Autumn brings with it the feeling that we’re off to the races. The lazy, slow days of summer are behind us and it’s now all about figuring out and falling into our routines. Whatever that looks like for you — back to the office, back to school, back to managing all the moving pieces — we’ve got two great ways to keep your days on track: fast meals and books on the go. Check out these cookbooks that keep things on the table quick and easy coupled with some of our favorite — and some of the freshest — audiobook fiction. Now off you go!
Jane Butel's Quick and Easy Southwestern Cookbook
by Jane Butel
When it comes to Southwestern cuisine, no one can hold a candle to the innovative and simply delicious style of best-selling author Jane Butel, the queen of Southwestern cuisine. Jane Butel's Quick and Easy Southwestern Cookbook is both a classic and contemporary collection of recipes that makes creating a variety of fabulous dishes easier than ever. Give in to the lure of Shrimp with Mint Mango Salsa, Quick Corn and Green Chile Chowder, and Grilled Lobster Tail with Lemon Cucumber Salsa. Jane Butel lends her signature style to these mouthwatering dishes and more. Sound elaborate? These delectable recipes are easy to prepare, often requiring no more than five or six easy-to-find ingredients per dish and taking only twenty minutes to cook.
Dinner in One: Exceptional & Easy One-Pan Meals
by Melissa Clark
Melissa Clark brings her home cook's expertise and no-fuss approach to the world of one-pot/pan cooking. With nearly all of the recipes being made in under one hour, the streamlined steps ensure you are in and out of the kitchen without dirtying a multitude of pans or spending more time than you need to on dinner. Expect to find a bevy of sheet-pan suppers (Miso-Glazed Salmon with Roasted Sugar Snap Peas), skillet dinners (Cheesy Meatball Parm with Spinach), comforting casseroles (Herby Artichoke and Gruyere Bread Pudding) that you can assemble right in the baking dish, crowd-pleasing one-pot pasta meals (Gingery Coconut Noodles with Shrimp and Greens), vegetable-forward mains, and dozens of tips for turning a vegetarian or meat-based recipe vegan. And since no dinner is complete without dessert, you'll find a chapter of one-bowl cakes, too. These are simple, delicious recipes for weekdays, busy evenings, and any time you need to get a delicious, inspiring meal on the table quickly--with as little clean-up as possible.
Skinnytaste Simple: Easy, Healthy Recipes with 7 Ingredients or Fewer
by Gina Homolka - Heather K Jones
Gina Homolka knows how tough it can be to put a meal together when she's tight for time and energy. Skinnytaste Simple is the solution: recipes with minimum ingredients but maximum flavor and nutrition. These game-changing, no-fuss dinners use no more than seven ingredients each, allowing you to put easy, healthy meals on the table with little-to-no effort. From hearty breakfasts like Chilaquiles with Fried Eggs and Acai Berry Bowls to crowd-pleasing dinners including One Pan Shrimp and Saffron Orzo and Sheet Pan Eggplant Lasagna, you'll find recipes the whole family will love. Plus, sweet indulgences are a snap with quick-and-easy chocolatey Flourless Sea Salt Brownies and make-ahead Strawberry and Cheese Turnovers. With Skinnytaste Simple, cooking delicious, nutritious meals for your family is easier than ever!
Rustle Up: One-Paragraph Recipes for Flavour Without Fuss
by Rhiannon Batten - Laura Rowe
We've all experienced that moment when you open the fridge and need inspiration to rustle up something a bit different from the usual repertoire, without too much faff and a trip to the supermarket. Rustle Up is a collection of tried-and-tested micro recipes, kept short and sweet at just one paragraph each. Using simple ingredients, store-cupboard staples and basic equipment, these dishes promise good food, whether you're cooking solo in a tiny kitchen, making meals with mates or impressing at a family gathering. Packed with tips and recipe variations, there is inspiration galore and all the answers to rustling up a storm for any occasion. These are recipes so easy they've been memorized, like tiny culinary poems, by their passers-on. Recipes, in other words, you'll want to eat on repeat.
