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"Half-Baked Harvest: Quick & Cozy" is another excellent cookbook by Tieghan Gerard
A few years ago, I bought a cookbook on Amazon that had some impressively high ratings—”Half-Baked Harvest: Super Simple.” After the first recipe I tried, I was googling its author, Tieghan Gerard, to see if she’d published anything else, because I knew whatever she had on the market belonged in my kitchen.
Half-Baked Harvest is more than a cookbook title—it’s a cooking blog with a huge community of followers who get treated to a new recipe every day from Tieghan, who spends her day tending to her homestead and cooking for her family.
Her newest cookbook, “Half-Baked Harvest: Quick & Cozy,” releases tomorrow, November 19. I had the opportunity to chat with Tieghan about her latest cookbook and the best kitchen tools she owns. I also got to review a copy of “Quick & Cozy” before its release, so I tried out a few recipes with my own family to see if this cookbook was as good as her others (spoiler alert: it is).
Tieghan Gerard
Tieghan Gerard’s fourth cookbook, “Half-Baked Harvest: Quick & Cozy,” is another incredible addition to her collection. Its recipes are easy to make and deliciously flavorful.
Quick & Cozy: The one-pot cookbook of your dreams
Comfort food is Tieghan’s speciality, and while all of her cookbooks feature those warm and fuzzy favorites, her latest book leans fully into all things cheesy, filling, and easy to prepare.
“This really is such a labor of love at this point,” Tieghan said. “I don't know what it is about this book, but it feels so special to me. I've really put so much of everything into it.”
You can feel Tieghan’s passion as she talks about her fourth cookbook. As one of 10 children, Tieghan is used to preparing large-batch dishes that need to please lots of different palates at once. The secret?
“Straightforward, quick and cozy,” Tieghan says.
This cookbook comes with 120 recipes that are exactly what you’d expect if you’re a Half-Baked Harvest fan, like I am. If you’re new to Tieghan’s cooking, you can expect a lot of filling entrees (like Sage Brown Butter Lemon Pasta), twists on comfort food favorites (like Sheet Pan Mac & Cheese with All the Crispy Edges), and richly decadent desserts (like Frosted Peanut Butter Brownies).
The common element that ties them all together is that they’re accessible—you don’t need to make dough for four hours to enjoy a delicious pizza in under an hour, you don’t need to simmer soup for six hours, and you don’t need to break out the grill to make chicken skewers.
“I think everyone can really find some recipes in this cookbook that they are just so excited to create and make and find doable at home,” Tieghan said. “I love to cook with real ingredients—using a lot of produce, really great meats, and things like that are really how I love to cook.”
As a new mother, I’m all for recipes that won’t take too long or produce way too many dishes. I’m having a love affair with one-pot and sheet-pan dishes, and in this space, Half-Baked Harvest excels.
“Nothing needs to be complicated to be delicious, you know,” Tieghan says. “There's just really simple, straightforward recipes with simple ingredients that you should have in your pantry or your kitchen and in your fridge — nothing's complicated.”
What I loved best while trying out this cookbook was that I was able to customize a few of the recipes to better suit my family’s taste without ruining any meal. We prefer chocolate ganache over frosting so we tweaked a brownie recipe a bit, and I can’t eat garlic (a true curse, believe me), so I had to replace it every time it appeared.
The recipes are approachable, quick, and—importantly—tasty, a trifecta that few cookbooks can effectively nail. But, as she has with her other three cookbooks, Tieghan absolutely knocks it out of the park.
Editor’s choice: The best 5 recipes to try from Quick & Cozy
Along with my beautiful at-home testers, my husband and my 14-month-old, we tested a handful of recipes from “Half-Baked Harvest: Quick & Cozy” to see how they held up in a real kitchen, under the pressures of real life (read: a toddler opening every single cabinet while I cook).
Here were the best recipes we tried out.
Creamy Turmeric Lemon Chicken & Orzo Soup
It’s soup season, and this recipe called to me. But I was very suspicious of it, to be honest. It’s a soup that only cooks for 40 minutes… surely that wouldn’t be enough time for deep flavor?
Turns out, it was pretty good. It’s packed with fresh herbs—sage, thyme, and rosemary—and loaded with vegetables (carrots, celery, and kale). It made enough to feed us for three nights in a row, without needing to re-add too much broth after each re-heat. It also calls for an optional parmesan rind to simmer with the soup, a small and delicious step that elevates the broth, especially after such a short simmer.
Pickled Pepper Pepperoni Pizza
Tieghan makes incredible pizza recipes. Too often cookbooks feature two recipes—pepperoni and margherita. But Tieghan always finds a way to offer 5-8 pizza recipes in her books, each of which are unique enough to serve several nights in a row.
This one adds smoked paprika to the base and calls for pickled roasted peppers (which you can buy on your own or make with her recipe), kalamata olives, and pepperoncini. I absolutely love that flavor combination—the olives added an unexpected but welcome bite.
