Food 52 A New Way to Dinner: A Playbook of Recipes and Strategies for the Week Ahead

A smart, inspiring cookbook showing how to plan, shop, and cook for dinners (and lunches and desserts) all through the week. The secret? Cooking ahead.

Amanda Hesser and Merrill Stubbs, founders of the online kitchen and home destination Food52, pull off home-cooked dinners with their families with stunning regularity. But they don't cook every night.

Starting with flexible base dishes made on the weekend, Amanda and Merrill mix, match, and riff to create new dinners, lunches, and even desserts throughout the week. Blistered tomatoes are first served as a side, then become sauce for spaghetti with corn. Tuna, poached in olive oil on a Sunday, gets paired with braised peppers and romesco for a fiery dinner, with spicy mayo for a hearty sandwich, and with zucchini and couscous for a pack-and-go salad.

Amanda and Merrill's seasonal plans give you everything you need to set yourself up well for the week, with grocery lists and cooking timelines. They also share clever tips and tricks for more confident cooking, showing how elements can work across menus and seasons to fit your mood or market, and how to be scrappy with whatever's left in the fridge. These building blocks form A New Way to Dinner, the key to smarter, happier cooking that leaves you with endless possibilities for the week ahead.

Amanda Hesser is the co-founder of Food52 and was previously a writer and editor at the New York Times. She wrote the award-winning books Cooking for Mr. Latte and The Cook and the Gardener. Her last book, a Times bestseller and the winner of a James Beard Award, is The Essential New York Times Cookbook. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband and twins.

Merrill Stubbs is the co-founder of Food52 and has written for many food and lifestyle publications, including the New York Times. She cut her teeth in the test kitchen at Cook’s Illustrated and behind the counter at Flour Bakery in Boston before she worked with Amanda Hesser on The Essential New York Times Cookbook. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband and two children.