Molly Yeh's Chickpea Tot Hotdish Is Pure Comfort Food

Welcome to The Pioneer Woman Cookbook Club! This month, we're featuring Molly Yeh, chef, food blogger, host of the Food Network show Girl Meets Farm, and cookbook author of Home Is Where the Eggs Are, available for pre-order. Read on to learn about how her perspective on food has changed since Molly on the Range and grab a delicious hotdish recipe just in time for all those fall potlucks.

Perhaps you've heard this, too: When you have children, everything in life changes. 

There's no more binge-watching your favorite Netflix shows or uninterrupted time spent piping buttercream onto scratch-made cakes. But what Molly Yeh did not anticipate was how important mealtime would become to her family. "No matter how busy life gets, sitting down to dinner as a family is one of my highest priorities," she says in the introduction of her new book, "right up there with dental care." 😂

When we sat down with Molly to discuss the book Home Is Where the Eggs Are (which is filled with fuss-free family recipes), she doubled down on that sentiment, explaining, "I come from a family of people who live to eat." As with so many families, food was seen as something more than just sustenance. "It was the centerpiece of all our holidays, a creative outlet, a window into our heritage and ancestry. And this is what I want to pass down to my kids."

Home Is Where the Eggs Are is the type of cookbook that makes you want to hang out in the kitchen with Molly Yeh, and not just because she might be listening to The Bee Gees. The pictures of her adorable family and farmhouse kitchen are certainly a draw, but they're not it either—it’s the collection of recipes that fits comfortably into busy family life that will make you come back to the pages again and again.

Recap: Molly's an Illinois native who grows up to pursue music at Juilliard, falls for a fellow Midwesterner, and (surprise!) leaves Brooklyn to return to the Midwest, where her husband, Nick, is a fifth-generation farmer—sounds like Ree Drummond can relate to that!

Like her Food Network show and blog before it, this book (and everything Molly touches) radiates with her light-hearted warmth and her mix of cultural recipes. "It really was about compiling recipes that we love as a family and that happens to be a mix of Chinese, Jewish, and farm-inspired recipes since that's what my husband and I grew up with," she says, "that's our comfort!"

So where did Home Is Where the Eggs Are get its name from? For one thing, it refers to the chickens on her farm who make the best eggs. But it's also "a nod to this idea that you can make a house feel like home if you cook something in it," Molly says, "it can be as simple as an egg! Just smelling the smells, hearing the sizzling, and sharing a meal with your loved ones and building a memory around it can make any space feel like home."

You won't pull out this cookbook, flip through the pretty pictures, and return it to the shelf. This is the type of book that will live a long, dog-eared life on your counter. When you're in one of those periods of feeling uninspired by your usual rotation, the book can snap you out of it by showing you a realistic balance of planned meals with space for leftovers and sometimes takeout. It's an intersection of needs that fits well with families or anyone who wants to prioritize having a few delicious home-cooked meals throughout the week (your editors, here, included).

During large gatherings or busy weeknights, she avoids stacks of dishes with the pure comfort of a hotdish—the all-in-one casserole recipe that combines "veggies, a protein, and a carb element, most famously Tater Tots." Take Molly's Harissa Chickpea Tot Hotdish, for example. This recipe comes from spending Labor Day weekend playing "lunch lady" to a crowd. In need of something that met everybody's dietary needs, she tinkered with the idea of hotdish to create this smoky harissa-spiced chickpea recipe covered in crispy, salty tots.  

It's a casserole that enters your repertoire when you want to impress a group with something delicious, yet surprisingly simple. It's also a weeknight dinner when you simply can't handle a mountain of dishes and just want to cook with what's already in the pantry.