This is a great cookbook for those of us who are looking for economical and delicious ways to use leftover food. There are recipes for using leftover fruits and vegetables and meats and even sweets. Highly recommend this cookbook for your collection.

The good news is, I don’t have to write a cookbook. The other good news is that you can buy Tamar Adler’s The Everlasting Meal Cookbook, Leftovers A to Z and have a better cookbook than I would write. It isn’t a coffee table book filled with artfully photographed food. It is an enormously useful cookbook that suggests uses for almost everything sitting in your fridge or pantry.

As much as I love cookbooks and spend hours reading recipes, I rarely actually cook from recipes. Tamara Adler’s suggestions work just fine for me. This is the rather loose and variable way I cook. For people who follow recipes exactly, Adler’s flexible recipes might induce some anxiety. I still think this would be an excellent cookbook to have in the house regardless. Who hasn’t been faced with aging, forgotten fruits and vegetables? Adler will give you ideas for using the whole celery bunch.

My housemate often exclaims in wonder at my ability to make leftovers interesting. I usually just shrug and say I like to cook. She pointed out one night that her late husband liked to cook too, but he hated leftovers. So I thought about it and realized that I don’t think of food as leftovers. I think of food as ingredients. I even after a lifetime of making meals out of what I have on hand, The Everlasting Meal Cookbook gave me a lot of ideas about how to reduce the amount of food I throw out even more. Now is a good time to bone up on making food stretch, and this cookbook will help.

I really love to cook but finding a cook book that is not heavily focused on hard to find ingredients can be hard to find. The Everlasting Meal Cookbook was perfect. It holds a wealth of knowledge for beginner cooks and cooks that are advanced. I have really upgraded my spice jar because of this book. 100% staple to have in my kitchen.

Thank you Scribner and NetGalley for the advanced electronic review copy of this great book. This a-z collection focuses on leftovers and how to repurpose them to create more nourishing, sustainable meals. I got some ideas I would like to try and hope that my family approves. It’s a good book to have around.

This is a great book to survive difficult times that we are living in. The author provides with valuable tips how to stretch a dollar and how to consume food with minimal or no waste. The recipes are simple and easy to follow. Great book to add to a home library or to give as a present. I definitely recommend it to all.

This is a blast to read! I garnered many idea of ways to use leftovers. Some sound interesting, others, well,…. Cole slaw soup might be pushing it. It seemed fruit, veg, grain and bean focused but all those have dairy/meat component so I would not consider this healthy. As a licensed dietitian, I have experience and education to back up that statement. I obtained some inspiration and plan to apply what I’ve learned here and refer back in the future. Thank you NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC

Not inspired or willing to read the entire thing. I found it boring and not the least bit inspirational.

Most of it was common sense stuff although I did like the conversion table.

I don't think that it is an exaggeration to say that Tamar Adler's revolutionary 2011 book of essays, An Everlasting Meal, deeply affected the way that I approached food. Over the years, I have continued to incorporate many of the ideas that she set forth about economy, avoidance of waste, creative use of leftovers, and transformation of ingredients into my daily cooking routines. Even today, years later, thanks to Adler, I wrap up the smallest amount of leftover salad dressing or sauce to use in my next meal. Adler's philosophy, which can be described as a nod to and a riff off of MFK Fisher's "How to Cook a Wolf," has now spread fully into the culture, but, like Alice Waters with her early emphasis on finding local, organic food, Adler was one of the first proponents of zero waste and purposeful use of ingredients that might at one time have been thoughtlessly tossed out.

Now, Adler's dictionary of suggestions for cooking up leftovers or vegetables/foods past their prime, based on the ideas of her original book of essays, will soon be available. I appreciated the chance to read an early review copy of this book, and I found many of her suggestions to be creative and clever. Part of me wishes that Adler had published this practical guide sooner, as I would have found it most helpful in the early days of my cooking journey, when I had fewer tricks up my sleeve, and before the internet made it easy to find suggestions for using fading ingredients or leftovers. But, certainly, better late than never. I can imagine that this food dictionary will be a great shelf reference for cooks working towards reducing waste in their own kitchens and learning a number of essential dishes and concepts that can be tweaked to fit whatever is in the fridge. This would be a particularly wonderful gift, paired with the original book of essays, for any person who is interested in thoughtful, purposeful eating well on a budget and honoring the food that comes into their life.

Thanks to the publisher and to Netgalley for making an early review copy available in exchange for an honest account.

What an amazing book! This is a book to browse and learn from as well as to keep on hand for a quick reference for a time when you are faced with leftovers that need recreating. Browsing will leave ideas in the back of your mind - I can see myself planning leftovers with the ideas in this book in mind. A wonderful resource

The Everlasting Meal Cookbook by Tamar Adler is a different kind of cookbook. This is specifically geared towards reducing food waste and repurposing leftovers and food scraps into delicious alternatives.
Pros:
Useful recipes for about anything edible under the sun
Great ideas for leftovers and scraps
Delicious ways to bring new life into old standbys

Cons:
May be intimidating to new or beginner cooks
Some ideas are a tiny bit off putting (i.e. scraping mold off jams and tasting the jam underneath)

Having made it my goal to reduce food waste, I thought I was good at using up food scraps and leftovers, But she introduced me to new ideas and I can’t wait to try some of these.

Thanks to NetGalley for the ARC in exchange for my honest opinions.

A valuable go to cookbook a book with great ideas on how to use all the food in our kitchen down to the last scraps.Great ideas and recipes a wonderful addition to your kitchen library.#netgalley #scribnerbooks

Clever idea for a book but I found it odd that there was little description on how any of the food was supposed to actually taste or visual cues about how it should look as it cooks? Yes, it uses up scraps but how is the flavor? How do I know it’s ready? Some of the times didn’t seem correct either. It was glaring as a recipe developer but a lay person they might trust the book too much.

An eco-friendly cookbook with a focus on using every last bit of ingredients in the kitchen. This book is organized alphabetically by ingredient for quick reference, but may best be enjoyed as a reference for the curious. It would be excellent an excellent read for the confident and budget savvy home cook who is enjoys perusing for tips and techniques. This one will appeal to the cook looking to reduce food waste with inventive solutions.

What a gem of a cookbook! Most of us know basic ways to use up leftovers but Adler takes it to a phenomenal new level. The book is divided into sections for what type of food it is, like vegetables or meats or snacks. There’s even a section of how to use your empty containers for best creative use of the contents still inside. There are recipes, suggestions, you name it, with delicious basic recipes and cooking instructions for all of the ingredients too.

Clocking in at hundreds of pages, there is not room for nutritional information (and the mix and match nature of the recipes makes this impossible anyway) or much in the way of photos. My ARC had gray rectangles in places where I assume photos will be but I can’t speak to their quality.

I also love that it incorporates so many foraged ingredients, from milkweed pods (a long time family favorite here) to amaranth greens to (gasp) pokeweed and more.

Highly, highly recommended.

I read a temporary digital arc of this book for review.