Cooking with Jocelyn Grayson – Social Media Consultant

JOCELYN GRAYSON, BASED IN THE FAIRMOUNT NEIGHBORHOOD, has always loved spending time in the kitchen. “My mom cooked a lot, my dad made desserts and there were always cookbooks around,” she recalls. And then, when Grayson’s husband worked in publishing in the 80s and 90s, he brought them home from the office by the armful. “I don’t have a publishing connection anymore, but I do have Amazon,” says Grayson, whose current collection totals 277 volumes.

Last year, in an effort to get the most out of her many cookbooks, Grayson made a new year’s resolution to cook from 50 different titles in 2019. She hashtagged the project #CookYourBooks2019 and shared her food photos on social media, encouraging others to play along. She ended up hitting her goal of 50 books by September, so this year she got even more ambitious. “I set a goal of cooking from 75 books in 2020,” she says. This year’s hashtag: #CookYourBooks2020.

As of mid-February, she’s at 19 books and counting. This year, she’s cooked from Everyday Dorie, Skinny Taste and Mastering Spice, to name a few. But her favorite author remains Yotam Ottolenghi. She recently made his Roast Chicken with Clementines and Arak from his 2012 book, Jerusalem (Ten Speed Press). She chose that recipe because of the simplicity of the dish. “It’s a few ingredients that turns out to be more than the sum of its parts. It’s really easy and so delicious,” she says.