homemade-ish: recipes and cooking tips that keep it real

Homemade-ish is a sassy, no-guilt cookbook, with more than 100 quick-and-easy recipes, that support busy folks wanting to provide healthy home-cooked meals to their family.

Creating and enjoying home-cooked food is time well spent, but sometimes we’re busy--almost too busy--to be bothered with the task of cooking, with the work of it all. How do we reconcile the impact and importance of providing home-cooked meals with the ever-lurking busyness that threatens to send us dashing to our doors to answer the call of our latest food deliveries? What do we do about this?

Meant to be a beacon of comfort, Lauren McDuffie’s Homemade-ish is an invitation to let your hair down and relax a little. No judging. No pretenses. Just simple, unfussy food that you really can throw together in minutes. Offering encouragement from one page to the next, Homemade-ish is here to be a supportive guide, a delicious devotional of sorts, with every recipe a reminder to take it easy on yourself, to keep it real.

With this cookbook, McDuffie shares more than 100 recipes that make use of store-bought shortcuts and quick-fix tricks for breakfasts; appetizers and snacks; soups; salads; pastas, grains, and meatless mains; meats and fish, and desserts. From jazzed-up bagged salads to improved-upon casseroles to faked and fabulous sweets, you can feed your family well, and actually have time to sit down and enjoy the meal together.

Lauren McDuffie is a cookbook author (Smoke, Roots, Mountain, Harvest, and Southern Lights), food blogger, photographer/stylist, and creator of the cooking blog, My Kitchen Little. She is also the creator of the critically acclaimed and award-winning food blog, Harvest and Honey, and has articles, recipes, and photography published in various forms. Originally from Lexington, Kentucky, she lived in Charleston, South Carolina, for a number of years, and has recently relocated to Lake Oswego, Oregon, with her husband and two children.