Feast on Your Life

Kitchen Meditations for Every Day

In January 2026 the James Beard Award winning author of An Everlasting Meal Tamar Adler – whom Michael Pollan has said wrote ‘the best book on ‘cooking with economy and grace’ that I have read since MFK Fisher’ – provides a year’s worth of inspiration, comfort and wisdom in Feast on Your Life: Kitchen Meditations for Every Day (Swift Books, £18.99). In a literary devotional about finding moments of joy in the everyday activity of feeding ourselves and our loved ones, the beloved food writer, former chef, and Vogue contributing editor offers 365 entries that remind us day by day of the essential pleasures that can be found in measuring rice, picking cherries, or sharing a meal with people you love.

Feast on Your Life grew out of Adler’s struggle with depression and her husband’s suggestion that she document what delighted her, a mindfulness exercise that yielded immediate benefits. Around the same time, she started writing her popular weekly culinary advice Substack, The Kitchen Shrink, where she received variations of the same question: How can I love cooking more? Or How can I love it better? In Feast on Your Life, Adler helps readers discover (or rediscover) the joy and delight in the daily necessities of cooking and eating.

‘Delight in food, in eating, in cooking, in serving, in recognising our luck when we felt full, is available to all of us,’ says Adler.

Musings from Adler’s year of finding delight in the mundane include:

• A simple list answering the question ‘Why cook?’ with answers such as ‘to mend things,’ ‘because it fosters a useful mess,’ and ‘to make something of what’s left.’
• One of Adler’s most used recipes, for granola made with rolled oats, coconut, sesame seeds, and maple syrup, whose reliability and impossibility to mess-up makes her feel calm.

• The smells that fill her house after a morning of cooking breakfast for her family, what Adler refers to as the smell of ‘golden light’ she breathes in as she comes down the stairs – a reflection on the subtle joys in daily routine.

• Recipes fit for the colder months: Such as directions for what Adler says are ‘the most perfectly potatoey potatoes’ with thyme, rosemary, and garlic, beans with Sichuan chili crisp, and challah French toast that became ‘caramelised clouds’ in the plan.

PRAISE FOR AN EVERLASTING MEAL

‘Adler is the best kind of kitchen companion, someone whose warm and witty voice I want to carry with me as I cook’ Bee Wilson

‘Like Nigella Lawson’s How to Eat, it’s a book to gorge on for its quiet, gentle and uplifting wisdom’ Saturday Times Books of the Year – Tony Turnbull

‘A thought-provoking reflection on the meaning of cooking and eating’ Sunday Express – Charlotte Heathcote

‘An Everlasting Meal, was the present I gave most to people this year … I regard it as a sacred text! I can best describe it as the most beautifully written description of what cooking is all about, and what is actually is, with recipes. It has such wisdom and calmness and, yes, grace’ Nigella Lawson