Daphne Oz - The Happy Cook: 125 Recipes for Eating Every Day Like Its the Weekend

for mommy and grandmommy,

the original happy cooks, around whose dinner tables

I will always be in paradise

For me, cooking has always been a celebration, from start to glorious, edible finish. Im the girl who loves to grocery shop. Euphoria is the bounty of a late summer farmers market. I see nothing wrong with planning vacations around meals I want to eat, plotting lunch at breakfast and dinner at lunch. The level of joy I get from something as simple as the perfect slice of pizza is right up there with the way normal people feel when their team wins the Super Bowl. Im as excited by Michelin stars as I am by locals-only dives, because this mouth of mine will never tire of talking about and tasting and chasing and exploring and loving wonderful food.

I grew up around a dinner table that at the holidays included nearly thirty immediate family members, a perpetually hungry and boisterous crowd who rarely left the kitchen. It was our therapy center, the rec room, the stage, the ring, and the only place I ever wanted to be.

When I brought my husband, John, home to meet everyone a few months into dating, he may have had a moment of pause when he saw there was no limit to the amount of excitement we could generate over a humble but impeccably balanced egg sandwich. But he came to appreciate that celebrating with food was not an occasional thing for our clanit was a daily necessity, a way of life. And luckily, he decided he wanted in.

Now, we get to slurp ramen together at our favorite neighborhood haunt, picnic with a hodgepodge assortment of edible loot, have date night with our version of a memorable pasta from an Italian adventure, and nosh on leftovers for a midnight snackand teach our kids to do the same!

This is all to say that a bad meal depresses me. Every meal is a chance to bond with the people I love over plates worth remembering. And with so many delicious things to try, I refuse to waste even one bite on food that is only fuel and no fun.

Ive been to culinary school and studied integrative nutrition, but my approach to food is as a jubilant eater, first and forever. My culinary education began at my mothers elbow at the stove. Both she and my grandmother are wild cooks, throwing a splash of this and a dash of that into pots and pans, turning out delicious dishes full of heart and flavor. Yes, they had to feed a crowd, but they made cooking exciting and personal, a liberty rather than a chore.

They taught me that a happy cook is casual and confident. Her meals are flavorful, unfussy, and often improvised. If she gets lost in conversation and the pasta sauce is forgotten and burns, shes at the ready with a simple blend of garlic, olive oil, and chile flakes. The happy cook recognizes that necessity is the mother of invention, and that the best meals may rise from the ashes of a few memorable mishaps.

And thats still how I think about the best home cookingtheres no point in creating a meal whose process is so rigid that it robs the cook of all the fun and freedom this time should represent. To be a happy cook is to make your kitchen your own.

Thats where this book comes in. When I wrote my last book, Relish: An Adventure in Food, Style, and Everyday Fun, my focus was on finding easy ways to do little things a little bit better across my entire life, from my home to my wardrobe, from my relationships to my career, and beyond. Of course, this journey started with food. Life had gotten cluttered and busy, and I found the easiest place to start to take it back and elevate it was by making simple improvements to my meals in ways that made them everyday celebrations. With the goal of maximizing every moment on the path to happiness, food paved the way for the rest of the process to flow.

After Relish came out, I discovered my readers felt the same way. I heard from newly minted hostesses who scrapped overwrought, stressful meals in favor of sangria and a bowl of chili for easy gatherings; gents who had never cooked before who now had a signature dish; moms who had been relying on the same menu plan week after week and were spicing it up with great results; even grandmas who thought they wouldnt like a new recipe they saw, gave it a spin anyway, and now get requests for it from family and friends. The thing I heard most often from these readers? Cooking makes me happy. I couldnt agree more.

That simple sentence got me thinking: Cooking at home can feel overwhelming, or obligatory, or routine, or make us nervous when the kitchen should be the place we feel most empowered to make the choices we want, experiment, and live on the edgewhats the worst that can happen? I think our problem is all in the framingwe see cooking as a duty to be mastered, rather than seeing it as something to be enjoyed along the way, with a delicious reward at the end. The Happy Cook is as much about sharing my favorite everyday celebration meals with you as it is about giving you license to personalize and discover your own.

Part of this personalization involves taking the time to develop a way of eating and cooking that makes us feel good, inside and out. People constantly ask me, But what do you really eat? They know I have this connection to healthDr. Oz for a dad will do that to you!and that I care passionately about the quality of what goes into my body, especially now that Im also feeding little mouths. I used practical healthy eating strategies to lose forty pounds in college, and have kept it off for the last decade (two fifty-pound weight-gain pregnancies notwithstanding). But they also know that I categorically refuse to eat food that isnt delicious. Im not looking to outlaw every last drizzle of oil, pat of butter, sprinkle of salt, or spoon of sugar. I dont count calories or grams or ounces with my food. But I still want to feel strong in my skin and look good in my clothesso how does that work?

The compromise for me has always been to take the healthy essentialsfresh fruits and veggies, lean proteins, a selection of grains and beans and seedsand flavor them with just enough of the decadent indulgences we all crave to make them crave-worthy in themselves. This is how I eat healthybut even more, its how I eat happy.

These days, I cook in a wild, wonderful kitchen. I have visions of slinking around the kitchen in a silky dress, licking spatulas of frosting and swooning over the perfect crown roast, doing my ultimate domestic goddess act. But most days, Im cooking in an old T-shirt and sweatpants with maybe an apron to catch some of the spills, tripping over toys, and rushing to get something on the table. Its the domestic goddish version, and it is sometimes chaos, but it is always fun! And the food is just as delicious.