Meals You Can't Mess Up

Get comfortable in the kitchen with more than 100 impossible-to-mess-up recipes by Shay Spence, with a foreword by Ree Drummond

Cooking can often be time-consuming, expensive, wasteful, and stressful for those who are not practiced in the kitchen. In Meals You Can’t Mess Up, food and travel writer Shay Spence sets out to create dishes that are as foolproof as possible. He considers the four greatest recipe pain points identified by his social media followers—longer-than-expected prep and cook times, too many expensive ingredients, a mess of dishes at the end, and excessive prep work.

First off: no recipe in this cookbook calls for more than ten ingredients, and most can be cooked in just one pot or pan (and never more than two). Furthermore, each recipe falls into at least one of these categories:

30-ish Minute Recipes Chili-Lime Corn & Black Bean Tacos, Burst Tomato-Basil Tortellini with Burrata
6-Ingredient (or Less) Recipes Lamb Chops with Feta & Mint Orzo Salad, Cheesy Butternut Squash Pasta Bake
One-Dish Recipes Ratatouille with Baked Brie, Beer Cheese Broccoli Orzo Soup
No-Chop Recipes Cheater’s Chicken Parm, Cubano Dogs

This book gives you a collection of easy recipes that you can make to get yourself comfortable in the kitchen, or help you learn some new tricks if you already are. As you make your way through this book, you’ll find calm in the kitchen as you whip up one easy dish after the other, and if you don’t . . . well, at least now you know some super-quick, easy recipes to get you out of there as soon as possible.

Shay Spence is a food and travel writer with over a decade of experience in culinary and social media. After attending the Institute of Culinary Education in NYC, Shay spent seven years as the Food Editor for People Magazine. He now works as a full-time social media content creator, while securing bylines in mainstream publications such as People, Food & Wine and Travel & Leisure. Over the past few years, Shay has amassed over 1.7 million followers on TikTok and over 500k followers on Instagram by showcasing creative recipes, restaurants, and travel destinations through an expert lens. Shay was also a contestant on the second season of Gordon Ramsay’s Next Level Chef on Fox, where he was featured on ten episodes. His career highlights include writing two People magazine cover stories on Ree Drummond, the Food Network’s Pioneer Woman, and fulfilling a lifelong dream of going to Ina Garten’s house in the Hamptons to write a cover feature on her. He lives in Key West, Florida with his husband.