ONE OF THE best cooking tips I’ve ever received came during one of the lowest times of my life.

Faced with a sudden medical crisis, I was strangely obsessed with how I was going to put dinner on the table for three small children during months of recovery.

A friend said, “Cheese and crackers can be dinner.”

I thought about this revelation a lot while reading Leanne Brown’s new cookbook, “Good Enough” (Workman Publishing, $19.95), a combination of essays and recipes on “embracing the joys of imperfection. and practice self-care in the kitchen”.

I had met Brown when he visited Seattle years ago for his groundbreaking first cookbook, “Good and Cheap,” which focused on budget meals and was distributed to food banks nationwide. The bestseller was curated around a $4/day SNAP (formerly food stamp) budget, and is still available for free download at books.leannebrown.com/good-and-cheap.pdf.

I had no idea that Brown suffered from depression and exhaustion at the time, or that someone so resourceful and helpful could be overwhelmed with daily cooking and the constant mental and physical tasks that surrounded it.

His later lessons on reframing old opinions and rigid rules might be a relief to anyone feeling wiped out or overwhelmed. That describes… quite a few of us these days.

As Brown says, “Cooking is good, but eating is essential.” We can dine on “assemble-only” meals, like the ones I had found so useful: cheeses and crackers, dips and spreads, fresh fruits and nuts, hard-boiled eggs sprinkled with salt or dipped in vinaigrette. (True confessions: I buy cases of pre-cooked, peeled eggs at Costco.) Depending on our own desires and abilities on any given day, we may also find pleasure in cooking more traditional or elaborate meals — if that’s what that we choose.

I tend to think of cooking as both a repetitive necessity and a delightful pastime, but these schools of thought don’t always work simultaneously. Sometimes dinner is an adventure or an experience or a labor of love; sometimes it’s an egg salad sandwich. Sometimes the main course takes time, but the greens come from a bag.

Brown urges readers to acceptance above all else: to be kind to ourselves, to feel gratitude, to let go of perfectionism and other people’s ideas of what our dinners should look like.

“There is no bad home cook,” she writes.

I particularly liked his “TL;DR” approach to each recipe, giving a high-level summary of how it works. (It comes from the Internet acronym “Too long; did’t read,” followed by a sentence summarizing the gist of a long piece.) The relaxed nature of his TL; DR reminds me of recipes from my grandparents’ days, which get flak for being imprecise, but are also sometimes more flexible and useful and easy to remember because of it. These quick recaps are how I would tell a friend how to cook a dish.

I’m so grateful and lucky to have passed our own days of crisis and crackers, with kids old enough now to have their own dinner if that were to happen. We eat a lot of tasty cooked food. I might as well look for random ingredients in the fridge and pantry: pita and hummus; tomatoes on pre-sliced ​​mozzarella; a handful of soft and sweet Medjool dates; maybe a can of marinated asparagus or stuffed grape leaves; a quick dish of roasted broccoli or asparagus. I once apologized a little about the random assortment – just like Brown would say I don’t need to be – and my eldest surprised me by saying, “I love dinner parties like this. -this.

Asparagus with honey and cheese
Makes 4 servings as a side dish

TL; DR: Roast the asparagus at 400°F for 5 minutes. Sprinkle with grated Gruyere and roast again until the cheese is melting and crispy.

1 bunch of asparagus
1 tablespoon of honey
1 teaspoon fine sea salt
2 teaspoons extra virgin olive oil
½ cup grated cheese

1. Preheat oven to 400 degrees F. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper or a silicone baking mat.
2. Trim and discard the woody end of each asparagus tip to prepare for roasting.
3. Arrange the trimmed asparagus tips in a row on the prepared baking sheet. Drizzle them with honey, salt and olive oil. Go in there with your hands and rub the honey, oil and salt on all the spears, then put them back in a neat row (rather).
4. Roast until asparagus is nicely green, about 5 minutes. Take it out of the oven and sprinkle it with grated cheese. Roast again until the asparagus is super shiny green, with a few small dark bits at the top, and the cheese is melted and bubbly, 5 more minutes. Serve immediately. I usually eat about half of the spears straight from the pan, which burns my fingers and tongue.

– Excerpt from “Good Enough. A Cookbook”, by Leanne Brown. Workman Publishing, 2022