Cookbookmarked! is our new series where we review the latest cookbooks from the foodie influencers you follow. Check back often to find out which new releases are worth your hard-earned cash and the recipes you should try first from each.
We have waited two long years for the sequel to Cravings by Chrissy Teigen, and now Cravings: Hungry for More ($30) is finally here (you’ll still have to wait a few more days for her Cravings kitchenware line at Target, though). Though we were expecting it to have less ham and be more “vegan-ish,” as Teigen told us in an interview, the release does not hold back on rich decadences like Cream Cheese Bombs (AKA squares of cream cheese folded into pancake batter and breakfast bakes) and bacon (found in chowder, grilled cheese, and pad Thai carbonara, NBD).
Keep reading for three must-make recipes including her Fluffy Popovers With Melted Brie & Blackberry Jam, Khao Tod (Crispy Rice Salad) With Fried Eggs, and Simple Skillet Broken Lasagna.
While Teigen divides the book into typical sections like Breakfast & Brunch, Snacks, and Supper, she throws in a few enticing oddballs like “Potatoes & Their Friends” (a carb-loaded chapter) and “Thai Mom” (to feature all the Thai recipes from her adorable mother, Pepper). No surprise, she devotes an entire part to soups and stews (she is the “soup master,” after all), but she also includes a “Sweets” chapter too (fans know Teigen would much rather go hard on a plate of chicken wings than cookies).
You’ll find yourself ooh-ing at the stunning food pictures, then aww-ing at snaps of the whole fam. Teigen and John Legend’s daughter, Luna, 2, appears in jammies with food smeared on her face, and we’re not sure what’s cuter: the face of their new English bulldog pup (also named Pepper) or his tiny tush. Teigen’s dad also shows up again in his fishing vest to make a foil-packet burger dinner.
Her recipe captions, like the first book, are oh-so quotable and read like her Instagram account. She does not hold back on her abundant use of capped letters, exclamation marks, and repeated letters for emphasis. You will want to make ALLLLL of her food (!!), we promise, but first start by reading the book cover to cover.
Once you’re ready to cook, you’ll discover, the recipes may be even easier than the first book. As a mom of young children, Teigen knows how hard it is to have the energy to make from-scratch sauces and fussy recipes that take hours and call for a million ingredients. She elaborates in the intro to the Cool Ranch Taco Salad recipe, “Forcing you to make Cool Ranch dust for this downhome, family-staple taco salad would be very Book One. Book Two, post-Luna Chrissy says to buy a bag [of Cool Ranch Doritos] and crush them up. Who knows what laziness Book Three Chrissy will come up with, at this baby-making rate.”
We’re calculating with roughly 90ish recipes, it will take you at least three months to go through the cookbook… but Teigen says she aims for this cookbook and its recipes to be a “lifetime book” that will develop “sticky pages and balsamic fingerprints” with years of use. Not sure where to start? Keep reading for three of the best recipes from the project formerly known as Cravings 2.
Fluffy POPOVERS With Melted Brie & Blackberry Jam
(Makes 12 popovers)
Total Cook Time: 1 hour (includes preheating oven) plus 25 minutes (for jam)
As these beautiful weirdos bake, they puff their eggy selves up with tons of hot air before developing a gorgeous, dark brown shell you gotta eat fast to enjoy at 100 percent. But first: Break them open (watch out for that burst of hot steam!) and dollop in jam you make yourself in a flash (or swap in store-bought if you got stuck watching the season finale of Below Deck) and a wedge of molten brie cheese.
Ingredients:
Blackberry Jam:
- 3 cups blackberries
- 3/4 cup sugar
- 3 tablespoons lemon juice
- 1/2 teaspoon finely grated lemon zest
Popovers:
- 2 tablespoons butter, melted, plus more for the muffin tin
- 1 3/4 cups milk
- 4 eggs, beaten
- 1 3/4 cups all-purpose flour
- 1/2 teaspoon salt
- 6 ounces brie cheese, rind removed
- blackberry jam (or any jam you’d like)
Directions:
1. For Jam: In a smallish, wide saucepan, combine the blackberries, sugar, and 2 tablespoons of the lemon juice. Bring to a boil over medium-high heat, reduce the heat, and cook at a simmer, stirring often and mashing the fruit (use a potato masher if you’ve got one!), until the mixture has thickened and is glossy, about 20 minutes.
