WELCOME TO OUR BOOK

Hello, beautiful reader,

Gabi and Miranda here. Welcome to our book! Thanks for buying it! Or maybe your cool aunt bought it for you as a graduation gift? Perhaps the delivery guy who drops off your weekly burrito gave it to you passive-aggressively with your last order? Maybe your mom sent it to you after having hacked into your email account and deciding you were incompetent. Are you yelling at your mom right now? Stop! Forgive her. But just for buying you this book (because you will like it). No need to forgive her for anything else. You can blame your parents, or anyone else, forever and never assume responsibility for anything! It will be healthy and fun. Just kidding. Unfortunately, at some point, you do have to grow up and take care of yourself. We know, we know, this is truly a horrific endeavor (no matter how old you actually are), so we’re here to help by teaching you how to cook. We’re not asking you to open your mail every day or even to go through the giant stack of papers sitting on your bedroom floor. We’re merely suggesting that you think about learning how to cook.

Keep reading! Don’t run away because cooking seems scary and/or you’re lazy. We get it and we agree: doing basically anything is terrifying. What are plans? Do you stick with them? You do? You’ve left the house before? Whoa. Well, for the rest of us slackers, we’re going to demonstrate how to cook fun, tasty, mostly healthy food in a manageable way so that you actually do it when you say you will. The trick is breaking things down into steps and doing a little bit at a time, starting with what to buy at the grocery store and going all the way to using your culinary skills to trick someone into falling in love with you forever.

Cooking is a thing you can do to truly treat yourself well. Do you have some vision of a perfect, put-together, chic, awesome version of yourself? Are you worried you’ll never become her? The only way you will is if you start acting like her now. You, lovely reader, deserve to have a nice meal when you come home from work, or wherever you go during the day (we don’t judge). It will make you feel better. We promise. Okay, we know this is all very corny, and we’re sorry about that. We promise the rest of the book won’t be like this. Okay, it might have some moments, but everyone just chill.

And we’re going to be here every step of the way, telling you which knife to use and how to tell if your meat is ready or if you’ll be getting salmonella (relax, you probably won’t). We’ll be there when your mascara is running because you’re chopping onions, or because you’re crying, or because you sneezed right after applying it. And we’re going to sprinkle all our recipes with interesting musings and embarrassing anecdotes to keep you entertained. We’re going to be your friends. Your kitchen friends, your hot mess kitchen friends. Your best friends? No, no, this isn’t like a Her type of scenario. Have real friends.

We’re excited to hang.

XOXO,

Gabi and Miranda