Recipetin Eats Dinner: 150 Recipes for Fast, Everyday Meals
by Nagi Maehashi
Millions of people around the world open Nagi Maehashi's digital "recipe tin" every day to discover new meals and cooking inspiration. In RecipeTin Eats Dinner: 150 Recipes for Fast Everyday Meals, she brings us the ultimate curation of new and favorite dishes, from comfort food (yes, cheese galore), to fast and easy food for weeknights, twists on Mexican, French, and Italian classics, hearty dinner salads, Asian soups and noodles, and more. Sauces, sides, and sweet endings pair perfectly with dozens of selections. And the invaluable chapter, "What Do I Do With a Piece of ..." makes cooking protein from your fridge whether it's chicken, steak, or salmon effortless. This is a must-have for everyone from beginners to expert cooks. After all, we all need dinner!
Simply West African: Easy, Joyful Recipes for Every Kitchen
by Pierre Thiam with Lisa Katayama
This is West African food for every kitchen, a generous, warm welcome to its delicious, irresistible culinary mainstays and rhythms. If you already cook with ingredients like hearty greens, yams, black-eyed peas, and okra, or have enjoyed Southern staples like jambalaya and gumbo, you have tasted the deep culinary influences of this interconnected region that spans Senegal, Ghana, Côte d'Ivoire, Cameroon, Nigeria, and more. Now, in Simply West African, celebrated chef and West African cooking authority Pierre Thiam unlocks the region's essential tastes for the everyday home cook. With helpful tips and tricks that teach readers the basics of the cuisine, Pierre shows how seamlessly these flavorful, easy-to-execute dishes can become weeknight staples or the star of your table for weekend gatherings. With this book, you too will fill your kitchen with the comforting, irresistible flavors and beautiful spirit of West Africa.
Absolution
by Alice McDermott; Read by Jesse Vilinsky and Rachel Kenney
You have no idea what it was like. For us. The women, I mean. The wives.
American women - American wives - have been mostly minor characters in the literature of the Vietnam War, but in Absolution they take center stage. Tricia is a shy newlywed, married to a rising attorney on loan to navy intelligence. Charlene is a practiced corporate spouse and mother of three, a beauty and a bully. In Saigon in 1963, the two women form a wary alliance as they balance the era's mandate to be "helpmeets" to their ambitious husbands with their own, inchoate impulse to "do good" for the people of Vietnam.
Sixty years later, Charlene's daughter, spurred by an encounter with an aging Vietnam vet, reaches out to Tricia. Together, they look back at their time in Saigon, taking wry account of that pivotal year and of Charlene's altruistic machinations, and discovering as they do how their own lives as women on the periphery - of politics, of history, of war, of their husbands' convictions - have been shaped and burdened by the same sort of unintended consequences that followed America's tragic interference in Southeast Asia.
A virtuosic new novel from Alice McDermott, one of our most observant, most affecting writers--about folly and grace, obligation, sacrifice, and, finally, the quest for absolution in a broken world.
Lessons in Chemistry
by Bonnie Garmus; Ready by Miranda Raison
Chemist Elizabeth Zott is not your average woman. In fact, Elizabeth Zott would be the first to point out that there is no such thing as an average woman. But it's the early 1960s and her all-male team at Hastings Research Institute takes a very unscientific view of equality. Except for one: Calvin Evans; the lonely, brilliant, Nobel-prize nominated grudge-holder who falls in love with - of all things - her mind. True chemistry results.
But like science, life is unpredictable. Which is why a few years later Elizabeth Zott finds herself not only a single mother, but the reluctant star of America's most beloved cooking show Supper at Six. Elizabeth's unusual approach to cooking ("combine one tablespoon acetic acid with a pinch of sodium chloride") proves revolutionary. But as her following grows, not everyone is happy. Because as it turns out, Elizabeth Zott isn't just teaching women to cook. She's daring them to change the status quo.
Laugh-out-loud funny, shrewdly observant, and studded with a dazzling cast of supporting characters, Lessons in Chemistry is as original and vibrant as its protagonist.
