Former Pittsburgher’s first cookbook features ‘doable’ recipes for every day
Like so many of us who fell in love with the Food Network in the 1990s, cookbook author Lidey Heuck consumed a lot of food media while growing up in Pittsburgh.
She also knew the joy of big, family-style Italian dinners, which were prepared on Sundays by her maternal grandfather, Bill Urrichio, and spent countless hours perusing her mother’s many cookbooks.
But she didn’t get busy in the kitchen herself until she went to a small college on the east coast of Maine, and needed a fun hobby to survive the town’s long winters.
“We started cooking in the communal kitchen as a way of passing time and to get together,” recalls Heuck, 32, of the dinner parties she threw for friends.
She certainly didn’t think of cooking as career path. Apart from becoming a chef like her two maternal uncles, who owned La Charcuterie in Shadyside, the premier Laforet in Highland Park and Vermont Flatbreads in the Strip District, the English and political science major couldn’t imagine what else she could do in the food world to make a living.
“I thought maybe I’d work in publishing,” she recalls on a recent phone call from New York’s Hudson Valley, where she now lives with her husband, Joe. Or, perhaps she’d follow in the footsteps of her parents, Marylynn Uricchio and Doug Heuck, who are both former Post-Gazette editors.
Enter Ina Garten.
Just before graduating in 2013, Heuck wrote on a whim to the celebrity TV host and cookbook author, asking for a job doing social media. Through a sixth-degree connection, the letter not only actually landed in the Barefoot Contessa’s hand in East Hampton, but Garten also just happened to be looking to add a third member to her culinary team.
Heuck got the job, and as Garten writes in the foreword of “Cooking in Real Life: Delicious & Doable Recipes for Every Day,” which lands on store shelves on March 12, “She was like a sponge, soaking up everything I could teach her about cooking, entertaining, flower arranging and the business of writing books.”
Eager to learn even more about food and people, Heuck left Garten’s employ in 2019 to embark on an “exploration stage” that found her writing more than 100
food stories for The New York Times and developing recipes for her blog, “Lidey Likes.” She also worked as a prep cook in Maine, served as a personal chef for a family of five and led virtual cooking classes during the pandemic.
“I wanted to get some different experiences in the food world to see what I might like doing,” she says.
What she came away with, and beautifully details in the pages of her cookbook, is that food doesn’t have to be complicated to be good or inventive. Even the easiest of dishes, she says, can make an occasion out of nothing.
Gorgeously illustrated with New York photographer Dane Tashima’s photos, Heuck’s first cookcook features more than 100 cook- and crowd-pleasing recipes using everyday, easy-to-find ingredients. Determined to make cooking as easy as possible, she also includes a pantry primer, advises on the best kitchen tools and offers tips throughout on shortcuts and food substitutions. There’s also a chapter on simple “addons” that will help turn a salad or grain into a satisfying meal.
“What I’m interested in today is the golden middle ground where joy and practicality meet — that’s what I mean by ‘delicious and doable’ recipes,” she writes in the book’s intro. “To share recipes that will meet you where you are.”
Two years in the making, the book grew out of a conversation Heuck had in 2021 with an editor at Simon & Schuster who was impressed with her food writing and hands-on work with Garten.
“It got me a lot of eyeballs,” she says.
After chatting about what the book could be and agreeing “accessible and friendly” was a winning idea, she spent all of 2022 writing and testing the recipes in her home kitchen. Every dish was photographed there, too, with friends and family sometimes included to evoke a homey, lifestyle element in its 275 pages.
“I wanted it to feel real and not like a set,” she says.
While a handful are old favorites, including the colorful Spaghetti with Sweet Cream Pesto pictured on the cover, a majority of the recipes are new. The goal was three-fold: to offer a good balance of ingredients that didn’t feel repetitive, to make it easy enough for beginning cooks to embrace and to sneak in enough twists that experienced cooks would love it, too.
“It’s like a puzzle,” says Heuck. “You sit down, look at this blank space and then fill it.”
To that end, users will find everything from straight-forward salad, seafood, pasta and dessert recipes to dishes that take a tiny bit more effort or count a longer list of ingredients. For vegetarians and meateaters alike, it’s a welcome addition to any cookbook collection.
One recipe that immediately caught my eye was for a crispy and gluten-free cauliflower cake seasoned with Moroccan spices and spicy harissa. I was also intrigued by a super-easy, rosemary-infused olive oil cake that true to Heuck’s description, proved “plenty sweet and very lemony.” My husband and I ate it both as dessert, and with a cup of coffee for breakfast.
Heuck hopes the cookbook will become a companion for the different reasons and times we cook; some things are well suited to a busy week while others aim to make a holiday or special meal shine.
However and whenever you step into the kitchen, “go for what appeals to you, and have fun with it,” she says.
Lidey Heuck will hold a book signing at Bass & Bennett Trading Company, 1900 Smallman St., Strip District, from 5-8 p.m. March 13. Tickets cost $35 and include a signed copy of the cookbook, along with small bites and a complimentary drink. Additional wine and cocktails will be available for purchase. More info: bassbennett.com ( search “Events”).