What I'm Reading, Mid-October 2025
Preliminary Thoughts On My Coffee Table Tower
Eat Small Plates, by Ben and Zikki Siman-Tov
Following Covid isolation, many cookbook authors seem to have had the same idea: Dinner parties! That’s coming to fruition this fall.
Eat Small Plates marries the Israeli and Ukranian backgrounds of Ben and Zikki Siman-Tov to offer up a cheerful, accessible way to host friends regularly, with a table laden with small plates to share. They provide advice on food to offer as soon as guests arrive, sample menus, and an array of dips, breads, salads, and vegetable dishes. Their short list of seafood and meat options includes many raw ones, such as tuna nectarine tartare, Arabic ceviche, and mackerel, cucumber, and arugula crudo. Many of the same ingredients pop up repeatedly, including beets, cucumbers, and eggplant, in recipes that skew light and healthy without feeling abstemious. Think amba, chopped liver, beet and goat cheese dip, beet and cherry salad, chicken shawarma salad, a salad of pears, mustard greens, mint, and challah croutons, and shrimp in grated tomato butter. Cilantro pistachio artichoke dip made a quick, lusciously smooth spread of an unexpected ingredient combination for bread or bagels (with a few modifications—I used roasted and salted pistachios to speed up the recipe, which called for roasting raw pistachios, and I subbed regular canned artichokes plus oregano and lemon zest after realizing I failed to buy marinated artichokes). Nine recipes for sweets close the collection.
*Let’s Party, by Dan Pelosi
Continuing on the dinner party theme, Dan Pelosi organizes 100-plus recipes into 16 themed dinner party menus—including Thanksgiving, breakfast for dinner, an Oscar-watching (or Olympics, or Super Bowl) party, a cookie swap, a cookout, and “Joyuary.” He walks readers through a week-ahead timetable for each menu, with advice on cleaning, decorating, and creating a guest list. The very bubbly Pelosi celebrates abundance: Each recipe is meant to serve six to eight people, and each menu has about six dishes. Fewer recipes in here feel as interesting as those in Eat Small Plates, but they make up solid menus of appealing food. The one menu that readers might either love or hate? The pumpkin carving party, with seemingly enough pumpkin and calories to get you through a full hibernation—with a cheese ball with pumpkin puree, roasted squash with crispy chickpeas and feta, pumpkin cider-braised pork shoulder, ravioli dressed in creamy pumpkin sauce, and ginger pumpkin pie, the only respite from pumpkin in this menu is the salad.
*In for Dinner, by Rosie Kellett
Using her London experience of communal cooking with six housemates, who each chip in about $30 a week for groceries and take turns cooking each night, Rosie Kellett focuses In for Dinner on affordable recipes for six to eight people. This book will especially appeal to 20-something cooks newly on their own, but in today’s economy, the recipes will find a wide audience. Chapters broken down by breakfast, lunch, dinner, and sweets offer mostly vegetarian dishes (many of which can be made vegan, and many of which are also gluten-free), plus a few with fish. They include plenty of tips on making dishes ahead, scaling recipes up or down, cooking for large groups, and keeping costs down (such as highlighting other recipes to use up leftover ingredients like an egg white). Affordable doesn’t mean boring; Kellett offers cheddar, jalapeno, and chive cornbread with maple harissa butter; savory corn French toast with cherry tomato salsa; citrus mackerel spaghetti with pangrattato (breadcrumbs); hasselback potatoes with massaged kale and a miso almond sauce and lemon salsa; brown sugar vanilla blackberry sheet cake; and masala chai shortbread. Do the recipes work? Most look reliable, but I noted issues in her sourdough recipes. A pikelet recipe clearly intends, from both the headnote and a page about sourdough, for cooks to use sourdough discard, but it calls simply for sourdough starter; sourdough pancakes had a similar issue.
*Nights and Weekends, by Alexis de Boschnek
Subtitled “recipes that make the most of your time,” Nights and Weekends aims to help readers get dinner on the table with fast, accessible, flavorful meals. Weeknight recipes lean on pantry staples and a few ready-made ingredients, using as few pans and utensils as possible and simple shortcuts to pare a few seconds or minutes off the prep, such as slicing an onion instead of dicing it. As an impatient cook, I’m always looking for speed and ease in my own kitchen, and I notice when cookbook authors fail to get from point A to B as easily as possible. This book opens with a simple recipe for crab pasta with pistachios and olives, topped with a hefty cup of chopped mint—an intriguing combination for a 15-minute supper. (De Boschnek notes that canned tuna can sub for the crab.) Other interesting options include tofu in miso butter sauce with corn and scallions, roasted broccolini and banana peppers with hazelnuts over ricotta, and halloumi fattoush. Cooks will appreciate even the ordinary recipes, such as udon noodles with peanut sauce or roasted tomato and red pepper soup, for their emphasis on ease and speed. Recipes nicely skew toward vegetarian options. The meat chapter is somewhat less interesting, but the fish chapter perks back up, opening with chile crisp salmon with a quick salad of pickled carrots, cucumber, and fennel. In the “weekends” section, simple starters include soy-blistered shishitos, fried okra, gochujang almond butter dip, and salmon ceviche with cucumber and Tajin. Brunch and dinner recipes follow; most take more time than the weeknight section but are not complex. They include French onion soup strata, crepes with mushrooms and gremolata, tofu schnitzel with braised cabbage, and slow-roasted salmon with grapefruit and crispy shallots. Desserts such as lemon bars, apple crumble, and chocolate mousse make up the least interesting chapter.
*I haven’t tested any recipes in this book.
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