Inside ‘Smitten Kitchen Every Day,’ the Second Cookbook From Blogger Deb Perelman

Since starting her perennially popular cooking blog Smitten Kitchen some 11 years ago, Deb Perelman has written more than 1,200 recipes garnering more than a quarter of a million comments — not to mention given birth to two children and, with the impending release of Smitten Kitchen Every Day: Triumphant and Unfussy New Favorites, two cookbooks.

For her second book, Perelman says she wanted to avoid falling into the trap of overly simplified, 20-minute express recipes. “I didn’t want a book whose goal was to rush you out of the kitchen the second you began to unwind,” she wrote earlier this year. “I didn’t want to operate from the assumption that cooking is drudgery, when for so many of us, it’s a much-needed escape. I didn’t want to waste anyone’s time, but I also knew that a recipe that takes 10 minutes longer isn’t necessarily a deal-breaker if those 10 minutes make it infinitely better.”

To that end, the recipes are simple but not basic; inventive, but won’t require home cooks to trek to multiple specialty stores for obscure ingredients. Like her first book, The Smitten Kitchen Cookbook — which snagged Perelman the coveted IACP Julia Child Award in 2013 — this one contains plenty of fresh material, even for devoted followers of the blog: Out of 115 recipes, 101 are new. Perelman also caters to various dietary needs with dozens of vegetarian and vegan dishes, 51 gluten-free recipes, and 37 that are dairy-free.

One of the sections of the book Perelman says she’s most excited about is called “The Party Cake Builder.”

“My party-cake theory is that 98 percent of cakes, especially those intended for the birthdays of loved ones, are made between the hours of 10:30 p.m. and 4:00 a.m.,” Perelman writes in the section’s introduction. “Because the recipe you found on the internet said it would take one hour, max, but it neglected to mention butter softening time and the fact that you cannot put frosting on a cake that’s not absolutely cold without it sliding off.”

Perelman’s Instagram followers were recently treated to an inside look at making a wedding cake for a friend, an intensive, multi-day process that seemingly dirtied every dish in her (gorgeous-yet-attainable) home kitchen and involved the tossing out of at least one super-sized batch of frosting. Following Smitten Kitchen Every Day’s simple, one-bowl cake and frosting recipes should help readers avoid any such disasters of their own — but barring that, they can at least hope to handle any snafus with Perelman’s trademark sense of charmingly self-deprecating cheer.

Smitten Kitchen Every Day is available for pre-order now and hits shelves October 24.

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