Today my third cookbook, Smitten Kitchen Keepers, comes out and thank goodness, because it’s been impossibly hard to keep it from you this long.

It feels downright unfair that I figured out how to make the best molasses cookie — thick, tender, but also one-bowl, no hand-mixer required, the kind that makes your whole home smell like the holidays — and you’re only finding out about it today. My favorite pot roast is in there; sometimes I add rice shortly before it’s done for a truly one-pot meal-of-a-braise that feels perfect for this cold week. There’s a warm hoagie that’s practically a vegetarian cheesesteak. The most perfect chocolate chip cookie I could possibly dream up is there (it has salted walnut brittle inside). A deep dish, actual doorstop of a broccoli cheddar quiche that serves a crowd and an egg salad, just for us. The easiest three-layer chocolate party cake that could ever exist is filled with a salt-flecked milk chocolate buttercream and it’s designed to fit in the bottom of a shopping bag so you can take it everywhere with you. The actual craziest thing I’ve suggested you do with cabbage (salt, vinegar, and char it), might lead to the craziest thing you do with cabbage (eat it from the pan, standing up). There are cream cheese and jam challah buns that make me think of my dad and there’s a pound cake that I hope could be worth the cover price alone.

They’re all, to me, keepers — the kind of recipes that you make and know instantly that you’ll want them to be part of your repertoires forever. For 17 years on this site, I’ve paid close attention to what happens when we are in kitchen and I try to apply everything I’ve learned about how to make shopping easier, cooking more doable and enjoyable, and the outcomes more reliably delicious. Because if you hate making the recipe — if the process was persnickety and you dirtied every bowl in your kitchen — it barely matters if the result was otherworldly, you’re going to avoid it. And I want these to be recipes you, above all, love to make.

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