by Michelle Mook
Table Of Contents
Recipes
A
Primer
For My Girlfriends
Christmas 2003
by Michelle Mook
© 2003 All rights reserved.
Decide that cooking is easy. Approach your kitchen with a good attitude. Don’t be timid! Cooking is a very butch sport - you can't be shy about it. Get in there and knock stuff around.
Remember, the worst possible outcome is that you make something inedible. The odds of actually lighting your kitchen on fire are pretty low.
Remember: cooking is not smarter than you.
I think a little bit of fatalism concentrates the mind wonderfully. Face it: you have to cook. You can't possibly intend to eat out for the rest of your life, and it seems that remarkably you find yourself living with people who sometimes depend on you to put food in front of them.
Eating out is bad on so many levels: there's the fat and sodium, of course, and the mental attitudes of the people preparing the food putting vibes into it, and don't forget the sheer boredom of yet another dish from (insert local restaurant name here), the expense, and the total lack of discipline.
In other words: cooking happens. We might as well understand it and bend it to our will then, right?
We have to cook, and we have to cook often. It can be a daunting, time-consuming chore without the proper tools. This little essay is intended to arm you with the basic concepts and skills it's taken me years to learn.
Don’t be bound by recipes - learn to cook what you actually have in the house! Flexibility is the best tool you can cultivate.
Sure, you will need a recipe for certain things (after all, it wouldn’t be a good idea to eyeball the yeast for a loaf of bread), but most of the time it’s easier to choose an ingredient you have and build a dish around that, rather than assembling complicated shopping lists and getting agravated when someone happens to eat a key ingredient as a snack.
Recipes, in my opinion, are for special occasions and specific dishes. Most good cooks learned a lot of their secrets by cooking from a lot of recipes; I'm not anti-recipe in principle. But I do know that many women don't have time to cook from recipes for three years while they learn the tips contained here.
Everyday cooking can easily be recipe-free. By simply keeping your pantry properly stocked, and learning a few basic cooking concepts and techniques, any cook can be free of cook books and complicated shopping lists in a very short time.
A well-stocked pantry is your best friend; it lets you cook without having to think too much about it. If you keep certain staples well-stocked, you'll always be able to produce a meal. This means you can eat if you don't want to go out, if you're suddenly snowed in and can't get out, or when your husband is hungry now and you can't afford to send him for take-out.
Every cook has different staples, which is why every cookbook has a different pantry list. The more you cook, the more you know what you’re likely to reach for, so there’s no such thing as an “ideal” pantry - you have to stock what you're likely to need. All pantry lists are suggestions.
Below are the things I generally have on hand at any given time. As for shopping, if I add to the list below some meats or meat-substitutes, salad ingredients, snacks (junk food, that is!) and beverages, I'm ready to go.
Canned
Canned tomatoes (chopped or diced or whole)
Canned beans (black, navy, pinto, garbanzo, refried)
TunaLegumes & Pastas
Green lentils
Couscous
Rice(s)
Bulgar
Assorted noodlesRoot Vegetables
Onions
Garlic
Celery
Carrots
PotatoesIn The Freezer
Corn
Spinach
Nuts - for salads or cookies
Hashbrowns - can be added to stews and casseroles
Brown rice
Bread(s) - a loaf each of French, pita, and sandwichOther Staples
Flour
Sugar(s) - I generally have granulated, powdered, brown, and turbinado
Salt
Baking powder and soda
Bullion cubes
Herbs & spices
Olive oil
Vinegar(s) - I generally have white, red, and wine vinegar in the kitchen
Wine(s) - any table wine you have around for drinking will work for cooking; don't bother buying "cooking" wines because they're not fit to drink, which means they aren't fit to eat, either
Cocoa powder
Corn bread mixesCold
Milk
Butter
Hard cheeses - parmesan and asagio are always handy
Eggs
Miso
Tamari or soy sauce
Tahini - used for hummus and salad dressings, mainly
(There is a printable version of this list here.)
