Quick and Easy Illustrated Recipes for Winter

Lauren Stein is a Boston-based journalist and author whose charming new book, Fresh Made Simple(Storey Publishing: 2015), offers bright, fun flavors combined in recipes that are so accessible and easy to make, they’re not even written as traditional recipes. Instead, Stein’s collaborator, illustrator Katie Eberts, turns them into lively illustrations, presenting all the information you need in a way that will light up the visual pleasure centers of your brain. Take her recipe for homemade granola:

These presentations remind us that cooking should be fun! And their relaxed style will ease the anxiety of any beginning cook who can never get his or her dishes to come out looking exactly like the perfectly glossy ones produced by professional cooks and stylists for magazines and television  (yes, even Yankee uses stylists, though we do try to make all of our food look accessible). Stein’s stuffed fig recipe is another great example. Simple enough to make with your kids (if they don’t like goat cheese, try substituting cream cheese or mascarpone), they’re a lovely appetizer or healthy dessert alternative.

There are 74 other recipes in this charming collection, covering every season, soup to dessert. Now that winter is upon is, you have a new reason to get in the kitchen and play.