The Art of Eating In: How I Learned to Stop Spending and Love the Stove is now available for pre-order!
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The time is near! In February, Gotham/Penguin will release my book, a memoir of the culinary journey that I took on when I began Not Eating Out in New York – and practicing that as a strict rule. Its ambitious-sounding title is The Art of Eating In, but believe me, especially those who have followed this blog through thick and thin, there is much irony in “art.”

It’s also not a rehash of anything published (or eaten) on this site. Keeping in mind that so many of you have written, commented and approached me to ask what really goes on in the kitchen of not eating out, the book covers the entire two-year journey, starting with a bland burger and ending with an “Opposite Week” in which I ate everything from restaurants to conclude the fast. What you can expect to read: Messy relationship stories? Check. More “Reasons for Not Eating Out” and the subsequent reasons I gleaned from the experiment in its favor? Check. There will definitely be more about my family, who brought me up to cook. (I may have touched on these bizarre people from time to time, but my parents couldn’t have showed me more disparate cooking styles: my mom, who’s native to Taiwan and Chinese by heritage, is all on-the-fly stir-fries and hot sauce in everything, and my dad, total WASP from upstate New York, is all cookbooks and pies, lots of pies.) And, I’m adding all new recipes at the end of each chapter, so I’m saving the best for the book.

So if the thrifty recipes, ruminations, flops and rants that make up this blog start getting fewer and farther in between, it’s probably because I’m trying to write triple-edit the best recipes, rants, and all the aforementioned stuff above for the book. Or, it could mean that I’m just slacking off at both. Good chance of that.