Lidey Heuck's cookbook Cooking in Real Life is like Barefoot Contessa for Pittsburgh kids

Pittsburgh native Lidey Heuck and the cover of her first cookbook, Cooking in Real Life

For someone as accomplished as Lidey Heuck — a 32-year-old Pittsburgh native who spent seven years working closely with famed food mogul Ina Garten, is a NYT Cooking contributor, and is about to release her first cookbook — it was surprising to discover that, essentially, she never had any real goals.

"I liked food, and I love to cook," Heuck tells Pittsburgh City Paper, but when she showed up to her first day on the job with Garten in "a pencil skirt and ballet flats," Heuck writes in the intro to her book, "I had no idea what my job would really entail."

Mostly, Heuck tells City Paper, she was enamored with the way Garten had spun a career simply out of what brought her joy.

"It was less about wanting to work in food," Heuck tells CP, "as much as I was intrigued by the idea that you could have this sort of outside-the-box career," adding "I really just had a gut feeling, too, that it was what I should do."

That gut feeling has been the guiding principal of Heuck's career trajectory. Never wanting to waste away behind a desk, Heuck knew she "wanted to do something that was fun and interesting and different," and she has let those endeavors reveal themselves to her along the way.

Learning an abundance of technical skills and business know-how working in Garten's kitchen, Heuck writes in her book, she combined that unique education with her more down-to-earth roots. Growing up in Shadyside, she tells CP, her parents both worked, and for the most part, "food was food," she says. "It wasn't anything that they would get particularly excited about."

That said, "They did love to entertain," Heuck says. "My parents would have constant dinners and Christmas parties — they loved having people over." Her uncles also owned restaurants — La Charcuterie in Shadyside, Laforet in Highland Park, Vermont Flatbread in The Strip, and Cross Keys Inn in Fox Chapel, where Heuck briefly worked bussing tables. All that, paired with the boisterous Sunday dinners generations of family members routinely gathered for, taught Heuck that, as she writes in her book, "good food could make any occasion out of nothing."

That, it seems, is much of what Cooking in Real Life aims to do: provide recipes for whatever type of occasion a moment is calling for. Instead of focusing on quick one-pot dinners or lavish holiday dishes, it has both, and lots of stuff that falls in between. That's because, Heuck tells CP, it's how she, and really all of us, cook in our everyday lives.

"If I'm at my parents house for Thanksgiving in Pittsburgh, [my cooking is] different," Heuck says. "If I'm having a dinner party in the summer at my house, like outside by the firepit — like real life — the way that we all cook is different depending on the day, depending on where we are in the country, depending on what time of year it is, what the occasion is." There's something among her collection of recipes that works for any and all of that.

Both Garten, who wrote the foreword, and Heuck allude in her book to their similar approach to cooking, but, as unfussy as Garten is known to be, Heuck's recipes are notable for notching up accessibility even more. Where Garten is famous for routinely insisting on "good olive oil" (not bad advice), Heuck writes that "as long as the bottle says 'extra-virgin' olive oil, you should be good to go ... I've always made these recipes with plain old EVOO and it does the trick for me." Likewise, she writes, "I'm inspired by seasonal ingredients, but not bound to them — strawberries might be at their best in June, but that doesn't mean I don't eat them in February." That sensibility and pragmatism permeate the book, making for a collection of recipes that's as inspiring as it is flexible.

Now that she can check "cookbook author" off her to-do list, what's next? Heuck is still letting intuition take the lead. "It's funny," she says, "I never think about checking boxes, because I feel like I'm not a linear thinker."

Still, she has some ideas — projects that are more "public facing," she says: more cooking videos and recipes, freelancing, perhaps a line of home decor and kitchenwares, maybe even a store.

But an end game is not her end game.

"I don't know that I've ever had a career end goal as much as [simply]: this is the thing I want to do it, I'm going to pour my heart into it and see where it leads after," Heuck says. "So I'm hoping that the next chapter will reveal itself soon."

A launch party for Cooking in Real Life will be held on Weds., Mar. 13 at Bass & Bennett, 1900 Smallman St., Strip District. Sold out.