2. Remove from the heat and stir in the remaining 1 tablespoon lemon juice and the zest. (It may look like the jam loosens too much when the lemon juice is added, but it firms back up as it cools so don’t sweat it.) You can keep it in a jar in the fridge for a couple weeks.
3. For Popovers: Preheat the oven to 425°F. Generously butter 12 cups of a standard muffin tin.
4. Place the milk in a large microwave-safe bowl and warm in the microwave just to get the chill off of it, about 1 minute. Whisk in the eggs, 2 tablespoons melted butter, flour, and salt until smooth. Place the muffin tin in the oven to preheat for 2 to 3 minutes (if you go much more, the butter could start to smoke or burn).
5. Remove the pan from the oven and, working fasssssst (but don’t burn yourself!), add 1/4 cup batter to each muffin cup. Bake until puffed and dark golden (they will be in no way symmetrical and will have puffed out an all sorts of directions), 20 to 25 minutes.
6. During the last minute of cooking, place the brie in a microwave-safe bowl and microwave until melted, about 30 seconds.
7. Remove the popovers from the oven and immediately poke the tops open and drop some of the melted brie inside each popover. Top with a dollop of jam.
Khao Tod (Crispy Rice Salad) With Fried Eggs
(Serves 4)
Total Cook Time: 40 minutes
Tip: Homemade Thai Chili Powder: Buy dried Thai chiles (available at Thai markets) or dried serrano or árbol chiles (available at Mexican markets) and grind them up in a spice grinder or with a mortar and pestle until fine. It lasts indefinitely in a sealed container at room temp.
*If you’re making fresh rice for this recipe, DON’T rinse the rice before cooking; the starch is your friend and will help the rice cakes stick together.
This salad has lots of wonderful ingredients, like peanuts, ginger, and herbs, but the headliner is the crisped-up rice. Some people make it with rice balls, but I like to make the rice cakes thinner to give the rice more surface area, which means maximum crispiness. Oh, and we top it with a sunny-side-up egg, which makes everything better. (This trick works with a pizza, a burger, meatballs, asparagus… yeah, pretty much everything.)
Ingredients:
- 4 cups peanut oil, for frying
- 1/2 cup plus 1 tablespoon all-purpose flour
- 5 eggs
- 2 teaspoons red chili paste or sambal oelek
- 3 cups cooked jasmine rice, cooled if you made it fresh for this*
- 4 dried chiles (such as chiles de árbol), or to taste
- 1/4 cup peanuts
- 3 tablespoons fresh lime juice (from about 1 1/2 limes)
- 1 tablespoon fish sauce or soy sauce
- 2 teaspoons sugar
- 1 teaspoon Thai chile powder (see Tip), or to taste
- 1/3 cup loosely packed fresh cilantro leaves
- 1/3 cup loosely packed mint leaves
- 1/3 cup sliced scallions
- 2 shallots, sliced into very thin wedges
- 1-inch piece fresh ginger, peeled and cut into thin matchsticks (julienne)
Directions:
1. In a 9-inch cast-iron skillet, heat the oil over medium-high heat to 350°F. (Use a deep-fry thermometer or test the oil by dropping in a grain of rice; if it sizzles immediately but isn’t burning, you’re good.)
2. While the oil is heating, make the rice cakes: Put the 1/2 cup flour in a shallow dish. In a large bowl, whisk together one egg, the chili paste, and the remaining 1 tablespoon flour. Add the rice and mix with your hands. Form the mixture into 8 patties 3 inches wide and 1 inch thick. Dredge the patties in the flour and set on a plate.
3. Fry the dried chiles and peanuts in the oil just enough to darken them slightly, being careful not to burn them, 1 to 2 minutes. Remove with a slotted spoon and drain on paper towels; set aside for garnish.
