Boost your confidence in the kitchen with 80 foolproof recipes for busy weeknights, lazy weekends, date nights, and other special occasions--from the beloved creator of Your Barefoot Neighbor and With his delicious and doable recipes, Matthew Bounds proves that the comfort of a home cooked meal is easier than you think. In Every Damn Day: Zesty Sheet-Pan Caprese Chicken; Shortcut Air Fryer Taquitos; One-Pan French Onion Pasta Date Night: Honey-Butter;Lamb Chops; Pan-Fried Scallops over Polenta; Lemon-Asparagus Risotto Sunday Best: Skillet Eggplant Parmesan;;Classic Pork Roast with Vegetable Gravy; Buttermilk Fried Chicken A Lil Sugar in the Tank: Truvy-Style Peach Cobbler; Cookie Butter Blondies; Mamaw’s Coconut Cake <Keep It Simple Y''all: Every Day< is your go-to cookbook for creating comforting, delicious meals with ease. Whether you want a quick, no-frills dinner or a luxurious Sunday supper, Matthew’s friendly guidance and reliable recipes will inspire you to cook with confidence.

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Matthew Bounds, AKA Your Barefoot Neighbor, is a New York Times bestselling author who believes that feeding our families and ourselves shouldn’t be too difficult. Matthew began teaching himself to cook in 2020, and started posting those efforts online where his unpretentious approach has helped millions of fans enjoy mealtime. He is also dedicated to creating an inclusive, welcoming space on social media and uses his platform to uplift the community by driving donations and other support to organizations in need. He and his husband CJ live in Gulfport, Mississippi.

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NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Boost your confidence in the kitchen with 80 foolproof recipes for busy weeknights, lazy weekends, date nights, and other special occasions—from the beloved creator of Your Barefoot Neighbor and New York Times bestselling author of Keep It Simple Y'all

With his delicious and doable recipes, Matthew Bounds proves that the comfort of a home cooked meal is easier than you think. In Keep It Simple Y'all: Every Day, Matthew is back with a brand-new set of easy-to-follow recipes for every occasion, delivered with his signature Southern charm and laid-back attitude. Along with more of his popular weeknight-friendly dinners, he shares next-level comfort food dishes perfect for cozy date nights and larger gatherings so you can impress your guests with minimal fuss. Matthew walks you through foundational basics, like how to reverse sear a steak and cook perfect-every-time rice, and offers tons tips for success and tasty recipes to inspire your next meal, including:

• Every Damn Day: Zesty Sheet-Pan Caprese Chicken; Shortcut Air Fryer Taquitos; One-Pan French Onion Pasta
• Date Night: Honey-Butter Lamb Chops; Pan-Fried Scallops over Polenta; Lemon-Asparagus Risotto
• Sunday Best: Skillet Eggplant Parmesan; Classic Pork Roast with Vegetable Gravy; Buttermilk Fried Chicken
• A Lil Sugar in the Tank: Truvy-Style Peach Cobbler; Cookie Butter Blondies; Mamaw’s Coconut Cake
  Keep It Simple Y'all: Every Day is your go-to cookbook for creating comforting, delicious meals with ease. Whether you want a quick, no-frills dinner or a luxurious Sunday supper, Matthew’s friendly guidance and reliable recipes will inspire you to cook with confidence.

Leseprobe
Welcome to the Neighborhood

For most of my life, I had no idea how to cook.

What a way to start a cookbook, right? But it’s true. I didn’t grow up in the kitchen, and while I spent many years working in restaurants (front of house, as they say, rather than the back with the chef), I could mostly just talk the talk. I could sell the stuffed fish special to a table, or explain étouffée to a guest who wasn’t from the Mississippi Gulf Coast. But I couldn’t make any of these things myself. The repertoire I worked from in my home kitchen was quite limited.

This started to change in 2020 when the pandemic hit. I was doing my office job from home, and with the extra time I had without a daily commute, I set myself the goal of finally learning my way around the kitchen, a skill I was long overdue to master. I studied YouTube videos, rewinding them so that I could clearly see what was going on, and I followed people on social media who seemed to know their stuff. Then I took my learnings into my kitchen.

Y’all, there was some trial and error. There were stretches when it seemed like I had more failures than successes, because I messed up a lot of meals. But little by little, I started to make progress.

I vividly remember one of my first big wins, a dish of risotto. I took a spoonful, right from the pan where I’d been standing and stirring for twenty minutes straight, and I started pumping my fists because it was absolutely perfect. It was creamy and a touch cheesy, with rice that was so tender and satisfying.

After a couple more bites, I stepped back from the stove and did a double take. Wasn’t risotto a restaurant-only type of food, reserved for the cooking professionals? I replayed the process in my mind. I’d sautéed down some chopped onion in butter. I’d toasted the rice. I’d poured in the hot chicken stock a bit at a time. That was pretty much it.

This gave me an aha moment: Risotto was not that hard. It was basically just rice, with stirring.

Pot roast was another such dish. If I had to choose my last meal, it’d for sure be pot roast. I love it so much. But I always believed it was too difficult to make. So I did my research, gathered up the ingredients, and fired up my stove. And I came to a similar realization when I took my first bite of that fall-apart, perfectly succulent beef: Nothing was actually that difficult! The beef roast just needed enough salt, a good sear in the Dutch oven, and I had to make sure not to skimp on the cooking time.

I gradually learned that these recipes were primarily about knowing a few techniques, and once I understood that, I could start playing around. In my risotto, why not trade corn kernels for peas or stir goat cheese in at the end instead of Parmesan? In my pot roast, I could add a bag of frozen pearl onions or a can of tomatoes to the vegetable gravy or incorporate a bit of red wine into the liquid.

In my kitchen, the clouds slowly started to clear, and the intimidating notion of cooking no longer had such a grip on me. I even became a bit of an evangelist, because I wanted y’all to know that if I could do this, you surely could, too.

Flash-forward to 2022. I was talking with my best friend, Ashley (you’ll hear more about her shortly), about the videos of her ridiculous French bulldog, Bugsy, that she had started posting to TikTok. I wanted to see them, so I set up my own account.

When I signed up, I had a vague idea that if I were ever to post anything, it would be DIY content, like backyard projects. So I chose the handle “Your Barefoot Neighbor.” People think this is a reference to the Barefoot Contessa, but nothing could have been further from my mind. (At the time, I was also known to run around barefoot quite a lot, but these days I don’t mess around when it comes to proper shoe support.)

At first I shared just a couple videos to TikTok for fun, and I enjoyed it. Eventually I started doing them from my kitchen while I was cooking dinner, chatting away as I cooked easy “dump-and-go” recipes in real time. I noticed that when I posted these food videos, a lot more people were paying attention. And it didn’t take long before I started to become known for those super simple (but stick-to-your-ribs satisfying) recipes.

Occasionally I shared more involved recipes, like that risotto I mentioned, and I loved hearing the reactions, because the…