I have been negligent about cookbooks since I started writing On Eating in early 2024. I have been negligent about cooking—or, cooking the way I used to cook—since I started writing the book. The voice of the book, the person who loved to cook so much? She was basically nonexistent during the process of narrating her life.

Now that it’s out and I have what feels like an absurd amount of free time before I start a new proposal and work behind the scenes revamping my business model, I decided: I’m going to start looking at these cookbooks that keep showing up at my house!

One of the most recent ones to do so is the forthcoming The Swedish Cookbook: Lagom Flavors for the Modern Kitchen by Niklas Ekstedt. He’s a fancy Stockholm chef with an eponymous restaurant, and while I was thumbing through the galley, I realized I really do have an affinity for when a fine dining chef provides recipes for the home cook.

When I interviewed Eric Ripert, I had prepared by diving into Vegetable Simple and realized most of the ingredients were things I had around and the techniques were wildly simple but effective. It certainly helped, too, that his wife being Puerto Rican meant plantains were in there, treated as just another vegetable—this is something I rarely encounter. I was immediately moved to cook an apple dessert (I was on Long Island at the time) that came out beautifully.

This is how I want most recipes to be. I’m not a fussy home cook, despite loving a fussy meal, and thus these types of books really hit the spot for me in terms of inspiring me to actually cook—because they’re so simple, I just take the inspiration and run with it. Thus, The Swedish Cookbook seemed within my wheelhouse.

The Swedish Cookbook has extensive vegetable and fika chapters, but because of the fish and meat, I’d recommend it more for pescatarians and (to bring back a phrase from No Meat Required) conscientious omnivores. As a food writer, I like to have all kinds of cookbooks around for reference, and this one will provide good fodder for me.

For the plant-oriented, there’s this cabbage (recipe PDF below, and I’ve converted to grams for the weight-measure-obsessives among us). It stood out to me as something that would get better as it sat in the fridge, and could be perfect for upcoming picnic hangouts or as a lunch for the week that you can build on with proteins like boiled eggs or beans, flatbreads, and other items you might have kicking around the fridge and pantry. Cabbage is so good to have around and wildly accessible. I eat it almost every day. (And Benny, the dog, loves it too.)

I’ll be trying to make this more of a habit—bringing you samples from cookbooks and to do a bit of dabbling myself. I need to perfect a freezer empanada to heat up for lunch.