Lemon Pesto Orzo with Buttery Walnuts and Kale
This is my favorite recipe from Quick & Cozy so far. It can be found in the vegetarian section, but—as I often do with vegetarian recipes—I added meat (some shredded chicken at the end).
This recipe is a perfect dish for cold days. It’s got creamy orzo, fresh basil, a kick of lemon zest, and buttery walnuts, which are so, so delicious. They make the dish and add a much needed texture to this creamy pasta.
Baked Cajun Chicken Skewers
I own a set of skewers but no grill, so they get little to no use in my kitchen. I was excited to try this recipe because I’m always on the hunt for a reason to use my skewers.
These were a sleeper hit with my husband and baby. They cooked extremely well in the oven and provided a strong punch of flavor. My only regret was the sauce—I can’t eat garlic, so I tried to make the sauce without it and it was not good (that’s my bad: don’t try to make a garlic parmesan sauce without garlic).
Frosted Peanut Butter Brownies
These brownies were so good I made a second batch immediately after finishing the first. This is another one I was initially a bit skeptical of. It calls for warmed peanut butter spread on the brownie (instead of a peanut butter mixture that’s more common for buckeye-type brownies), but it ended up working really well.
The brownies were deliciously gooey without being undercooked. The recipe calls for a chocolate frosting, but I prefer a ganache, so I cut the frosting and coated them with my favorite ganache. The results were incredible.
Tieghan Gerard’s kitchen staples
As a home chef, I’m always curious what tools the professionals use. I watch a lot of America’s Test Kitchen, where Le Creuset Dutch ovens line the shelves and wall-to-wall ovens sparkle in the background. So when I get the opportunity to chat with chefs, I like to hear what actually lives in their kitchens.
And, unsurprisingly, Tieghan Gerard uses a lot of the tools normal home cooks do.
“This is always the hardest question for me because I'm going to be honest with you—I just don't use a lot,” Tieghan said. “It’s so simple in my kitchen.”
She loves using wooden spoons, Pyrex dishes, Target measuring spoons, and solid mixing bowls.
“You need a sharp knife and you need a cutting board,” Tieghan said. When it comes to bigger needs, there are only three Tieghan considers must-haves: “The Crock-Pot, the food processor, and the stand mixer are definitely my go-tos in the kitchen when it comes to appliances.”
Tieghan adds that there’s one piece of cookware that she can’t live without—and it happens to be my all-time favorite piece of kitchen equipment.
“I kind of love a Dutch oven,” Tieghan says. “I find that most of the time, anything you can do in a Crock-Pot, you can almost do it easier in a Dutch oven, just because the oven has higher and lower temperatures and you can brown things — and that's really nice on my end.”
A Dutch oven can also go straight from the oven to the dinner table, Tieghan adds. Her favorite is the Staub Dutch oven, a gorgeous option and cheaper (yet equally powerful) alternative to the Le Creuset.
If you’re looking to splurge and you’re preferential to Le Creuset, Tieghan loves the pumpkin-shaped line of Dutch ovens that’s currently on sale at Williams-Sonoma.
Le Creuset
“Something about this design is just so cute,” Tieghan says. The pumpkin-shaped Dutch oven comes in two colors, orange and white, and makes a beautiful Thanksgiving centerpiece.
Fall cooking tips from Half-Baked Harvest
Tieghan’s newest cookbook, Quick & Cozy, has quite a few great recipes for fall—soups, stews, and flavorful roasts. But we asked Tieghan to share a few more fall cooking tips that she uses during this time of year.
Her go-to fall flavors? “I love cinnamon, like there's so much cinnamon in my recipes right now,” Tieghan said. “If I'm baking, I mean, literally like 9.5 times out of 10, there's cinnamon somewhere in there.”
It’s not an exaggeration; if you head to the Half-Baked Harvest blog, you can spot it in just about every recipe in the fall, like Brown Sugar Roasted Honeynut Squash.
“I'm using a lot of sage right now,” Tieghan added. “I use rosemary sparingly, but I like it. I think rosemary can be a little bit overpowering.”
And while many of us are using pumpkin for pies, cakes, and cookies this season, Tieghan prefers adding it to more savory dishes.
“I love to bake with pumpkin, but I think that everybody bakes with it and nobody cooks with it,” Tieghan said. “I think that it's actually great in a lot of savory dishes too.”
I asked her immediately for an example, because I hadn’t seen many savory pumpkin dishes in the fall before. She directed me to her blog, where three stood out immediately: One Pan Sesame Butter Chicken, Pumpkin Pasta Alla Vodka, and Crock-Pot Pumpkin Beer Braised Chicken.
Tieghan’s latest cookbook, Half-Baked Harvest: Quick & Cozy, is for sale now.
Tieghan Gerard
Tieghan Gerard’s fourth cookbook, “Half-Baked Harvest: Quick & Cozy,” is another incredible addition to her collection. Its recipes are easy to make and deliciously flavorful.
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