With these simple ingredients, you can make plenty of food, and in general the stuff on this list keeps forever - it doesn't turn to jelly in the crisper while you're not looking, not very quickly anyway! With solid staples available, you can walk into your kitchen at any time, and walk back out with a meal – even when it seems like you really “don’t have anything to eat” in there!
For instance, with only the ingredients above, I can make any (or several) of these dishes without going to the store:
...and hummus with pita, just to name a few!
Knowing that you can always pull something to eat out of your staples is really reassuring, especially for those weeks when your car is dead or you're sick or you're too poor to hit the grocery store.
When a recipe says "adjust seasonings, and serve" it can be somewhat frustruating, especially if it doesn't taste that good and you don't know what to do. The phrase "adjust seasonings" is too vague to be useful unless you actually know how to adjust.
Adjusting a dish generally happens at the end of the recipe, or just before serving. The cook (that's you) takes a spoonful of the dish and tastes it, and then decides: is it too sweet? too flat? too salty? not salty enough? is it interesting, or does it just taste like lentils in bullion? And, most importantly, what can I do to fix it?
The most common adjustments are to add water, add salt, or add an acid before serving. Water corrects liquidity (many soups, stews, sauces, and other dishes dry out during cooking or long warming times), all good cooks under-salt while cooking because it's easier to add salt later than take it out, and acids balance flavors.
You know how Ayurveda talks about the six tastes? This applies to cooking of individual dishes, too. Often something acidic or sweet, added at the end of cooking, can make all the difference in a dish. A good-tasting dish is generally either amazingly simple (just three or four fresh ingredients - what I call "garden cooking"), or it's a comfortably balanced relationship between savory, salty, sweet, bitter, pungent, and tart.
For example, many split pea and lentil soup recipes call for a teaspoon of lemon juice to be added before serving. Many tomato sauce-based recipes call for a dash of red wine or vinegar. I knew a cajun cook once who always added "sweet" spices - the kind we generally think of as being for cakes and cookies - to his spicy or savory dishes to "add dimension." In Mexican cooking, you'll often find cocoa powder or cloves in main dishes. In Indian cooking, sweet and savory spices are always used together, and lemon juice or tomatoes are used for acid in almost every dish.
If you have a dish that tastes too “thin” – say it’s just plain salty, with no depth of flavor to it – you can often liven it up by adding something sweet, or bitter, or tart:
Sweet – Spices (like cloves, cardamom, or other “dessert” flavors) in small pinches; sugars (any kind); syrups; sweet potatoes or yams.
Bitter – Coffee, bitter leafy greens, lemon juice, cocoa powder.
Tart – Wines, vinegars, booze of any kind, citrus.
To correct a bland marinara, add a dash of vinegar or wine. Correct a boring bean or lentil soup with an ounce or two of this morning’s leftover coffee, or a dash of red wine vinegar. Deepen a stew’s flavor with a pinch of nutmeg or cloves.
Depth of flavor is especially important in vegetarian cooking. When cooking with meat, you’ve already got all the flavor and all the fat – all you really need is some heat and some sodium and everything else is just an embellishment. When cooking vegetarian foods, variety is the spice!
Remember, if you only add a little of things at a time, you won’t ruin a dish. The only time something really becomes inedible is when too much of a good thing - especially salt - is added all at once.
TIP Note that you can sometimes correct over-salting by adding a diced potato. It will often absorb the extra salt.
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The recipe below is extraordinarily vague, but it's that way on purpose. The intent is to show you that right now while you might think there's nothing to eat in your kitchen, in fact you probably have all the ingredients you'd need for a delicious, easy, and most importantly recipe-free meal.
Read the recipe over until you grok the idea, then go look in your cupboards and see what you can do!
How to Clean Out Your Fridge
(Simple Soup)1. Heat oil in a heavy-bottomed soup pan.
