An Eater Cookbook of the Year, Everything I Want to Eat is the debut from Jessica Koslow, award-winning chef of LA’s popular restaurant Sqirl, featuring more than 100 fresh, market-driven, healthy, and flavorful recipes.
Jessica Koslow and her restaurant, Sqirl, are at the forefront of the California cooking renaissance, which is all about food that surprises us and engages all of our senses—it looks good, tastes vibrant, and feels fortifying yet refreshing. In Everything I Want to Eat, Koslow shares 100 of her favorite recipes for health-conscious but delicious dishes, all of which always use real foods—no fake meat or fake sugar here—that also happen to be suitable for vegetarians, vegans, or whomever you’re sharing your meal with.
The book is organized into seven chapters, each featuring a collection of recipes centered on a key ingredient or theme. Expect to find recipes for dishes Sqirl has become known for, as well as brand-new seasonal flavor combinations, including:
- Raspberry and cardamom jam
- Sorrel-pesto rice bowl
- Burnt brioche toast with house ricotta and seasonal jam
- Lamb merguez, cranberry beans, roasted tomato, and yogurt cheese
- Valrhona chocolate fleur de sel cookies
- Almond hazelnut milk
Koslow lives in LA, where everyone is known to be obsessively health-conscious and where dietary restrictions are the norm. People come into Sqirl and order dishes with all sorts of substitutions and modifications—hold the feta, please, add extra kale. They are looking to make their own healthy adventures. Others may tack breakfast sausage, cured bacon, or Olli’s prosciutto on to their order. So Koslow has had to constantly think about ways to modify dishes for certain diets, which in a way has made her a better, more adaptable cook.
Throughout this book, Koslow provides notes and thought bubbles that show how just about any dish can be modified for specific tastes and dietary needs, whether it needs to be gluten-free or vegan.
Everything I Want to Eat captures the excitement of the food at Sqirl—think of a classic grilled cheese turned playful with the addition of tomato coriander jam—while also offering accessible recipes, like blood orange upside-down cake, that can be easily made in the home kitchen. Moreover, it’s an entirely new kind of cookbook and approach to how we are all starting to think about food, allowing readers to play with the recipes, combining and shaping them to be nothing short of everything you want to eat.
Includes color photographs
Praise
"Jessica Koslow’s cooking is always in tune with the seasons and I admire her approach to food that is pure and beautiful. Everything I Want to Eat is a delightful cookbook that truly lives up to its title!"Alice Waters
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"I love Jessica, I love Sqirl, and I love this book."Mark Bittman
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"Don't let the cuteness of Sqirl fool you. It's smart and insanely delicious. I never understood why white people loved toast so much until I had theirs. But everything is genius and every ingredient has a purpose."David Chang
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"Paraphrasing the philosopher Isaiah Berlin, I once called Jessica Koslow a hedgehog, which is to say a thinker who knew One Big Thing. In her case, the One Big Thing was jam: Koslow was remarkably talented at capturing the nuances of fruit, sweetness and dust in a jar. Could I have been mistaken? Because at the moment, Koslow seems to embody nearly everything wonderful about Los Angeles cuisine."Jonathan Gold, food critic for the LA Times
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“In Everything I Want to Eat, Jessica Koslow opens the door to her world for the reader through the people, the product, the place and her stunning aesthetic on the plate. At Sqirl, while the rest of the world was shunning gluten, Jessica has made toast and jam modern, unctuous and feminine without being precious. Her grain bowls are brilliant and her treatment of the most perfect protein, the egg, reverent. I will cook from this book … and devour Jessica’s familiar yet witty food and words with a smile on my face. Everything you will want to eat is a self-fulfilling prophecy.”Anne Quatrano, chef and author of Summerland
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“In 2004 I lived on my friend's couch on Hoover just around the corner from where Sqirl would eventually exist. I had no interest in breakfast then, still don't. However, in the off chance I get to visit Los Angeles these days, I always go to Sqirl. And always eat breakfast. This book is a monster. And if I ever get the opportunity to write another cookbook, I will steal shamelessly from this one. Watch me.”Brooks Headley, chef and author of Fancy Desserts
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"People ask me (like a lot) who the chef I admire most is, and my answer is always lightning quick: Jessica Koslow. Jess cooks food that I yearn to eat every day, resplendent with unbridled freshness, focused authenticity, and mad skills. She is also the most badass person I know in our restaurant industry. And now you can cook like Sqirl."Hugh Acheson, chef and author of A New Turn in the South
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"It's hard to describe Sqirl to people who've never been there. It's hard to justify why I fell so hard for a tiny East Hollywood coffee shop serving fancy toast and sorrel pesto rice bowls to passels of hipsters. But Everything I Want to Eat encapsulates the feel of and flavors and spirit of Sqirl so beautifully. I've often thought of Jessica's food that it's exactly what I'd like to be cooking for my family if I had the tools to do so, and now I do. The creativity, the ingredients, the people, the delicious exuberance that makes Sqirl so special—and makes L.A. one of the the world's most exciting places to eat—it's all here. And you don't even have to stand in line for an hour to get it."Besha Rodell, restaurant critic and author
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"Jessica once joked to me that Sqirl is a place where beautiful people come to eat on uncomfortable chairs. And this book is full of them, the beautiful people, eating her beautiful food, shot by fantastic photographers: Nacho Alegre's stacked-food shots in the latter third joyously evoke Irving Penn. But the proof of a cookbook is not in how much we want to climb inside the pages and live in them, the proof is in the pudding: here there are two, coconut and cocoa, as well as the recipes for all the jams & eggs & toasts & things that made all those beautiful people want to line up on an ugly corner in almost-Silver Lake for an uncomfortable seat at Ms. Koslow's cantina. Now you've got the power to conjure that kind of draw at home. Use it wisely!"Peter Meehan, editor of Lucky Peach
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“I would say that Koslow and I are culinary soul mates, but given the popularity of the place, it’s clear that I’m not the only one. This is food whose time has come.”Mark Bittman
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“Koslow’s dishes managed to galvanize the very narrow crossover of food writers and L.A. salad obsessives. Turns out that in her hands, breakfast and lunch are what people want to eat all day long."Bon Appétit
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