7 Questions with Caroline Chambers!

One quick Down to Earth announcement before I get to my exciting Q&A with Caroline Chambers.

You all have showed up over the past weeks for my debut romance novel and it’s meant the world. It has been SO FUN to put this very sweet (and spicy!) book out into the world. I have one more local event coming up at the end of the summer — Saturday August 29th at Blue Heron Books in High Falls, NY at 6p. I’ll be chatting and signing and then if you bring a copy of your book across the street to Ollie’s after (where I will be eating pizza, ofc), you’ll get half off the price of any cocktail! Community!

P.S. If you’ve read the book, do you know that I wrote an epilogue? And there are recipes and merch, too?? All here!!

If you’re into food and reading Substack newsletters, I am sure you know Caroline Chambers! For those of you who might not, I’ve included her full bio below, but the short version is: she’s incredibly popular here on Substack and her cookbooks fly off the shelves….and all for good reason. She writes spot-on recipes and walks you through all the substitutions. Most importantly, as my mom would put it, Caro has her antenna pointed in the same direction as her audience. I really admire how connected she is with everyone who follows her work. Her new book, Make it Fast, is coming out next week and she was kind enough to stop by here today to answer seven questions for us. She’s also sharing a delicious looking recipe from the new book. All below!

Caroline Chambers grew up in the kitchen on her mom’s hip, learning how to cook in their Winston-Salem, North Carolina, home. With experience as a chef, caterer, and freelance recipe developer for a host of publications and brands, she published her first cookbook in 2018, Just Married. In 2020—at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic—Caro began sharing her recipes and connecting with home cooks on Instagram (@carochambers), and launched her newsletter, What to Cook to Cook When You Don’t Feel Like Cooking, which flew to the top of the Substack charts. Her next cookbook, bearing the same title, was published in 2024 and was an instant New York Times bestseller. Caro lives in Carmel Valley, California, with her husband, George, and their four sons, Mattis, Calum, Cashel, and Tavish—one of whom can almost always be found in the kitchen on her hip.

The third book from New York Times bestselling author Caroline Chambers, What to Cook When You Don’t Feel Like Cooking: Make It Fast (on-sale August 11, 2026) is the ultimate guide to making easy, crowd-pleasing dinners in under 30 minutes. Caro is a mom of four young boys and a Substack recipe developer who famously doesn’t feel like cooking—and she’s built a whole brand on that premise. The speedy sequel to her instant 2024 bestseller, What to Cook When You Don’t Feel Like Cooking, Make It Fast is focused on eliminating unnecessary steps, minimizing dirty dishes, and making dinnertime as accessible as possible. Organized by cook time into three chapters, the book features 100 stress-free dinner recipes—all of which are complete meals—with no more than half-an-hour hands-on time in the kitchen. In the “15 Minutes” and “30 Minutes” chapters, readers can make dishes such as Flank Steak with Elote Salsa, Crispy Sausage Meatball and Caramelized Cabbage Pasta with Burrata, and Fish and Veggie Curry. The “Walk Away” chapter features recipes perfect for the home-chef who’s busy but not in a rush, so they can let recipes like Rotisserie-ish Chicken with Schmaltzy Lemon Dressing roast while folding a pile of laundry. Every recipe features Caro’s signature swaps, riffs, tips, and shortcuts to empower the home chef to make the recipes work for them. Even on the busiest of nights, What to Cook When You Don’t Feel Like Cooking: Make It Fast will help readers get a full, flavorful meal on the table in basically no time

ONE: Mazel tov on Make it Fast! Did you have anyone in particular in mind when making this new book?

Yes, myself!!! I was pregnant with my fourth kid while writing this cookbook. My desire for quick and easy recipes had never been stronger. But, I love eating really GOOD food. I don’t want it to feel basic or lack interest. So I wrote a book of 15- and 30-minute recipes that still feel really interesting and special and exciting to eat! Because that’s what I need during this insane stage of my life! No matter what the reason, we all have days or weeks or years where we just do not feel like cooking because we are too busy or too stressed or too tired or too whatever! These are the recipes for those moments.

TWO: How do you decide what goes in your book versus your newsletter?

OMG, this is such a good question. I want to know your answer, too! In the newsletter, I can break the “rules” a bit more, because I have more real estate to give people the option to choose their own adventure. My newsletter rules are that the recipe always takes under an hour, minimal ingredients, minimal dirty dishes. But sometimes I want to give readers a more elevated recipe; maybe it’s Valentine’s Day or something. So I’ll write a recipe that takes, say, an hour and a half, but I have plenty of space to also write a riff that uses store-bought ingredients and can be completed faster. I don’t have that kind of space in a book! The book recipes have to be more concise, more direct, simpler. I don’t have space to give readers a million different riffs and swaps and options, so they have to be a bit more dialed in.

THREE: Which recipe from Make it Fast do you find yourself making most regularly?