Put some oil, maybe 2 tablespoons or so, in the bottom of a soup pot over medium to medium-high heat.
2. Throw in some diced root-type vegetables and cook until soft.
Most traditional soups and stews start with a mirepois (carrots, onions, and celery), but you can use whatever you like. Onions, garlic, carrots, celery, cabbage – whatever you have in the crisper.
3. Throw in some spices.
Ground spices only at this point – paprika, cumin, chili powder, etc. totalling about 2 tsp. all together. This will flavor the root vegetables and seep into the oil.
4. Add 2 to 4 cups of water.
5. Add leafy spices.
Oregano, basil, parsley, etc., whatever you like.
6. Add bullion cube(s), or miso, or a combination, to make a flavorful (but not too salty) broth.
I generally use the half rule - if you have 4 cups of water, put in bullion for 2 cups per its packaging.
7. Add the main ingredient(s).
Any of the following, alone or in combination: A can of beans. Dried lentils. A few handfuls of uncooked pasta. Maybe some bulgar wheat. Some left over chicken/ham/whatever.
8. Bring to a simmer.Cook until any grains or pastas are very nearly done.
9. Add additional veggies.
Whatever veggies you happen to find in your kitchen: potatoes, tomatoes, carrots, celery, canned tomatoes, cabbage, zucchini, broccoli, cauliflower. A handful or two of frozen veggies. Canned veggies.
10. Bring to a simmer. Cook until ingredients are done.
11. Adjust seasonings.
A dash of coffee, lemon juice, vinegar or wine will be needed to focus this soup’s flavors. If you didn't use any tomatoes or other acid ingredients, I'd recommend a good vinegar at this point.If you want to thicken your soup/stew, see the kneaded butter tip, below.
12. Serve!
And don’t forget to garnish: having some sour cream, grated cheese, croutons, diced onions, or crackers to put in a soup is always delicious and makes it seem more like a meal. Pair it with a salad and some toast and your household will be amazed you made such a great meal from an "empty" pantry!Yummy soup combos are... black bean and ziti pasta; red beans and rice; lentil and potato; three bean (black, kidney, navy) with carrots; red lentils with cauliflower and onions - the combos are endless. If you think it would taste good together, it probably will!
To thicken a soup or stew, blend a tablespoon of softened (room temperature) butter with a tablespoon of flour. Mix together well using the back of a fork. When incorporated, roll this kneaded butter into tiny balls, drop into your soup or stew and stir. Allow to simmer for a few minutes to thicken.
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Deglazing refers to simply getting the brown bits – that's the actual term for the stuff stuck to the bottom of your pan after you cook meat in it! – off of the bottom of the pan and into a sauce. Brown bits are concentrated and flavorful.
You can deglaze a pan with basically anything: water, wine, cognac, coffee, broth, or beer. Below are a few combinations for deglazing a steak pan. I suggest you always cook your FODA (flesh of dead animal) in a cast iron pan.
Fry That Steak!
(Deglazing is your friend)This skill is really important to me as a vegetarian with a meat-eating husband. I don't really want to handle meat all that much, but on the other hand, I want the food I feed to my husband to be good, so I settled on deglazing.
This method is quick and painless for the cook, and pleasing to the diner. It allows me to make an essentially vegetarian meal, and then add that extra protein he needs in just a few minutes.
1. Fry a steak in a pan. Season lightly with salt & pepper, or steak seasoning. Turn.
2. Remove steak to a plate when done, or push to the side of the skillet.
3. Deglaze the pan with about a half of a cup of (any item from list A).
4. Add (any item from list B) and a teaspoon or so of butter. Add salt and pepper to taste. Simmer a couple minutes until sauce is reduced (thickened by steaming off some of the liquid).
