Quirky and Cool New Cookbooks

Thug Kitchen: The Official Cookbook, by Thug Kitchen
It’s frustrating to open a cookbook only to realize you need three gadgets and five kinds of herbs for every single recipe. Thug Kitchen, based on an award-winning food blog (warning: it contains lots of cursing), cuts out the hype and makes vegetarian eating accessible. If you love the profane, funny blog, or just want to get something delicious and healthy on the table between the end of the workday and the beginning of Modern Family, then Thug Kitchen is ready to guide you from door to dinner with attitude. Roasted beer and lime cauliflower tacos, anyone?

Prune, by Gabrielle Hamilton
Located on New York’s Lower East Side, beloved, postage stamp-sized restaurant Prune is the domain of Gabrielle Hamilton, the hardcore chef behind gorgeous memoir Blood, Bones & Butter. Prune reveals the recipes that made the woman an award-winning chef before she was a published author, and it does so with a twist: the recipes haven’t been scrubbed and polished for the home cook, but appear here just as they do in the restaurant, covered over with Hamilton’s helpful scrawls imparting info, advice, and instruction to her cooks. It’s a delicious glimpse not only into a professional kitchen, but into the mind of a food genius, and it offers a mix of high- and low-maintenance recipes, many of which will find their way into your everyday arsenal.

The Portlandia Cookbook: Cook Like a Local, by Fred Armisen, Carrie Brownstein, and Jonathan Krisel
Portlandia is a hilarious Portland-set sketch show about the famously weird city’s incredibly earnest locals. If you’ve seen the show, you might expect to take any recipe in a spinoff book with a grain of locally sourced salt. But while this book will make you laugh, its recipes are for real. It’s full of beautiful photography, in-character writings, and recipes for Portland-inspired food. And yes: it can teach you how to pickle. Just remember, no artisanal pickle jar is complete without a bird on it.

Orange Is the New Black Presents: The Cookbook, by Jenji Kohan, Tara Herrmann, Hartley Voss, and Alex Regnery
If your favorite character on memoir-turned-Netflix binge-watch Orange Is the New Black is Red, and you suspect you could make a pretty passable lasagna out of nothing but government-issue bulk goods, let this cookbook be your new kitchen guide. Recipes inspired by plot twists and beloved characters (Miss Claudette’s Coconut Cake, Red’s Chicken Kiev) are illustrated by photos highlighting moments from the hit show, and the book also includes quirky additions for the superfan, like Taystee’s reading list, and bits of prison trivia that will get you good and primed for the day season 3 finally hits.
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