Make Every Dish Delicious: Modern Classics and Essential Tips for Total Kitchen Confidence

Shortlisted for the 2023 Taste Canada Awards

Recipes, perfected. A repertoire of reliable, classic recipes and fundamental techniques that deliver gorgeous results, every time, for cooks of every ability, in the tradition of Genius Recipes and Barefoot Contessa Foolproof.

Stop searching the web for what to cook for dinner. From the best roast chicken to the most sumptuous brownie, Lesley Chesterman’s perfected recipes have you covered—tonight, and always.

When Montreal’s favorite food critic, Lesley Chesterman, was approached ten years ago to write a cookbook, she laughed and said: “The last thing the world needs is another recipe for carbonara.” She never forgot the editor’s reply: “True. But I think they might like your recipe for carbonara.” That comment resonated, because carbonara, like so many dishes, is a recipe Lesley has worked tirelessly to get just right. Returning again and again to recipes and making small tweaks or big overhauls is what Lesley loves to do. And the result of a lifetime of tinkering is Make Every Dish Delicious, a cookbook that offers a repertoire of foolproof modern classics and a wealth of cooking knowledge to give everyone a helping hand in the kitchen.

Make Every Dish Delicious begins with deeply informative chapters on how to set up your kitchen and pantry, and how to work with fundamental ingredients and basics such as eggs, butter, stocks, and vinaigrettes. Lesley effortlessly demystifies multiple technical challenges (how to make an omelet, how to deep fry without fear, how to use—and not misuse—the all-important salt, and many more). From there, she takes you on a savoury and sweet journey of recipes encompassing modern classics such as her super simple carbonara, perfect pain de campagne​, show-stopping salt-baked bass, crowd-pleasing standing rib roast, stunning black forest cake, and gorgeous Gascogne apple tart.

Every recipe here is reliable, repeatable, and irresistible. Homemade no-knead bread and pizza dough? Yes, you can! Chicken Kiev (the easy way)? Of course! Cote de boeuf for two? Why not? Chocolate megamousse for a dessert sensation? Lesley’s got you. These are dishes to cook with total confidence for friends and family, every day. Let Lesley’s collection of perfected recipes become your very own.

Lesley Chesterman is a Montreal-based pastry chef and food writer. Her two most recent cookbooks, Make Every Dish Delicious and Un Week-End Chez Lesley, were awarded the 2023 Gold Medals in Taste Canada’s General Cookbook division, in the English and French categories. She was a food columnist and restaurant critic for The Montreal Gazette from 1999 to 2019, and her work has appeared in Gourmet Magazine, The Art of Eating, Eater, and other food media.