Debbie lived fully, authentically, and with purpose. When she was diagnosed with brain cancer, she adopted the motto "no day but today," inspired by one of her favorite musicals, "Rent." While going through treatment, she wrote, read, traveled, danced, exercised, baked, ate what she wanted, and cherished her time with family and her large circle of friends, all of whom loved her distinctive laugh.
We may receive a commission on purchases made from links. It's easy to keep turning to the same old burgers, pizza, and tacos for dinner; we get it. Some recipes are tried-and-true favorites for a reason, but we also know you're really just a little inspiration away from finding the next batch of go-to favorites. That's why we're huge fans of cookbooks: Even if you don't follow a recipe, cookbooks are brilliant for ideas.
The best cookbooks of 2025 inspired us to return to the kitchen again and again. They brought us not only inspiration and deliciousness but solace, beauty, delight and a sense of home in a challenging year, especially for Los Angeles. Our list of favorites defined connections to a place, whether geographical - Bahrain, Paris, a Palestinian garden - or reframed as a world view such as the legend of Turtle Island,
Researching Slate's 25 Most Important Recipes project last year reminded me just how transformative a great cookbook can be. Works like The Silver Palate Cookbook and The Vegetarian Epicure introduced new methods, new ingredients, and new flavors to American home chefs of their eras, helping them think about cooking and eating in ways that felt revolutionary. My kitchen could sure use a revolution, I realized. So I decided to spend 2025 cooking new recipes from new cookbooks and chronicling the results.
Most cooks tend to have what they need, and the good ones, especially, trust technique over gadgets. Still, there are certain objects that remain both useful and genuinely novel-the sort of finds that quickly become indispensable. The best gifts for the cook fall into that category: things they don't yet know they need, or pieces that elevate the everyday kitchen.
Anyone can tell you how to cook Italian food - a preliminary search on YouTube will throw up millions of meticulously detailed tutorials competing for your attention. However, when you want to understand why Italians cook the way that they do, you'll want to turn to the culinary maestros and virtuosos at the forefront of this cuisine, from Marcella Hazan and Anna del Conte to Nancy Silverton. But you wouldn't want to consider the Italian cookbooks written by them as simple recipe books, either.
The grocery store came first, before the house, the husband, the baby. When the chef and cookbook author Alison Roman closed on the building that would become First Bloom, her debut retail venture, in the Catskills town of Bloomville, New York, it was a local pizza parlor. The store's opening, in 2023, marked a moment when Romanwho chronicles her life and cooking for a million-odd followers across Instagram, YouTube, and Substackneeded something for herself.
Gene Daly sits up at the table with us as we talk about his parents' latest cookbook, The Daly Dish Air Fryer, and the whirlwind that has been the last five years of Gina and Karol's lives. Gene recently started playschool near their home in Co Meath, but he's home today, a bit under the weather, while his teenage siblings, Holly and Ben, are at school.
Amazon's Prime Big Deals Days event has landed, and while Swifties are busy purchasing every version of The Life of a Showgirl, dealseekers are taking advantage of this major sales extravaganza to jump start on their holiday shopping. A smart move! To me, crossing off loved ones from my CVS-receipt-long gift list months in advance is actually actually romantic. Since I'm holiday shopping for a very large family
When considering chefs that have forever changed the way we cook, Samin Nosrat expeditiously comes to mind. A teacher and Chez Panissetrained chef, Nosrat has built a career sharing the fundamentals of cooking. This has translated into her first #1 New York Times Bestselling and James Beard Award-winning book, Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat. The book's success landed her a Netflix documentary series adaptation. Nosrat took a much-needed break before turning out her latest endeavor, Good Things,
This season sees the release of big party-focused cookbooks, like Dan Pelosi's straight-to-the-point Let's Party and Brie Larson and Courtney McBroom's Party People, full of ambitious, themed spreads and tips for setting the mood through tablescapes. We also see books about how to throw less-formal gatherings, such as Hetty Lui McKinnon's Linger, Chelsea Fagan's Having People Over, and Samin Nosrat's Good Things.
"I felt like this country gave me so much, I really fell in love with it. A way to give back through food was to educate people about the country and their cuisine and the history, because it's all so intertwined."
I was incorrectly placed in a culinary arts class in high school. Total accident. But when Johnson & Wales came in to do a demo, I felt like they were speaking directly to me. That was my lightning strike.
"Changed my life. So I get anxious doing the adult coloring books. This was so much fun and made me really think outside of the box. I'm not the best at drawing but I felt like I was when I was a kid doodling in my textbooks in school." - Carley C.
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