4. Working in two batches, use a Chinese spider or slotted spoon to gently lower the rice cakes into the oil and fry them until crispy and golden brown, flipping halfway, about 5 minutes per side. Remove the cakes from the oil and allow them to cool on paper towels.
5. In a small bowl, whisk together the lime juice, fish sauce, sugar, and chile powder until the sugar is dissolved.
6. Using your hands, crumble up the crispy rice cakes into different sizes into a bowl. Add the cilantro, mint, scallions, shallots, and ginger.
7. Take a bit of the frying oil and heat it up in a separate skillet, then fry four eggs sunny-side-up style.
8. Toss the salad with the dressing, divide the salad among four plates, and top each plate with a sunny-side-up egg. Garnish with the fried peanuts and chiles.
Simple Skillet BROKEN LASAGNA
(Serves 8)
Total Cook Time: 1 hour and 45 minutes
The first recipe I made for my last book was zucchini lasagna, and while it’s still one of my favorites, it’s laughably time-consuming, between the six-hour-simmering sauce and the layers and layers of must-be-roasted-beforehand zucchini strips. For this book’s lasagna, I went for max flavor with minimum effort. The sauce is easier and faster, and this time you get to take out all your aggressions by breaking the noodles and sticking them into your skillet with the sauce and cheese. You don’t even have to make neat layers! It’s like a lasagna that let itself go… which is obviously the best kind of lasagna, right?
Ingredients:
Sauce:
- 2 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
- 3/4 pound ground beef
- 3/4 pound ground pork
- 1 large onion, finely diced
- 9 cloves garlic, minced
- 1/4 cup tomato paste
- 2 (28-ounce) cans crushed tomatoes
- 1/2 cup shredded fresh basil
- 1/4 teaspoon red pepper flakes
- Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper
Lasagna:
- 2 cups ricotta cheese
- 3 cups shredded mozzarella cheese
- 3/4 cup finely grated Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese
- 1/2 cup shredded fresh basil
- 3/4 teaspoon kosher salt
- 1/2 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
- 6 ounces no-boil lasagna noodles broken into 2-inch pieces
Directions:
1. Make the sauce. In a Dutch oven, heat the oil over medium-high heat. Add the beef and pork and cook, breaking up the meat into tiny pieces with a wooden spoon, until no longer pink, 5 to 6 minutes. (Don’t stress over it getting brown.) Transfer to a bowl.
2. Drain off and discard all but enough of the fat from the pot to slick the bottom. Add the onion and cook until tender and translucent, 7 to 8 minutes. Add the garlic and cook 1 additional minute. Add the tomato paste and cook, stirring, for 2 minutes. Return the meat to the pot along with the tomatoes, basil, red pepper flakes, 1 tablespoon salt, and 1 teaspoon black pepper. Bring to a boil, then reduce the heat and simmer until slightly thickened, about 45 minutes. Season to taste with salt and pepper.
3. Preheat the oven to 375°F.
4. Build and bake the lasagna. In a large bowl, combine the ricotta, mozzarella, Parm, basil, salt, and pepper.
5. Spoon 1 cup of the sauce into the bottom of a large (12-inch), deep (2-inch) ovenproof skillet. Add a layer of noodles (since they’re broken you can kind of just set them into a layer without worrying about how exactly your noodles will fit together), then a layer of sauce, then a layer of dollops of the cheese mixture. Repeat layers of noodles (pressing down on the noodle layer to compact everything), sauce, and cheese until the skillet is full, topping with a final layer of sauce and then dollops of cheese at the very top.
6. Put a rimmed baking sheet in the oven and put the skillet on top of it (this prevents burny drips in the bottom of your oven). Bake until bubbling, about 45 minutes.
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(Reprinted from Cravings: Hungry for More by ChrissyTeigen with Adeena Sussman. Copyright © 2018 by ChrissyTeigen. Photographs copyright © 2018 by Aubrie Pick. Published by Clarkson Potter/Publishers, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC.)
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