Best Cookbooks to Diversify Your Home Menus

If you usually eat burgers or creamy pasta for lunch, drink a few cups of latte and hot chocolate a day, and can’t imagine your evening without a glass of Margarita, chances are great your relationships with food are complicated and you are dependant on it, which is one of the biggest problems for many people today that stands in a row with drug and alcohol addiction. The Whole30 Guide to Total Health and Food Freedom will give you a chance to change the way you eat and put yourself onto the right nutrition track.

First off, Melissa and Dallas Hartwig who are the authors of this book are certified nutritionists specialized in helping people change their relationships with food. So, they know for sure what you feel when eating up ice cream at night or swallowing yet another cocktail coming back from work, and know how to break that vicious circle and stop treating food as some kind of antidepressant or reward.

In general, this book is a 30-day guide on healthy nutrition with rather strict rules on what you are allowed to eat, and we'd fib if we said that following them is very easy. That said, this book is not about quick results. What it's driven towards first and foremost is to help you get rid of bad eating habits for good and in the end, make healthy eating your lifelong nutrition strategy, so it's definitely worth trying.

According to Melissa and Dallas Hartwig, one of the main rules of switching to healthy eating is to cut down on sugar and starch consumption. For this reason, such ingredients as legumes, grains, dairy products, as well as sugar, of course (including all of its varieties) are forbidden and not included in the menu, not to mention bakery, fast food, and junk food. That being said, the choice of meals provided in this book isn't scarce, featuring 150 chef-created ready-to-cook recipes, all accompanied by mouth-watering photos and fitting the Whole 30 principles. Offering healthy substitutes and alternatives to your calorie-packed favs, those recipes will keep you feeling full and satisfied.

An Instant Pot cooker is a kind of cooking wizard, serving as a helping hand for many busy cooks who often lack time on cooking yet want to be able to treat their loved ones to fresh and nutritious homemade meals. However, as it happens, many users tend to run out of recipe ideas very quickly which often causes them to put those pots back on the shelves and return to cooking/eating pre-packaged and take-out foods. Sounds like your scenario? If so, then this cookbook featuring a collection of recipes tailored specifically for instant pots will come to help!

What sets this cookbook apart from the competition is an extensive choice of recipes which, unlike many other Instant Pot recipes primarily built around exotic, canned or rare ingredients, use simple foods that can be found in just about any grocery shop. Furthermore, all recipes are laid in a simple and easy-to-understand manner so that even novice cooks will be able to handle them with ease. Besides, you can easily modify and mix up recipes for different presentation and serving ideas or simply to add a personal touch to them.

Another selling point of this book is that it contains as many as 500 recipes. Thanks to that, you'll have no problem finding an idea of what to cook for breakfast, lunch, dinner or hearty family meals, as well as how to please your kids and what ingredients to use to concoct vegan and vegetarian dishes. With such straightforward instructions, full-fledged ingredients lists, and precise cooking times, you can rest assured that all of your meals will come out cooked to perfection and appetizing-looking.

The other benefit of this cookbook is that it offers a list of low-fat and low-sugar substitutes enabling you to adjust any dish to your dietary needs. Moreover, all recipes are smartly organized into categories by the main ingredient so you will be able to quickly figure out what you want to cook and find the needed recipe in the blink of an eye. A nice bonus is that this book also includes detailed instructions on how to use an Instant Pot, which makes it an attractive choice for first-time Instant Pot users.

Cooking is not your forte and you are rather an eater than a culinary expert? It’s time to change the way you treat meals and discover the whole new world of savory dishes you can cook in the comfort of your own home. For that purpose, the Half Baked Harvest Super Simple cookbook by Gerard Tieghan can become your best guide!

A food photographer initially, Gerard Tieghan has soon retrained as a food blogger and made a successful career as a cook by building her own food blog and writing her first book, The Half Baked Harvest Cookbook. It didn't take long for this book to become a best-seller. With plenty of inspiring recipes, accompanied by professionally-made food pictures, it quickly found its loyal audience, offering them a no-fuss way of cooking and translating many all-loved favourites into more manageable and quicker dishes.

