cooking a roast chicken

Chicken Noodle Roast Chicken excerpted from In Mary’s Kitchen by Mary Berg. Copyright © 2023 Mary Berg. Photographs by Lauren Vandenbrook. Published by Appetite by Random House®, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited.

Everyone loves Mary! This beloved host of Mary Makes It Easy and The Good Stuff with Mary Berg, who Variety calls “the millennial Ina Garten,” is back with a cookbook of 100 all-new recipes guaranteed to become your stress-free sidekick in the kitchen.

The kitchen is Mary’s happy place, where worries melt away, a busy mind calms, and time seems to slow down. But she knows that for many people, the exact opposite is true! However you feel about mealtimes, Mary is here to help, with uncomplicated but delicious recipes, packed with tips and tricks, to produce flavourful results—every time.

It’s What You Need: With chapters broken down into their main ingredient to facilitate easy searching, you’ll love Mary’s ideas for breakfast, veg & starch, pasta, fish, chicken, beef, pork & lamb, and, of course, sweets.
Make It Easy! It’s not just the name of her award-winning TV program, it’s her culinary ethos. Mary’s recipes look easy because they are easy, and the ones in this book are her most straightforward yet!
Find the “Why”: With notes in the margin of each recipe giving you the reason behind a certain ingredient or technique, you’ll learn tips that act as building blocks for all your culinary endeavours. And with call-outs that point to recipes where you can get ahead, build fast flavor, or get more bang for your buck, home cooks of all skill levels will find something to entice.

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Go-To Dinners: A Barefoot Contessa Cookbook by Ina Garten

Even Ina Garten, America’s most trusted and beloved home cook, sometimes finds cooking stressful. To make life easy she relies on a repertoire of recipes that she knows will turn out perfectly every time. Cooking night after night during the pandemic inspired her to re-think the way she approached dinner, and the result is this collection of comforting and delicious recipes that you’ll love preparing and serving. You’ll find lots of freeze-ahead, make-ahead, prep-ahead, and simply assembled recipes so you, too, can make dinner a breeze.

In Go-To Dinners, Ina shares her strategies for making her most satisfying and uncomplicated dinners. Many, like Overnight Mac & Cheese, you can make ahead and throw in the oven right before dinner. Light dinners like Tuscan White Bean Soup can be prepped ahead and assembled at the last minute. Go-to family meals like Chicken in a Pot with Orzo and Hasselback Kielbasa will feed a crowd with very little effort. And who doesn’t want to eat Breakfast For Dinner? You’ll find recipes for Scrambled Eggs Cacio e Pepe and Roasted Vegetables with Jammy Eggs that are a snap to make and so satisfying. Ina’s “Two-Fers” guide you on how to turn leftovers from one dinner into something different and delicious the second night. (more…)