If You're Going To Buy One Cookbook This Fall, Make It This One

There are cooks who write and writers who cook; the genius of Alison Roman's cookbook is that she's one of the few that genuinely, wholly occupies both spaces. After years honing her culinary skills in fine dining kitchens (including dessert-maverick Momofoku Milk Bar and San Francisco's vegetable-filled Quince), she worked as an editor at Bon Appétit and BuzzFeed. Her first cookbook, Dining In, reflects both of these sensibilities. It's filled with surprising food that plays with flavor profiles and textures (in one dish, raw and roasted carrots come together with fennel and pistachios for a dish that's simultaneously warm and cold, crunchy and sweetly smooth, familiar and exciting), but it also has the type of cooking-school expertise turned into bite-size, digestible information that years on an editorial team provides. You'll learn new techniques (slow-roasting in olive oil) and chef's tricks that'll impress anyone you have over for dinner (how to actually cook an eggplant properly, why toasting nuts actually matters).

Serves 4

I ate a lot of squash with brown sugar and butter while growing up. This recipe is my more practical "I can’t have ice cream for every meal" compromise, using honey instead of brown sugar and coconut oil instead of butter. I would probably eat this as dinner on its own, but I happen to know it’s also great as a side with things like roasted chicken or pork chops.

While tender, caramelized, salty-sweet squash is magnificent all on its own, it should be mentioned that the real reason for making this dish is for the toasted coconut gremolata: chips of nutty, unsweetened coconut tossed with herbs, lots of lemon zest, and a bit of Aleppo pepper. It’s wildly addictive, and there is no reason it couldn’t appear over roasted carrots, sprinkled onto a curry or stew, or even over salads as a stand-in for croutons.

Makes about 5 cups

Aside from eating this for breakfast over yogurt with cucumbers (page 112), this granola is really great to use like croutons in salads as well as for plain old out-of-hand snacking. I don’t want to push this recipe too hard, because it’ll seem like I have some sort of savory granola agenda, but just know that it’s one of the few things in this book that is in my pantry at all times.

Like the sweet version on the facing page, this one gets its crunch from egg whites, and the ingredients are rather flexible. I like to pack as much variety into this as humanly possible, always adding a new seed or grain when I have them on hand, and you should feel free to do the same. The soy sauce here not only adds some good old-fashioned saltiness, but its residual sugars also help everything caramelize and stick together, which is nice since this contains way less sweetener than a regular granola.