Overall, in this book, you will find 125 recipes of super-simple dishes (as the title suggests), ranging from breakfast ideas to pizza crusts to tasty meat dishes to flavorful veg meals and unforgettable desserts. Best of all, all these recipes are easy to cook, no matter your cooking experience, and use simple ingredients which you can buy in the nearest store or already have in your fridge.

With busy cooks and trending techniques in mind, Gerard Tieghan offers a choice of recipes for Instant pots, multi-cookers, and slow cookers, plus you get usual stovetop instructions that will inspire you to always try something new. Also, you'll find handy icons indicating the needed number of ingredients, cooking times, and cookware that will help you take over cooking and become a pro in a short while.

If you want to have everything you need to know about home cooking and American food traditions in one book, you’ll be hard-pressed to find a better option than the Betty Crocker Cookbook.

First published in 1950, this legendary cookbook has been popular for decades and stays strong today. It’s a cookbook your moms and grandmas used to cook after and it still has a lot to offer to modern home cooks. Though Betty Crocker is not a real person but a fictional character created for a food contest back in 1921, her identity is synonymous with quality and helpfulness when it comes to cooking. All in all, there have been published 250 Betty Crocker cookbooks, and this 11th edition is hands down one of the best of them.

What you’ll get is an impressive collection of as many as 1500 recipes on 640 pages. It’s a sort of culinary Bible that will teach you how to cook literally anything - from tried-and-true classic recipes to some contemporary favorites. Notably, despite such a big volume, the book is not a boring set of recipes but rather an exciting culinary guide that has passed the test of time and was updated to meet modern cook needs and make cooking more appealing and fun. Along with a plethora of recipes, the book features tons of practical tips and hints and provides a whole myriad of colorful and engaging pictures that will inspire you to cook and try something new.

All built around American culinary standards, the book is not the best option if you look for the dishes from other cuisines, yet, in terms of American cooking tradition, it has everything you need to know and even more. Here, you’ll find specific chapters devoted to breakfast and brunch, slow cooker recipes, vegetarian treats, and some quick meals you can toss off in less than 20 minutes. Each recipe you’ll encounter in this book provides nutrition facts and some expert tips on how to prepare and cook specific ingredients as well as offers different serving options and contains other interesting info which does not directly pertain to cooking. All this makes the Betty Crocker book a perfect match both for novices in search of easy-to-cook dishes and for advanced cooks striving to level up their skill.

A model, a TV-host, and an extremely popular Instagrammer with over 5 million followers, Chrissy Tiegen is real big on food and on cooking. In her blog and on her website, she not only shares tons of recipes but also posts videos of herself tossing off some new treats or modifying tried and tested dishes in her home kitchen. Her debut cookbook “Cravings: Recipes for All the Food You Want to Eat” is an absolute top-seller that evokes curiosity even among those who don’t know Chrissy Tiegen. So, let’s find out if it’s really worth the hype or it’s yet another book of fancy recipes from a celebrity.

What distinguishes Chrissy Tiegen's approach first and foremost is that she doesn't take food too seriously and treats cooking as something fun (just like many other things in her life).  In this book, she shares her one-time favs and signature recipes as well as favorite treats of her husband who is an R&B singer and her mother who is from Thailand and knows everything about spicy, flavorful, and zesty Thai cuisine. The tweak behind Chrissy Tiegen’s recipes is that she takes pretty simple, affordable, and easy to find ingredients and mixes them out in a bit extraordinary combos to fit the most sophisticated tastes of avid gourmets. On the other hand, though, all treats are quick and easy to whip up to meet the needs of busy cooks.

One more distinctive feature of this cookbook is a specific approach to healthy food. Although Tiegan claims that you won't find here a bunch of diet recipes, some way or another, most of her recipes are meant to be good for your health and friendly to your body as well. Thus, she replaces noodles with zucchini slices in lasagne and swaps mashed potatoes for mashed cauliflower to cut down calories and deliver the taste that bursts with a diversity of flavors on your taste buds.