5. Pour sauce over the steak and serve!
List A
Cognac
Leftover coffee
Red wine
White wine
BeerList B
Chopped shallots
Sliced onions, broken into rings
Sliced mushrooms
Minced garlic
Fresh or dried herbs
The beauty of this technique is that you can use it with any meat; it works with chicken, pork, and fish just as well as beef – but with the lighter meats and poultry you will want to use white wine or a blonde beer (to keep from discoloring the meat and overpowering its flavor).
You can also make an actual gravy from the brown bits: Remove the meat from the pan, add butter (if needed) to make a tablespoon of fat, add an equal amount of flour, and cook the roux. Add 1 cup hot water or broth, whisk until smooth, and cook until thickened. Season with salt and pepper, and serve.
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Sauces are a basic component of cooking. Gravy, cheese sauce, hollandaise - all dress up everyday foods and make them remarkable.
Learning how to make basic sauces and gravies is the key to simple but good cooking - you can serve the most mundane and ordinary stuff (chicken and rice, tofu and broccoli, eggs and bacon) but no one will notice if you add a flavorful sauce!
This saucy approach lets you simplify your shopping list, shorten your cooking time, and save money, while still feeding 'em food they'll like. Let's face it, even if you love to cook like I do, no one really wants to spend twenty hours a week shopping and cooking.
There are only five mother sauces, and all other sauces are simply variations on them. The mother sauces are: béchamel (white sauce), velouté (light stock), espagnole (brown stock); hollandaise (hot emusification) and mayonnaise (cold emusification); and Vinaigrette (oil and vinegar). Some people also add tomato sauce to this list due to its versatility and commonality.
I will go over all the sauces except for the stocks. A brilliant homemade stock is all well and good, but the modern home cook has perfectly good canned broths and bullion cubes to shorten her stay in the kitchen! For detailed information on stocks, see The Joy of Cooking or The Vegetarian Epicure for complete treatment.
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The most versatile sauce in my opinion is plain old gravy, a simple flour-thickened sauce. Making a gravy to pour over food makes a borning meal fantastic. A hamburger or tofu patty and a boiled potato is somewhat bland; but add a little gravy and it's delicous and aromatic.
A basic sauce like gravy only takes about five minutes to make.
To make this sauce's base, you first need to know what roux is. Roux (prounounced "rue") is simply flour cooked in butter or fat, and it is the basis for all flour-thickened sauces.
Roux is Also Your Friend
(Basic Gravy)1 T. butter
1 T. flour
1 c. hot brothIn a sauce pan, place 1 tablespoon flour and 1 tablespoon butter. Cook over medium heat until it is a golden color.
Add 1 cup of broth, preferably hot, or water and a bullion cube. You may substitute hot milk in place of broth for a richer sauce. Stir with a whisk until smooth. This is called a white sauce.
To make a vegetarian gravy, add any or all of the following to your white sauce: paprika, tumeric, soy sauce, oregano, marjoram, salt & pepper, prepared mustard, and/or dill.
TIP When making a white sauce, don't add the liquid right away - cook the roux until it is a light golden color.
When making a richer sauce or a gravy, cook the flour until it is a dark gold color. Toasting the flour in this way imparts a rich, deep flavor to the resulting sauce.
When making roux-based sauces, always use an equal amount of flour and fat, then add a warm liquid until the desired consistency is reached. The rule of thumb is this: for each tablespoon of fat and flour, use one cup liquid. In other words, if you have three tablespoons of flour in three tablespoons of butter, you'd use three cups of liquid. See? That's easy to remember!
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Béchamel, a classic French "mother sauce," is extremely versatile and well worth learning. You can add all kinds of things to it - you can serve it plain, with eggs or meats added to it, or with cheese in it. A baked potato or steamed cauliflower is fine of course, but with cheese sauce on it, it's a completely different thing!
Mother of All Sauces
(Béchamel)1 c. milk
1/2 large onion
1 bay leaf
2 whole cloves
grated nutmegIn a sauce pan, place 1 cup milk, a pinch of nutmeg, and half an onion with a bay leaf attached to it with two whole cloves. Simmer for 15 minutes.
