Taking the Guesswork Out of Mealtime
By inspiring busy people in the kitchen, Caroline Chambers ’07 has turned her top-ranked food-and-drink newsletter into a highly anticipated cookbook.
As a recipe developer, cookbook author, and the creator of the popular Substack newsletter What to Cook When You Don’t Feel Like Cooking, Caroline Chambers ’07 has written hundreds if not thousands of recipes, drawn from a seemingly endless reserve of notes, observations, and memories of meals.
Food is never far from her mind. During lunch, her thoughts sometimes drift toward ideas for dinner. She inhales cookbooks and routinely probes restaurant menus. When dining out, she’s not above grilling servers about the dishes on offer, down to the final pinch of salt. All of this information makes its way into an elaborate ongoing document of ideas, notes, and photos of food that contain the kernels of potential recipes. Sometimes years pass before Chambers dusts off treasures from her cache of research.
“Recently I found notes from a trip we took to Israel five years ago,” says Chambers, a wife and mother of three young boys. “I found this hummus-shakshuka mashup thing we ate there. I made it and am working on it for the newsletter.”
Building on the success of her weekly newsletter, which has more than 190,000 subscribers, Chambers released her second cookbook, What to Cook When You Don’t Feel Like Cooking, on August 13, accompanied by a multi-city book tour. Like the newsletter, the book promises its readers complete, delicious meals that can be prepared in less than an hour. Recipes mostly require twelve ingredients or fewer, with the use of pots and pans kept to a minimum. Chambers also provides an array of possible ingredient swaps and other tips to assist anyone who wants, or needs, to improvise.
“I do a lot of little hacky things that make life easier and cleanup simpler, and people have come to trust me for it,” she says.
A self-taught cook who has run her own catering company and styled food for The New York Times, Chambers can’t quite specify where her ability to conceptualize new dishes comes from. “It’s like being a writer or an artist,” she says. “I would never know what to do with a blank canvas, but I can look at food and know what could go with what. It speaks to me.”
Part of that ability comes from a lifetime of making food for, and with, the people she loves. Her mother was an adventurous cook who placed a high value on eating meals together as a family. Helping her put dinner on the table was always a task Chambers embraced, and she learned from a young age the satisfaction of feeding people and watching them take pleasure in her creations – something that continues to motivate her.
“We live in a small home in California, but we have friends over all the time, because I still get such a thrill from feeding people,” she says.
Chambers’ ability to connect with people through food ballooned through the popularity of the recipes she shares online. She might have never started posting recipes if not for changes in the business of book publishing. Despite the success of her first cookbook, Just Married: A Cookbook for Newlyweds, which was published in 2018, Chambers’ next pitch was met with skepticism.
“Publishers wanted me to already have a following because they didn’t want to do any of the marketing themselves,” she says. “They wanted to be able to presell 20,000 books without lifting a finger.”
At first, Chambers bristled, but then the COVID-19 pandemic struck, and the budgets for her steady recipe development jobs for magazines and brands evaporated overnight. “I started posting tons on social media and growing my own audience, and I grew a nice, loyal following,” she says.
She soon launched her newsletter, and within a couple of years, despite the number of influential chefs and food journalists on the platform, What to Cook climbed all the way to the top to become Substack’s No. 1 food and drink newsletter.
By this time, publishers were contacting her, eager to offer her a book contract. Chambers didn’t even have to write a proposal for her new cookbook. “The publisher told me my Substack was the proposal,” she says.
Writing a cookbook presents a much bigger challenge than creating one recipe per week, Chambers says. “It’s super-consuming, but I genuinely love my job so much. I love good food. I love talking about it and what goes into it. I think about food all of the time.”
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Adam Grybowski is a freelance writer based in Lawrence Township.