Wishbone Kitchen Cookbook: Seasonal Recipes for Everyday Luxury and Elevated Entertaining

by Meredith Hayden

Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

Living in the sweet spot of delicious and straightforward, this guide to a tastier kitchen is for anyone who wants to spice up their daily meals. With a wide range of recipes and insightful commentary, it's like having a chef in your kitchen, mentoring you every step of the way.

Learn to cook, host, and eat like a private chef with 100 recipes from Meredith Hayden of Wishbone Kitchen.

Inspired by years working as a chef in New York City and the Hamptons, as well as her childhood summers on Nantucket, Meredith Hayden makes food that is both unfussy and elegant—often with a touch of whimsy. In The Wishbone Kitchen Cookbook, Meredith teaches you to cook like a professional hostess (and have fun while doing it). This is the kind of food to celebrate every season of life; the kind of cooking you don’t start until you’ve made yourself a drink first. Recipes range from 20-minute meals to show-stopping centerpieces, all fit for your next dinner party.

Here you’ll find big salads (Blueberry BBQ Grilled Chicken Salad) and sharable sammies (the Ultimate Italian); there are your starters, your grazers, your chatting-with-friends snackers like Hot Crab Dip and Really Good Guac. Serve the Pink Lemon Pasta when friends come over after work or pack up the Farro Broccoli Salad for lunch the next day. Snack on an Heirloom Tomato Galette and veg out on Asparagus Fries with Feta. Your authority on all things seafood, Meredith shows you the easiest way to break down a lobster so that you can use it in a number of recipes like the Lobster Avocado Salad and Wok Lobster. Or how to shuck oysters so you can enjoy them grilled or with a yuzu kosho mignonette. Throw your own Nantucket Clam Bake, why not?

With sharp, witty commentary, themed menus, and gorgeous imagery, The Wishbone Kitchen Cookbook will inspire you to rediscover the joy in cooking, romanticize your grocery hauls, and find any excuse to celebrate with friends and family.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780593835951
Publisher:	Clarkson Potter/Ten Speed
Publication date:	05/06/2025
Pages:	288
Product dimensions:	8.20(w) x 10.10(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Meredith Hayden is a chef, recipe developer, and the creator behind Wishbone Kitchen, which started as a recipe blog and has evolved into a multidimensional culinary lifestyle brand. Hayden publishes new recipes every week; writes a bi-weekly newsletter, The Group Chat, where she discusses food, fashion, and lifestyle; and hosts a monthly cooking show on YouTube, Dinner with Friends. She has been featured in Vogue, The Washington Post, The New York Times, In Style, People, Delish, and Business Insider.

Read an Excerpt

Welcome

Hiiiiii!! Welcome to The Wishbone Kitchen Cookbook! Can I take your coat? Are you thirsty; do you want something to drink? Water, wine, a cocktail?

Let’s go sit and get comfy. So what’s been going on; what’s new? I wrote a book! And you’re reading it right now!!! Kinda crazy, can you believe it?

Anyway, I’m so happy you’re here, and I’m so excited to share these recipes with you. Whether this is our first time meeting, or we’ve known each other since I was selling olive oil cakes out of my parents’ house (or God forbid longer): Hi, I’m Meredith!

I like to think of myself as a professional hostess. And as for you, my reader and my guest, I promise to take the utmost care of you as we venture our way through the wonderful world of Wishbone Kitchen *together.*

What you’ll find here are recipes for every season of life. Yes, seasons as in spring, summer, fall, and winter, but also like television seasons, or loosely strung together moments with new characters, plot lines, priorities, challenges, and celebrations. So no matter what season you happen to be in—within this year or within this lifetime—I promise that you’ll always have the perfect thing to eat. Because when you have the perfect thing to eat, the moment becomes the memory.

How We Got Here

The story of Wishbone Kitchen starts with my mom, who never let a day go by without feeding us a delicious home-cooked meal. Every day after school I’d belly up to the kitchen counter, where I’d start tackling my homework. My mom would be in the kitchen, too, of course, preparing dinner and watching her favorite cooking shows. She’d expertly carve our weekly roast chicken, extracting the wishbone with ease and setting it aside for the two of us to split after dinner. My eyes would inevitably wander from my notebook to her cutting board, and an endless slew of questions would follow. My childlike curiosity and dangerously short attention span got me in a lot of trouble as a kid, but now I see these qualities as my superpower.

I’ve never stopped questioning why, why not, and how. Following the rules and sticking to the status quo never sat right with me. This is not an intentional act of rebellion, but something I feel to my core. This mindset is what led me to start my own private chef business at the age of twenty-three.

I was working full-time as an assistant at Vogue, a few months out of culinary school, and had just started working part-time with my first private chef clients. Which, at the time, was only supposed to be temporary, since my end goal was to land a job in food media. After getting a mix of rejections and non-responses from hundreds of job applications, I quickly grew more and more frustrated. As it turns out, it took a global pandemic and getting laid off from my corporate job for me to take the leap and start building my business.

“If no food media companies will hire me, I’ll make my own” I said to myself. I named my imaginary (at the time) company Wishbone Kitchen, as an ode to my mother who inspired my love of home cooking. I started an Instagram page, built a website, began publishing recipes, and started booking more and more private chef gigs to pay the bills. Success did not come instantly. It rarely does. There are plenty of undocumented years of me hauling hundred pound bags of groceries through the streets of New York with negative $200 in my checking account, a maxed-out credit card, and 117 followers on social media. I experienced countless moments where I wanted to give up and take a line-cook job for a steady paycheck. It was in these moments that I would remind myself: if Ina and Martha could turn their small catering businesses into culinary empires, then so could I.

Driven by my naive sense of invincibility, common in most early twentysomethings, and a supportive family who I knew would catch me if I fell, I persevered. I was scared shitless, navigating uncharted territory that culinary school never could’ve prepared me for. I think of my years as a private chef fondly. And while there are a million and one stories I could tell you, let’s just say it wasn’t always sunshine and hydrangeas. Mistakes were made, lessons were learned, and (luckily) the world kept on spinning.

All of this is to say, your journey in the kitchen will also be messy. You’re not always going to get it right on the first try. There will be moments when you feel as though you’ve bitten off more than you can chew, and there will be recipes that feel like too tall of a task. Just remember, people can do hard things and failure is a necessary part of the process.

After dinner was over, our plates were cleared, and the kitchen was clean, my mom and I would grab on to the wishbone, we’d close our eyes, make a wish, and pull, snapping it in two. The winner being the one left with the bigger half. I know she would secretly always let me win, and this book is proof that all of my wishes have come true.

Like the name, the vibe of this book is also inspired by memories made over meals with family. Casual weeknight dinners of Shake ’N Bake. Over-the-top four-course holiday meals complete with sticky toffee pudding. Or a shared bucket of seafood pasta, devoured while we were still in our bathing suits with salty, sun-soaked skin.

Those laid-back, belly-laugh-filled suppers are my North Star because they instilled in me from a very young age that the best ingredients aren’t always the most expensive, that good food doesn’t have to be measured down to the last teaspoon, that luxury is a full glass and a sunset, that no moment is too small to celebrate, and that there’s never a wrong time for oysters and good tequila.

Xo, Meredith