None of This Is True
by Lisa Jewell; Ready by Nicola Walker, Louise Brealey, and a full cast
Celebrating her forty-fifth birthday at her local pub, popular podcaster Alix Summer crosses paths with an unassuming woman called Josie Fair. Josie, it turns out, is also celebrating her forty-fifth birthday. They are, in fact, birthday twins.
A few days later, Alix and Josie bump into each other again, this time outside Alix's children's school. Josie has been listening to Alix's podcasts and thinks she might be an interesting subject for her series. She is, she tells Alix, on the cusp of great changes in her life.
Josie's life appears to be strange and complicated, and although Alix finds her unsettling, she can't quite resist the temptation to keep making the podcast. Slowly she starts to realize that Josie has been hiding some very dark secrets, and before she knows it, Josie has inveigled her way into Alix's life - and into her home.
But, as quickly as she arrived, Josie disappears. Only then does Alix discover that Josie has left a terrible and terrifying legacy in her wake, and that Alix has become the subject of her own true crime podcast, with her life and her family's lives under mortal threat.
Who is Josie Fair? And what has she done?
Learned by Heart
by Emma Donoghue; Read byShiromi Arserio
Drawing on years of investigation and Anne Lister's five-million-word secret journal, Learned by Heart is the long-buried love story of Eliza Raine, an orphan heiress banished from India to England at age six, and Anne Lister, a brilliant, troublesome tomboy, who meet at the Manor School for young ladies in York in 1805 when they are both fourteen.
Emotionally intense, psychologically compelling, and deeply researched, Learned by Heart is an extraordinary work of fiction by one of the world's greatest storytellers. Full of passion and heartbreak, the tangled lives of Anne Lister and Eliza Raine form a love story for the ages.
The Vaster Wilds
by Lauren Groff - January Lavoy
A servant girl escapes from a colonial settlement in the wilderness. She carries nothing with her but her wits, a few possessions, and the spark of god that burns hot within her. What she finds in this terra incognita is beyond the limits of her imagination and will bend her belief in everything that her own civilization has taught her.
Lauren Groff's new novel is at once a thrilling adventure story and a penetrating fable about trying to find a new way of living in a world succumbing to the churn of colonialism. The Vaster Wilds is a work of raw and prophetic power that tells the story of America in miniature, through one girl at a hinge point in history, to ask how - and if - we can adapt quickly enough to save ourselves.
The Beach at Summerly
by Beatriz Williams; Read by Saskia Maarleveld
June 1946. As the residents of Winthrop Island prepare for the first summer season after the sacrifice of war, a glamorous new figure moves into the guest cottage at Summerly, the idyllic seaside estate of the wealthy Peabody family. To Emilia Winthrop, daughter of Summerly's year-round caretaker and a descendant of the island's settlers, Olive Rainsford opens a window into a world of shining possibility. While Emilia spent the war years caring for her incapacitated mother, Olive traveled the world, married fascinating men, and involved herself in political causes. She's also the beloved aunt of the two surviving Peabody sons, Amory and Shep, with whom Emilia has a tangled romantic history.
As the summer wears on, Emilia develops a deep rapport with Olive, who urges her to leave the island for a life of adventure, while romance blossoms with the sturdy and honorable Shep. But the heady promise of Peabody patronage is blown apart by the arrival of Sumner Fox, an FBI agent who demands Emilia's help to capture a Soviet agent who's transmitting vital intelligence on the West's atomic weapon program from somewhere inside the Summerly estate.
April 1954. Eight years later, Summerly is boarded up and Emilia has rebuilt her sh
ttered life as a professor at Wellesley College, when shocking news arrives from Washington - the traitor she helped convict is about to be swapped for an American spy imprisoned in the Soviet Union, but with a mysterious condition only Emilia can fulfill. A reluctant Emilia is summoned to CIA headquarters, where she's forced to confront the harrowing consequences of her actions that fateful summer, and a choice that could destroy the Peabody family - and Emilia's chance for redemption - all over again.