In a separate sauce pan, place 1 tablespoon flour and 1 tablespoon butter. Cook over medium heat until it is a golden color. Add the hot milk, after straining out the onion, and stir with a whisk until smooth and thickened.
Okay, Now What Do I Do With It?
Now that you've got yourself a lovely saucepanful of bechamel, you can do a jillion yummy things with it:
For a rich, thick cheese sauce, add 1 cup of the grated cheese (or mixed cheeses) of your choice. You may add salt and pepper to taste, and perhaps a pinch of paprika. Adjust thickness by adding a bit of milk if too thick. Serve over:
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Emulsion sauces are more difficult and finicky than gravy or white sauce, but contrary to the cooking shows making one does not require you to be a rocket scientist! It's just food, after all! If you're smart enough to read the instructions to the end, and you don't dump all the oil in at once, you'll end up with a sinfully good hollandaise or mayonnaise and you won't believe how cool you are. If you don't care to tackle either of these rich sauces in the next six month, skip to the vinaigrette section. Vinaigrette can be used for salad dressings and marinades - much more practical than those other, moody emulsion sauces!
Knowing how to make a hot or cold emulsion sauce is not a skill you'll use every day, probably. I make mayonnaise maybe once a year as a very special addition to a meal, and I make hollandaise only three or four times a year (generally during asparagus season).
However, understanding the principles involved is useful to any cook. After all, cooking is really nothing more than an ongoing and (hopefully) edible science experiement, so no experiment is useless in the pursuit of knowledge.
Hollandaise sauce is a warm emusified sauce made with eggs and fat - butter, in this case, with an acid (lemon juice) for focus.
Hollandaise
6 egg yolks
1/4 cup melted butter
1 tsp. fresh squeezed lemon juice
a pinch of salt
a pinch of white pepperBegin by melting the butter in a small sauce pan...
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Like anything else, the right tools make the job of cooking easier. Following are some of the best tools you can have.
Consider the skillet: sure, a Teflon pan is nice... for about two months. Then the coating starts to break down, the pan releases toxic fumes when heated, and the little flecks of coating end up in your food. Not so sexy, eh? Even the pans rated for use with metal implements scratch all too soon.
The answer to this dilemma is a properly seasoned cast iron pan. I have one so smooth I can cook omelettes in it, and if I should happen to burn something in it (shudder), I can happily take a steel wool pad to it. The smooth surface never breaks down - it just gets smoother.
TIP To season a new cast iron pan, coat it with fat. Butter, olive oil, bacon grease, anything you've got. Place it in a warm oven (about 200 degrees or so) for four or five hours. Take it out of the oven, allow it to cool, and then scrub the hell out of the cooking surface with a steel wool or scratchy pad. (Repeat at random intervals until your pan is perfect.) Also: use the pan all the time! Cook in it! A lot! Nothing seasons cast iron better than heavy use.
Some cooks say you can't wash a cast iron pan properly - they say you should never use soap - but it's actually fine as long as you immediately place the damp pan on the stove over heat until it dries, and then smear some oil on it to seal it. Over time, your pan will become dark, smooth, glossy, and much better than Teflon.
Keep at least two smaller sauce pans, and invest in a double-boiler too. A good pan has a heavy bottom, to distribute heat evenly.
Implements
Get a collection of wooden spoons of various sizes and season them regularly with good olive oil. (Also scrub them thoroughly when washing them - it will help make them smoother.) Once your spoons are seasoned and sealed, they will stop being bacteria colonies and become your most favored spoons.
Buy a vegetable peeler that has the blade perpendicular to the handle. They're much, much easier to use than the traditional vertical peelers.
Invest in a good chef's knife. Also buy a sharpening kit.
Buy two little paring knives that you like. I use cheap Ginsu-style knives because they require no sharpening and they're cheap enough to replace every year.
12.1.03 - This document is still under construction.