Any successful food blogger will tell you the lengths they go to make sure their recipes work.
Nagi Maehashi takes that commitment to a new level. Her current record for re-making a recipe until it meets her standards (for vanilla cake, currently on her website) stands at 89 times.
That tidbit, which she shares in the introduction to her second cookbook, “Delicious Tonight: RecipeTin Eats: Foolproof Recipes for 150+ Easy Dinners” (Countryman Press, $35), helps explain her success.
She now has more than 5 million social media followers and her New York Times bestselling debut cookbook, “Dinner,” was awarded 2023 Australian Book of the Year. During the pandemic, she launched RecipeTin Meals, a food bank with a team of full-time chefs who produce and donate some 130,000 meals annually to vulnerable people as her way of giving back.
Born in Japan and raised in Sydney, Maehashi left the corporate finance world 10 years ago to start RecipeTin Eats with no culinary credentials other than a passion for coming up with quick, creative, budget-conscious meals. A litany of offers to star in TV shows and endorse big-name brands followed. Yet she’s turned them all down.
She prefers to remain homebound, she explains, obsessively developing and fine-tuning recipes with her beloved golden retriever Dozer (a fixture throughout her books and website) by her side. A quick scan through seductively photographed recipes such as Firecracker Beef and Cabbage, Chicken Guinness Stew, Chili Garlic Eggplant and Strawberry Swirl Shortcake reveals her knack for connecting with a broad swath of cooks. Her captivating descriptions throughout make it tough to decide which to try first.
I found her sticky, savory, Honey Pepper Chicken a good place to start. It’s super fast as promised and includes her viral and versatile Charlie Stir-Fry Sauce, which comes with its own chapter and handy template for building your own one-pan meals with whatever you have on hand.
When it comes to nailing the kind of recipe busy people are hankering for at the end of the day, it seems Maehashi has perfected the recipe.
Susan Puckett is a cookbook author and former food editor of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Follow her at susanpuckett.com.
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