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A New Love: Jacques Pépin's Fast Food
Talking Him Into It - Feeding The Guy
Another Change, and Two Summer Shortcakes
« The Weekend Cookbook Challenge: Lace Cookies from The New Basics Cookbook | Main | Finish Your Knitting Project Fast »
For most cooks, most of cooking consists of following recipes. Cookbooks, cooking magazines, and sites like Epicurious.com inspire home chefs, teach them to make new dishes, and introduce them to new cuisines. But as any good chef knows, the mark of a really good, confident cook is the ability to create dishes using instinct, experience, and imagination, not recipes.
Pam Anderson, author of How To Cook Without A Book: Recipes and Techniques Every Cook Should Know By Heart, astutely bases a cookbook on this premise. In a book geared toward novice cooks, Anderson gives a lengthy cooking class that covers everything from soups and salads to ravioli, pad thai and desserts. She picks a type of food and shows cooks how to embellish a basic recipe to create endless spinn-off dishes.
For instance, in the chapter "Simple Tomato Sauce, Scores of Possibilities" she starts with a Simple Tomato Sauce, then lists multiple variations, basing each variation on the "master recipe"; for instance for Tomato-Basil Cream Sauce she lists a handful of new ingredients and instructs the cook: "Follow the Simple Tomato Sauce Recipe, adding cream and basil to the fully cooked sauce. Continue to simmer until heated through, 1 to 2 minutes longer." This same technique is used to teach the reader to make sauces with artichokes and olive, mussels and garlic, and many more. For "Weeknight Stir-Fries" she uses the (longish) rhyme "With onion, garlic and ginger, stir-fry a pound each of vegetables and meat, Then stir in a flavoring sauce for a meal satisfying and complete" as the base for everything from Stir-Fried Chicken with Snow Peas and Water Chestnuts to Stir-Fried Tofu with Haricots Verts and Eggplant, and Sweet-and-Sour Pork with Peppers and Pineapple.
The idea is obviously that once a cook works his or her way through a few of these variations, he or she will understand the basic principals behind the dish and be able to create new recipes. Not a bad way to learn to cook, huh? And maybe a great Christmas or Hanukah gift for the college student or budding chef in your family.
Posted by georgia to Gifts , Kitchen and Cooking , Reviews on December 4, 2005 11:36 PM | permalink | Email this post
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