Sometimes, that change looks like simply staying in with her girlfriend, who is also a writer. “I made my life very small to protect myself,” Nosrat says: “So I fell out of practice eating out.” When she isn’t cooking, she tends to indulge her girlfriend’s craving for Five Guys. “Recently we had to have a conversation about the appropriate amount of burgers in a month,” Nosrat jokes. (They determined it’s three.) But when the two do go out, Nosrat often avoids the big, glitzy marquee restaurants; proprietors tend to send out the entire menu, often wanting her to perform the food-celebrity persona.

In many ways, fame was a shock for Nosrat. “I spent most of my life being the invisible brown girl, and then all of a sudden I was incredibly visible and beloved. That’s weird,” she muses. “I’m not different, the way you’re treating me is different.” Now, Nosrat’s trying to have “a different relationship to the rollercoaster of fame.”

In Good Things, Nosrat’s cooking advice is as frill-free and practical as ever, but she’s stepping into new literary territory. The book’s title comes from a Raymond Carver short story, “A Small Good Thing,” and the essays it contains name-check writers like Annie Dillard and Iris Murdoch. An earlier draft of the book featured, alongside the literary reflections, many more personal essays about the last few years of Nosrat’s life—but life changed, and Nosrat’s inclination to reveal intimate details changed with it. Since Salt Fat Acid Heat came out, her father passed away and she started dating her current girlfriend. Instead of trying to write her personal life into the book, Nosrat opted to channel her writing heroes and reflect on the joys of attention and time.

Good Things represents a technical evolution for Nosrat, too; the book marks the first time she has published traditional recipes. There are multi-step guides to perfectly balanced salad dressings, fluffy meatballs, focaccia, and a moist chocolate cake. Nosrat learned a lot from her book editor and editor at the New York Times, both of whom told her to write with her signature humor, warmth, and wit. While she’s shied away from publishing a straightforward recipe book in the past—Salt Fat Acid Heat was more a collection of food-related musings—she had a “relationship” to the recipes she put into Good Things. “That’s why I struggle so much: I make a lot of the same stuff over and over again,” Nosrat says. “There’s a story there.”