One great cookbook: 'I Dream of Dinner (so you don't have to)'

Every cookbook aims to inspire. Sometimes that entails gawking at luxurious, 22-step cakes that you know you will always covet but never bake. Other times that means staring into the middle distance as you imagine assembling a labyrinthine multi-component dish you ate at your favorite restaurant.

Let's give a hearty cheer, then, to the cookbooks that embolden when we have zero interest in cooking, despite knowing we already have the ingredients to make something from near-nothing. Ali Slagle's "I Dream of Dinner (so you don't have to)" is a paragon of this genre.

Start from the end

Each tier of information in "I Dream of Dinner" strives to reverse-engineer how cooking a delicious meal works, so you can do the same. Take the Skillet Broccoli Spaghetti. In bold in a column to the left of the directions is a streamlined list of core ingredients: garlic, broccoli, butter, anchovies, spaghetti, Parmesan. No amounts, and no details about how to prep these items.

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Then Slagle runs through the directions, with those ingredients bolded and the amounts of each included. Her imperatives are clear, replicable: "Roughly chop the florets so even the biggest pieces fit on a soup spoon." The resulting pasta is rich, green and satisfying. You have just learned how to make a simple, congenial meal.

Slagle — not satisfied with this kind of teaching alone — includes below the recipe a box dubbed "How to make any pasta in a single pan," stripping the approach down to its most general blueprint and showing a reader how to use the technique in myriad ways. Sure, you learned to make pasta in a single skillet when you cooked that spaghetti with broccoli. But Slagle wants to not only pat your hand, she wants to give you a gold medal for future successes. This is kitchen empowerment.

Eight entry points to endless cooking possibilities

The same shrewd approach binds the book's eight chapters. They are eggs, beans, pasta, grains, vegetables, chicken, beef, pork and lamb, and sea creatures. Rather than vaulting into recipes straightaway, the chapters are divided into sub-chapters according to technique. So the eggs chapter comprises Beat, Soft boil and Fry hot.

Across the two pages that set up the Fry hot chapter, Slagle tells you how to make her favorite style of fried egg, all crisp with its edges "rippled and golden brown." She also encourages you to use any kind of fat, really, including pepperoni, and reminds you that you can fry an egg on something else, like a raft of shredded potatoes, grated cheese or "sizzling breadcrumbs." Finally, she cajoles you into seasoning that frying fat with another ingredient, say, spices, curry paste, hard-stemmed herbs of chile. Flavored oil is the best oil.

The central technique established, Slagle then presents a collection of smart, laid-back fried-egg recipes like Egg Sliders, Garlic Bread Egg in a Hole with Mushrooms and Crispy Potato, Egg & Cheese Tacos. Every chapter in "I Dream of Dinner" operates the same. It's like 400 pages of mom holding your hand on the first day of school. Everything is going to be OK. Just jump.