I’m Daniela, a Food staff writer who has been cooking at home since I could push a chair up to the counter. I studied food history in college, went to culinary school and spent the first 10 years of my career working as a pastry chef. I love baking, but these days I spend a lot more time cooking. And much of that time is spent trying to make dinner feel more like fun than a chore. This newsletter will feature my favorite weeknight recipes — and they might just become your new favorites, too.
Here’s what you can expect to arrive in your inbox Monday through Thursday:
- A full, thoroughly tested, budget-conscious and quick recipe for a balanced meal that serves two to four and is easily scalable.
- Cooking tips, how-tos and technique deep dives to help you become a more confident cook.
- Shopping tips, ingredient substitutions and cooking shortcuts.
- Ideas for how to repurpose any leftovers.
- Jokes! Quotes! Playlists! Articles! Videos of cats making funny faces? And maybe even pictures of my dog, Frito.
Signing up is free, and it comes with perks: Do you have a question about a recipe? Need an idea for a substitution or want to debate the merits of the metric system over cups and teaspoons? Email me directly and let’s talk. I promise to do my best to respond to every email.
Maybe you’ve got a pile of cookbooks, recipes saved in a bookmark on your browser, and enough YouTube videos and TikToks to fill a weekend. You can still grow weary of the kitchen. Just the other day, I looked at a can of chickpeas, an ingredient I used to delight in, and wanted to fling it out the window. Instead, I took a deep breath and opened the can. A little over 10 minutes later, I had a creamy, tahini-scented hummus, a stack of pan-fried flatbreads (tender and spongy and done in minutes thanks to a scoop of yogurt), and a pile of carrot sticks and crunchy cucumbers.
My point is: If you feel exhausted just looking at your pantry and considering the same dinners you’ve been making for months, the Eat Voraciously newsletter can be the trick up your kitchen sleeve. It’s the email you forward to your significant other or roommate, hoping they’ll pick up the slack and make dinner for a change, the spark of inspiration you need to propel you to preheat the oven, to make something fresh, something good, something new to you.
Variety will be a constant theme — it’s the only way I can keep myself from getting into cooking ruts. And it reminds me that there’s so much I still don’t know about food and cooking: I’m always learning. So when I come across a new ingredient or technique, I’ll pass it along in the hope that it will inspire you, too.
But hey, sometimes dinner is just a fried egg over rice or toast, pickled peppers, and a few chunks of feta on the side. Sometimes it’s the slice of lasagna, stuffed with mushrooms and ricotta, that I find in the back of my freezer from months ago, thrice wrapped in Saran. It’s okay to take a night off. Whenever you want to jump back in, I’ll be here.
“We all eat,” the screenwriter and cookbook author Anna Thomas said, “and it would be a sad waste of opportunity to eat badly.”
Eating voraciously ensures you’ll eat well.
More weeknight cooking resources from Voraciously: