Title:	Staples + 5: 100 Simple Recipes to Make the Most of Your Pantry
	Author:	Tanorria Askew
	Published:	November 23, 2021, Alpha
	No. of Pages:	160
	Cover Price:	$18.99 Paperback, $9.99 Kindle

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Almost everyone keeps ingredients they use on hand in their pantry. Tanorria Askew takes advantage of these staples and shows readers how to do it at home in her cookbook, Staples + 5: 100 Simple Recipes to Make the Most of Your Pantry. The recipes in this cookbook make good use of the staples most of us keep on hand – she lists 35 ingredients that should be on your pantry shelves and some others that are nice to have (I was pleasantly surprised to find that I have everything in my kitchen from both lists). The ingredients are ordinary things such as flour, sugar, spices, potatoes, onions, etc., so it isn’t difficult to find them in any mainstream grocery store. Then Askew presents recipes using those staples as well as up to five other ingredients to create delicious dishes that almost everyone will love. The recipes have mostly southern roots with a bit of the Midwest thrown in, and there are some unique ideas for those who are tired of same old-same old boring meals.

Askew’s cute personality comes through in the chapters and in her notes prefacing each recipe, making this a fun cookbook to peruse as well as a fun cookbook to cook from. There are beautiful photographs of some of the dishes; the only negative to this book is that there aren’t enough. There are several recipes that should have been photographed so that cooks can see what the finished product should look like. Nevertheless, this is a good cookbook; it is well organized and the recipes are written in the traditional form so they are easy to follow. The ingredients are easy to find and it’s nice to know that most of them are already in the pantry waiting to be used.

If you are a cookbook collector or just like unique cookbooks, you’ll want to pick up this book.

Special thanks to NetGalley for supplying a review copy of this book.