Cookbooks arrive at Food Network Kitchen with delicious abundance, piling up on desks and crowding library shelves. But because of the wealth of recipes, finding the nuggets of gold — that one amazing curry, say, or a particularly clever method for crimping pie crust — can be daunting even to the experts at FNK. Where to start? The answer, we decided, is with the authors themselves. After all, who knows the material better than its creator? In this new series, we invite a noted cookbook writer to choose the one essential recipe from her or his book, and to make it with us at Food Network Kitchen. Just in time for back-to-school, we asked Katie Workman, author of The Mom 100 Cookbook: 100 Recipes Every Mom Needs in Her Back Pocket, to share her favorite dish. After slipping on an apron — "So long as I have one on, I'm all right with the world," she says — she gamely set to work. Here's how she does it.