Honest Ingredients, Easy to follow Recipes, and Comments from a Life Well Wasted...
What's For Dinner?
The words seem to ring in my ears. As the cook in my family, that question was directed at me. Since the answer seldom popped fully-formed into my head, I created a list of things that could be made from stuff that we usually had in the fridge and pantry. The list was useful, and it got used. A lot. But it didn't answer the related but quite different question: What are we going to serve our guests for dinner? So I made a second list and even came up with some complete meals involving multiple courses. And some of that stuff sounded good as "what's for dinner" options so the two lists got combined into 'The List'.
'The List' was quite long and not every recipe was super-simple or easily remembered. So I started to add references and bookmarks to 'The List'. And when I went to cook things from this pile of papers the instructions never made complete sense to me. There always seemed to be an easier method or technique or shortcut. And there were changes to the products to suit my geography and taste. And I liked different measurements and ingredients. All the petty but important things that any home cook knows about what they want and prefer.
Which meant massaging descriptions of things that I like into my own collection of recipes done my way. Which is a cookbook. Of which I am the curator. It is my cookbook, not in the sense of having created the basic ideas but in the sense of having tested and altered and molded and polished these ideas. In other words, the test kitchen has been open, work has been done, and the results are in this 'present little book'. I kissed a lot of toads to make this book, and I use it every day. It doesn't stop me from reading cookbooks and magazines and the New York Times, but it prevents a lot of aggravation when it comes to choosing and cooking the food we eat around here -- i.e. Honest Everyday Cooking.