Good Things: Recipes to share with people you love by Samin Nosrat

Good Things lives up to its name – it’s full of great recipes for food to be shared “with people you love”. With over 100 recipes, enticing photos, and a colourful cover, Samin Nosrat’s new cookbook will lift your spirits as well as your skills. She expands on the ideas in her best-selling Salt Fat Acid Heat and offers new insights and recipes, from simple to more complex.

The nine section headings continue the ‘good’ theme, from Good Things Come in Small Packages (such as dressings and pastes to drizzle or stir in) to All Good Things Come to an End (desserts). There are even Good Things to Keep Up Your Sleeve: new twists on basic ingredients such as chickpeas, noodles and rice.

Colours, flavours and textures are central to Nosrat’s recipes. She promises that her life-changing pickled onions will add extra brightness to any dish. Her zesty coriander, garlic and chillie-based Green Sauce will perk up rice and noodles, fish, chicken, vegetables, slaws and salads.

Nosrat shares her favourite technique for one of the smallest of good things, a boiled egg, alongside recipes for Crème Fraiche Devilled Eggs and a classic egg salad. Thirsty guests might enjoy Nosrat’s Sweet and Sour Mint Shrub syrup, which can be mixed with liquor or sparkling water.

While certain recipes must be followed step by step, others are easy to adapt and Nosrat encourages substitution and experimentation. Some ingredients in Good Things are unlikely to be available in New Zealand because – unlike Nosrat – most of us don’t have a nearby Mexican or Middle Eastern grocer. Yet our city supermarkets often have acceptable alternatives in the international aisle, and ordering online is also an option.

Alongside traditional recipe formats, Good Things includes creative mix-and-match approaches. The Roasted Vegetable Salad Matrix, for example, recommends choosing one or more of ten roasted veges as a base, adding a selection of crunchy vegetables, slathering one of Nosrat’s sauces, dips, or whips onto the platter, and scattering crumbled, shaved, or torn cheese on top.

There’s a whole section on bread, from focaccia to flatbreads. The Sky-high Foccacia, developed for Nosrat’s Salt Fat Acid Heat documentary series, looks tempting and apparently freezes well.

If you’ve never made focaccia, don’t let [the] technical jargon scare you off. The beauty of this one-bowl recipe is that it requires only patience to achieve perfection. There’s no stand mixer required, no endless kneading. One bite, and you won’t believe you’re not in Italy.

Nosrat shares behind-the-scenes stories from restaurant kitchens around the world, tales that star her vegetable-gobbling pup Fava, and memories that draw on her Persian heritage. She celebrates small joys: a hand-carved spoon gifted from Denmark, freshly dug new potatoes, a bouquet of wildflowers to bring nature inside.

As a teenager visiting Tehran, Nosrat bonded with her grandparents over their shared love of Barbari, a dense flatbread sprinkled with sesame or nigella seeds. The book has her version of this flatbread, which she suggests goes well with her Marinated Feta or Apricot and Noyau Jam. Other Persian-influenced recipes include Persian-style Herbed Rice.

Nosrat offers practical advice from her years of working as a chef and a teacher in commercial and home kitchens, including a list of essential ingredients and tools. Her tips for making fresh produce look attractive are simple and effective. “We eat first with our eyes”, she says.

As a rule, avoid straight lines and blunt cuts … Let the natural shape of an ingredient guide your choices about how to approach it. … Crumble pecans into large pieces instead of chopping them … instead of slicing a halved avocado for a salad, scoop out asymmetrical spoonfuls … tear an ingredient instead of cutting it.

While Salt Fat Acid Heat features striking hand-drawn illustrations, Good Things has vibrant photos that show the final dish. At around 460 pages it is a hefty book, but the pages stay open fairly well. Not all pages are numbered, so using the index to find a particular recipe can involve a bit of flipping from page to page.

Nosrat admits that most nights she cooks “extraordinarily simple” food, often meals that take only a few minutes to prepare. Good Things has many fast and flavourful ideas for turning a meal into something special, so you can spend less time in the kitchen and more time enjoying the company of your friends and family.

The beauty of cooking is that it’s a vessel for both time and attention. Cooking for someone,  or sitting down for a meal together, is about more than nourishment – it’s a way to share what’s most valuable to you with the people you care about.

Reviewer:  Anne Kerslake Hendricks

Penguin Random House