Cooking at Home: Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying About Recipes (And Love My Microwave)

This is a manifesto (with a fondness for parentheses). Declamatory sentences abound, as do exclamation marks. There are arrows within the text that emphasize many things. Plus lists, and flowcharts.

What Cooking at Home does not have is traditional recipes with precise quantities. Instead it offers approaches and descriptions of processes that mimic the experience of being in the kitchen with a very good cook who shrugs when you ask, "how much lemon?" "As much as it needs," you're told.

Ultimately, being able to cook in this fashion is liberating, allowing you to make the most of what is on hand and to respond to your own preferences, along with those of your friends and family. And the food presented here, drawn from Chang's Korean-American childhood food, his restaurant experience, and Krishna's own background as cook and eater, is very appealing.

But to learn all that you might from it, you must be willing to relax your expectations that it will be like other cookbooks.  (And be prepared to squint: there are some unfortunate sections where the contrast between text and background colors are not friendly).

Hardcover. Color photographs throughout.