Cookbook Club: Milk Street: Cook What You Have

Love to eat? Love to cook? Join us for a monthly cookbook feast! Each month, the group picks recipes from a single book. Each participant chooses a recipe from the book and prepares it for the group's meeting. At our meeting, we eat the dishes we've all prepared and talk about what inspired us to make them.

In March, we'll cook from Milk Street: Cook What You Have by Christopher Kimball (You might know him as a host of the weekly radio program Milk Street Radio). This book aims to help you create delicious meals out of the overlooked ingredients in your pantry.

Got a can of chickpeas? It can become anything from a quick hummus to a curry spiked with sweet carrots, from a garlicky chickpea soup to a bowl of crispy canned beans with lemon and scallions. 

Or grab that can of tomatoes from the back of the cabinet. It can become spicy one-pot pasta all'arrabbiata, chilaquiles rojos, a rich shakshuka with poached eggs or a chicken and tortilla soup.

Turn to the refrigerator, where eggs and leftover vegetables are the start of cheesy migas, a Spanish tortilla with potato chips or a quick fried rice. 

These 225 recipes begin with the most common ingredients in your kitchen, but they provide more than a lesson in practicality. They teach an improvisational, creative way to cook. That's when cooking becomes an adventure!