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Welcome to “Cookbook of the Week.” This is a series where I highlight cookbooks that are unique, easy to use, or just special to me. While finding a particular recipe online serves a quick purpose, flipping through a truly excellent cookbook has a magic all its own.
My Cookbook of the Week series has always been to recommend a book that I enjoyed or found extremely helpful so others can benefit from the find. Well, it’s the week before Thanksgiving, and there’s no other time of year when a helpful cookbook is more needed. Ina Garten’s Go-To Dinners is my featured cookbook this week. If you’re hosting a holiday feast and you feel a tad lost, this cookbook is your life boat, and Ina is your Chablis-slingin’ captain.
Ina Garten is no stranger to cookbook writing—and no stranger to most of us. She’s one of the original celebrity chefs (in my book anyway) on the Food Network. She, her husband, Jeffrey, and numerous roast chickens have made appearances on my TV for a large portion of my life, no doubt inspiring my love of cooking. She’s known for making elegant dishes in a simple manner, focusing more on quality ingredients and robust flavors rather than precision techniques and skill sets. I’ve always loved how Garten keeps her recipes mostly accessible and makes even the most insecure cook feel successful.
A bit about the book
Go-To Dinners is Ina’s latest cookbook from the Barefoot Contessa series, published in 2022. It also happens to focus specifically on simple, scrumptious dinners that you can whip up with few ingredients. When I say “simple,” for once, I don’t mean “no-frills.” Ina includes plenty of reasonable “frills” in her dinner recipes that make them, what I’ll call, comfort-food-gorgeous: The presentation is naturally event-worthy. She manages to do this without making the recipes eye-rolling or complex. That’s why this is a great cookbook to nab before Thanksgiving cooking begins.
A great cookbook for the swamped cook
“Swamped” is more of a feeling than a definition. It’s being weighed down. Whether it’s work pressure, relationship challenges, or the literal moment of cooking Thanksgiving has you feeling overwhelmed, we all feel swamped sometimes. Go-to Dinners is full of truly simple recipes that turn out great. You don’t have to be a practiced chef. I’d venture to say you don’t even have to be good at cooking. If you follow the recipe, you will be rewarded.
If you’re managing Thanksgiving, or you’re tasked with bringing a side dish to the big meal, you’ll find plenty of salads, vegetable sides, or desserts here that don’t feel like a great weight has been added to your shoulders. She writes the difficulty level at the bottom of each recipe (spoiler: many of them say “Easy” or “Make Ahead”), so you can easily assess how much of a commitment you need to make. Instead of feeling anxiety from complicated dishes, Go-To Dinners supplies you with a roster of “Oh, I can do this.”
The recipes you can expect
The blessed relief of this cookbook is that each time you turn a page, the next recipe is as achievable as the last. Some denser cookbook compendiums, such as America’s Test Kitchen’s cookbook or Milk Street Bakes (both great for different reasons), have a range of recipes with copious amounts of text to provide you with the “how” and “why.” Ina’s not doing all of that. It’s about to be Thanksgiving. We don’t need all the reasoning, we just need the recipe to work, dammit! And that, they do.
Each recipe has a full page, close-up photo of the dish so you can get a good look at your goal. The abutting page is the recipe. The recipes are often eight ingredients or fewer. The instructions are usually two to five short paragraphs, and there is plenty of white space on the page. If you’re not explicitly familiar with “white space” in design, it’s just empty page space and it’s essential to keep the page uncluttered. These recipes are much easier to read because of it.
Serving size is also listed at the bottom of each recipe, which I think is important if you’re using this book to help make your Thanksgiving easier. Since the focus is primarily dinner, the recipes usually range from four to eight servings. That’s the perfect size to serve to a table of eight to 12 people who are sampling a little bit of everything.
The dish I made this week
I chose Overnight Mac & Cheese as my testing recipe for a few reasons. For one, I love an excuse to make mac and cheese; but otherwise, this recipe intrigued me. I’d never made a mac and cheese that was designed to be soaked overnight and, for a casserole that looked creamy and decadent in the facing photo, the recipe was only about seven ingredients with no roux (a flour and butter paste for thickening sauces).
I set to work last night to make a quarter of the recipe (because my partner is lactose intolerant and it’s unwise for me to eat six servings alone). Which reminds me: Most of these recipes are easy to split if you’re making dinner for two.
The partially cooked macaroni mixed with shredded cheese and heavy cream before soaking.
Credit: Allie Chanthorn Reinmann
I par-boiled the macaroni and mixed it into a cream and shredded cheese mixture with a dash of nutmeg, as instructed. Suspiciously un-complicated. That dish gets covered and set in the fridge for the night. Note, though the recipe indicates a 24-hour soaking time, necessity makes me a rebel and I only did 12 hours. It still came out perfect.
After sitting in the fridge overnight, the pasta has soaked up the excess moisture.
Credit: Allie Chanthorn Reinmann
I took the soaked pasta out of the fridge and piled it into a buttered dish, topping it with more shredded cheese and buttered bread crumbs. The suspiciously simple mac gets baked until bubbling and golden brown, et voilà. A flavorful, creamy mac that required barely 15 minutes of actual active work from me. Most of the time the dish was chilling in the fridge or baking. The cheese sauce thickens just enough from the starch left on the pasta. Though she doesn’t say this, you just have to make sure you follow the directions, and it will work. Say hello to your make-ahead Thanksgiving mac and cheese recipe.
How to buy it
This book is one you’ll be leaning on for years to come. Get a copy quick from Amazon if you have Prime shipping, or you can get a signed copy directly from the Barefoot Contessa website here. Otherwise, since she’s a big name and this is her latest cookbook, pop into your local bookstore and you’ll probably find it there. Sure, you’ll be happy you got it in time for the upcoming holiday meals, but you’ll be flipping through it for the rest of the year too.