The Chicken Parm Meatballs with Broccoli Pasta, hands down. The trick of that one is the broccoli - it cooks in the same water as the pasta, so it really gets quite overcooked in the best way. Then you toss it with butter and Parm and a splash of pasta water until it breaks down into tiny soft bits and turns into the sauce. It stops being broccoli, if that makes sense! A pile of florets on the side of the plate is a negotiation, but this is just a noodle-y dinner. The meatballs bake instead of fry, too, so nobody’s standing over a skillet.

FOUR: How does North Carolina, where you’re from, show up in your cooking?

a. North Carolina is in everything I do! I love being a North Carolinian. The most Southern thing about the way I cook isn’t a recipe, it’s that food creates a moment and a feeling. I grew up watching my parents host - Christmas parties, supper clubs, birthday parties - and the rule was that a guest has a drink in their hand within thirty seconds of walking through the door. Not because it’s about drinking, but because it’s how you tell someone: here’s the house, here’s the lay of the land, you’re home now. I have four young boys, so sometimes greeting my guests is a bit more chaotic, but I try to make sure guests are watered and fed and know where the bathroom is within a few minutes! I also try to always go out and greet guests when they arrive. Again, it’s hard, but such a nice thing to be greeted outside and not have that moment of “are we early? are we in the right place? Which door should we go to?” Feeling welcomed from the moment you arrive is just such a good feeling.

b. The other big one is the healthy-ish thing. My mom is type 1 diabetic, so she spent my entire childhood taking classic Southern dishes and quietly lightening them up. That’s such a specific North Carolina inheritance - you don’t abandon the casserole, you just figure out how to make it work for your actual life. That’s basically what every recipe I create is all about!

c. And then the straight nostalgia. Yellow summer squash tastes like North Carolina in July to me. Country Captain, which was my mom’s entertaining showstopper - silver chafing dishes, a million little bowls of toppings, took her ALL DAY - is in the book as a one-pan version. The first meal I ever cooked for my husband was in a summer rental in Chapel Hill, corn and peppers from the farmer’s market and a piece of fresh tuna, and that one turned into the First Date Shrimp Skillet that’s in my first book.

FIVE: And Carmel, CA, where you now live?

We moved into a house that’s right beside the Sunday farmer’s market, which has completely changed how I cook. I’ve gotten to know my farmers, and I cook a lot more with the seasons than I was before. I think people picture farmer’s markets as a luxury thing - fancy woman, giant straw hat, beautiful straw bag - but really they’re the oldest, most ingrained way communities have fed themselves. Last night I made a sheet pan gnocchi with summer squash, corn, and sungolds, all from the market, and it was absolutely delightful.

Carmel Valley has also made me a wine person in a way I was truly not before. This is wine country, and the scale of it is so different than what I expected - these are small, family-run operations, and you end up knowing the people who actually grow the grapes and make the wine. I have friends who make wine and grow grapes, and getting to hear about the season from them - what the fruit did this year, what they’re excited about - has completely changed how I drink and how I cook. It’s the same thing the farmer’s market did to me. Once you know the person behind the thing, you pay attention differently.

[note from me, Julia: couldn’t agree more…it’s why I work part time at a vegetable farm!!]

SIX: You’ve built a world about what to cook when you don’t feel like cooking...what do you generally feel like doing? What’s an ideal day?

Reading! Obsessively! An ideal day has a hike in Garland State Park in it, ideally with my seven-year-old Mattis, who is also a big reader, so we spend the whole walk updating each other on our books. And it ends outside - we have a fireplace and cozy couches out back, and it gets cool here in the evenings, so after the kids go down my husband and I light a fire, pour a glass of wine, and read out there. The other piece of an ideal day is that my phone is off. I got a Brick, and I shut off all social media from 5pm to 9:30am. I know I’m shooting myself in the foot as a social media creator, but wow, life is better with firm phone boundaries around it.

SEVEN: Lastly, the question I ask everyone: what was your favorite thing to eat when you were a kid?

Growing up, both of my parents worked full time, but having a family dinner together was a really big deal to them. They did what they had to do to get dinner on the table, even though they were both getting home from work exhausted. We always had a huge bag of Sam’s Club taquitos in the freezer. They are one of my siblings’ shared core memories. My mom would throw them on a sheet pan, bake them, slice up some iceberg lettuce, and serve them with sour cream and salsa. It was just a really easy meal that the entire family loved. I have such fond memories of taquito nights. I learned from a young age that it really is about who’s around the dinner table, not how much time or effort or money went into the meal itself.

Caro has generously shared the recipe for Farrotto with Roasted Summer Vegetables, a banger from Make it Fast, with all of us today. Thanks Caro!!

Here it is!

• All about my romance novel, Down to Earth, is right here!

• My latest cookbook is What Goes with What and info about all of my cookbooks lives on my website.

• Here’s my video library of 130-and-counting! cooking classes.

• Here’s my all-time favorite class: a tour of my kitchen and also my mind! It includes a 2+ hour recording and an incredibly detailed companion document that details all of the tools, ingredients + more I use (it’s over 20 pages long!), plus a ton of tips for day-to-day cooking (lots of mini recipes within).

• Check out my ShopMy page for my favorite kitchen tools, ingredients, and even clothing items — it’s all there!

• And I catalog all of my favorite books right here at bookshop.org.