Hello!
We're Mei & Irene.
We're here to make your life more delicious and creative and help you stop throwing out food. Thanks for joining us on our mission to reduce food waste!
We're here to make your life more delicious and creative and help you stop throwing out food. Thanks for joining us on our mission to reduce food waste!
We’re beyond excited that our second cookbook, Perfectly Good Food: A Totally Achievable Zero Waste Approach to Home Cooking with W. W. Norton is now on sale! Get your copy at many booksellers near you, including:
The cookbook has been named a 2024 IACP Finalist in Food Issues and Matters, an Amazon Editor’s Pick, and a Best Summer Cookbook of 2023 by Food & Wine.
“Perfectly Good Food tasks itself with a lot of teaching: how to shop for and store produce, how to save ingredients for later, how to extend a single ingredient into many meals…[But] the book really excels where it’s the most open-ended, a quality I think is crucial for any book that really seeks to address waste and inefficiency in the kitchen.”
Bettina Makalintal, Eater
“One of the best things about Perfectly Good Food is its desire to help readers depend less on instructions and more on their own confidence in the kitchen, the trickle-down effect of which is less food waste. If you have the confidence and creativity to make something tasty out of that wilted lettuce, you’re much less likely to throw it in the trash . . . [That] confidence is liberating.”
Francie Lin, Boston Globe
“The book is full of recipes and use-it-up ideas to help you eliminate food waste in your kitchen one delicious summer roll at a time.”
Chandra Ram, Food and Wine
“Margaret and Irene Li . . . have put over a decade of professional experience into a “field guide” for transforming potential kitchen throwaways into delicious meals . . . I’ve already been inspired to add an “eat me first” box of leftovers to my fridge, whip up a batch of apple-cheddar muffins with bruised fruit, and celebrate with a tomato-water martini.”
Daniel Walton, Civil Eats
Perfectly Good Food makes a strong case for saving more of the food that we Westerners typically throw away when half eaten or left over; its readers will start to save onions, and view the sell-by dates on most foods with more skepticism.
Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker
[Perfectly Good Food] advocates a jazzy, contingency-driven approach to household thrift.
Dana Goodyear, The New Yorker
Perfectly Good Food is the most flat-out fun entry in the sometimes austere genre of food waste recipe volumes. The Li sisters gamify the pursuit of using up leftovers, and the prize is really cool stuff to eat. They'll have you using allium scraps to infuse flavor in homemade chili crisp, pureeing saggy heads of lettuce in a creamy soup, and mixing any kind of ground meat into four-ingredient meatballs.
Sara Bir, Simply Recipes
Perfectly Good Food is an invigorating change from typical cookbooks because it’s (fittingly) not really concerned with perfect, beautiful, farm-to-fridge food; rather, it’s about getting down and dirty with the stuff you already have . . . [Perfectly Good Food] will make it fun to reconceptualize your kitchen into a mean, green, food waste-fighting machine.
Adam Rothbarth, Vice
A field guide that prioritizes functionality and fun, while providing people with tools they can apply as they’re able.
Charlotte Druckman, Washington Post
Want to cook better while saving money and reducing your trash? Learn to eat less wastefully and more sustainably in this combination cookbook and field guide, full of ingenious use-it-up tips, smart storage ideas, and infinitely adaptable Hero Recipes. Whether you’ve got a lingering bunch of herbs or an abundance of summer tomatoes, Perfectly Good Food will help rescue everything in your fridge while getting a delicious dinner on the table quickly and easily—you’ll be inspired never to waste good food again.
Written by the chef-sisters behind Boston’s acclaimed Mei Mei Dumplings, Perfectly Good Food combines professional know-how from a decade in the restaurant industry with the make-it-work approach of a home cook feeding a busy family. With clever, colorful illustrations supporting a diverse array of plant-forward recipes, this is a book for the thrifty chef, the environmentally mindful cook, and anyone looking to make the most of their ingredients.
