Midnight Chicken & Other Recipes Worth Living For

A book of recipes and reflections that reveal the life-changing happiness of cooking.

"Bridget Jones' self-effacing wittiness, Julia Child's companionable forgiveness and Sylvia Plath's poetic prose." --NPR
"A manual for living and a declaration of hope." --Nigella Lawson

There are lots of ways to start a story, but this one begins with a chicken.

There was a time when, for Ella Risbridger, the world had become overwhelming. Sounds were too loud, colors were too bright, everyone moved too fast. One night she found herself lying on her kitchen floor, wondering if she would ever get up--and it was the thought of a chicken, of roasting it, and of eating it, that got her to her feet and made her want to be alive.

Midnight Chicken is a cookbook. Or, at least, you'll flick through these pages and find recipes so inviting that you will head straight for the kitchen: roast garlic and tomato soup, uplifting chili-lemon spaghetti, charred leek lasagna, squash skillet pie, spicy fish finger sandwiches and burnt-butter brownies. It's the kind of cooking you can do a little bit drunk, that is probably better if you've got a bottle of wine open and a hunk of bread to mop up the sauce.

But if you settle down and read it with a cup of tea (or a glass of that wine), you'll also discover that it's an annotated list of things worth living for--a manifesto of moments worth living for. This is a cookbook to make you fall in love with the world again.

Ella Risbridger is a writer, editor and anthologiser. In a former life she was a beauty columnist for the i, a cancer columnist for the Pool, a sometime journalist for lots of places (Guardian, Observer, Prospect, Grazia, Stylist), a poet and a carer. She now lives and works in south-east London, where she has too many books and thinks a lot about getting a cat.

Ella's website is seldom updated and her Twitter is mostly abandoned, but she is often on Instagram. @ellarisbridger / ellarisbridger.com