In a world of ever-expanding ethnic cuisine frontiers, specialty diets, and foodie trends, Deb Perelman’s “Smitten Kitchen” is as close as modern American cookery gets to a universal. Perelman is a home-cooking everywoman with indefatigable rigor, irrepressible enthusiasm, a tiny Manhattan kitchen, and great wit. Her massively popular blog and one previous cookbook boast an incredibly deep bench of cult-status recipes. Her Butternut Squash Galette is the millennial Chicken Marbella. And now, Smitten Kitchen Every Day: Triumphant and Unfussy Favorites (Knopf, $35) follows the birth of Perelman’s second child and a busy season of life, and is Exhibit A of Perelman’s appealing approach to “everyday”: never over-precious, but never, ever, simply rote. You’ll find street-cart style chicken and rice, dry-rub sweet potato steaks, a sushi cobb salad, polenta-baked eggs, and a number of other mains, vegetarian or no, that are eminently scalable. There is a whole passel of inspired sturdy salads that are just as easily served at a dinner party as they are taken to work every day for lunch. And of course, confident, cheeky desserts: caramelized plum tartlets, “bake sale winning-est gooey oat bars,” chocolate pecan slab pie.
