookbook allow you to prepare meals with economy and grace, making this a vital resource for every home cook.

Reviewed by annieb123 on

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Originally posted on my blog Nonstop Reader.

The Everlasting Meal Cookbook: Leftovers A-Z is a primer and comprehensive pantry resource guide by Tamar Adler. Due out 14th March 2023 from Simon & Schuster on their Scribner imprint, it's 560 pages and will be available in hardcover and ebook formats. 

Food waste is a serious problem. Not just from a cost savings viewpoint, but also on a much larger we-need-to-use-our-resources-wisely philosophy This is a masterclass in efficient resource use and the author has a particularly appealing zen-like quality in the way she reasons with the reader and teases the best use out of what most people would consider trash. 

This is *not* a pure cookbook, full of recipes. Rather, it is a book of tips and philosophy for prepping, storing, and using every bit of the food resources to which the reader has access. In ages past, up until around 100+/- years ago, every household had a stillroom or pantry book, full of clippings and recipes. These books were often handed down through generations (I have my maternal grandmother's book, which she had from her mother, and so on). This book has very much the vibe of those earlier how-to books with the addition of modern and up to date knowledge and a much more comprehensive waste-absolutely-nothing philosophy.

The illustrations by Caitlin Winner throughout support and enhance the earnest meditative vibe. They're beautifully rustic and complement the content and raise the whole to another level. 

The layout is quirky and takes a bit of getting used to. It's arranged in roughly thematic chapters by ingredient groups: vegetables, fruits & nuts, dairy & eggs, bread, beans & rice, soup, seafood, meat & tofu, dough & noodles, salads, and much more (including a monumental chapter on pickling). The chapters are arranged roughly alphabetically by ingredients with tips for using and re-purposing where applicable. It really is a NO waste primer. 

The early ARC provided by the publisher did not include the finished index, but there -is- a listed entry for an index in the table of contents, so presumably it will hopefully be as comprehensive as the book's content. 

Five stars. This is a *valuable* resource and would be a wonderful selection for public or school library acquisition, gardening groups, community garden library, homestead, and home use. Not photographed, but reasonably well illustrated and complete. 

Disclosure: I received an ARC at no cost from the author/publisher for review purposes.

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