The Bear star Matty Matheson is releasing a free cookbook for college students focusing on affordability and honing one’s cooking skills. While real-life chef and restaurateur Matheson portrays a handyman on The Bear, he’s also a culinary consultant on the show and is now using his culinary career to provide an affordable cookbook.
Throughout his career, Matheson has opened several pop-up restaurants, as well as a steakhouse, Prime Seafood Palace, in Toronto, and an Italian-American cuisine restaurant, Rizzo’s House of Parm, in Ontario. He has also dabbled in cookbooks, releasing Matty Matheson: A Cookbook and Matty Matheson: Home Style Cookery. Meanwhile, Matheson has always been interested in making his recipes accessible, as he has hundreds of cooking videos on his YouTube channel. He even made videos for 26 of the recipes in his Home Style Cookery book.
Now, he’s taking things further by providing a wholly free digital cookbook with affordable recipes aimed at college students.
Matty Matheson makes an affordable cookbook for college students
Matheson is partnering with WeTransfer to provide college students with a free cookbook, Cookin’ Somethin’ for College. It’s no secret that with rising tuition costs, many college students can’t afford cookbooks or come up with the ingredients for most online recipes. Far too many students describe living off ramen noodles or even facing hunger during one of the most transformative periods of their lives. As a result, Matheson is offering them 12 mouth-watering recipes with simple ingredients and easy-to-follow instructions. The book is designed to look like a notebook, with the recipes typed in lined pages and accompanied by cute doodles, notes, and important words underlined or circled.
While affordable and simple enough for one to follow without needing cooking experience, the recipes in his book still look and sound very delicious, such as the ultimate breakfast sandwich, fried chicken with mala spice, Matty’s nachos, and deluxe mint chocolate brownies. Matheson will also provide video tutorials for four of his recipes on his YouTube channel. In his book, he discusses wanting to share his recipes with students while they’re “out there in the world, figuring stuff out.”
Matheson isn’t the first chef to provide a cookbook focused on affordability. Cookbook author Leanne Brown wrote a James Beard Award-winning cookbook titled Good & Cheap: Eat Well on $4 a Day. The book is offered as a free e-book and is focused on providing those on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) with affordable recipes. Those receiving SNAP benefits often only receive an average of $4 a day to help pay for groceries. So Brown set out to help these people access affordable and delicious recipes.
With groceries being so overpriced and benefits being so inadequate, grocery shopping and cooking can feel overwhelming. Cookbooks like Matheson’s and Brown’s, though, acknowledge the reality that many Americans are living and are providing accessible recipes that are easy, affordable, and delicious. No one should be given $4 a day and left feeling like they can’t cook anything besides instant ramen on that budget. Everyone deserves the chance to cook well for themselves and their families, and it’s encouraging that cookbook authors and chefs are stepping up to make this possible.
(Via Variety, featured image: Hulu)
