I write about the foods I cook, and the methods I use to keep my kitchen. The most important foods to be able to prepare, I categorize as staples. The methods described in practices are general to keeping a home kitchen.
Meals
Recipes by the course or meal are tagged as follows:Staple foods
These are the foods upon which our meals are based.Meat and beef in particular can be challenging and expensive. I concentrate on the cheap cuts that can be braised or sliced for tenderness.
I hit the bulk bins and show you how to cook grains and dry beans.
Most people don't need much help with fruit, but when it comes to vegetables they are so various and not eaten often enough by most people, so I have a lot of topics on them. There are separate tags just for oven-roasted vegetables, because this is such a handy way to use up your farm share, and for greens, because I think they are important enough to warrant their own food group.
Special diets
One of the reasons people become interested in cooking for themselves is that they find it difficult to eat on a restricted diet from mainstream restaurants. If you follow a vegan diet, need recipes that are gluten-free, or are looking for ways to get more raw foods into your diet, check out these labels.Thrift
Home cooking means making the best use of what you've got. One way to economize is to engage in community supported agriculture. Topics under home ec are the kinds of things we used to teach in the high schools, back when that was still a subject: minimizing waste, planning ahead, keeping a stocked pantry.In honor of Slow Food USA's $5 Challenge, I've tagged recipes for entrees under $5. And since time is money, two tags can help you make good food in little time: relatively fast slow food for quick meals, and crock pot recipes for food that cooks while you're doing something else.
Special topics
One of the functions of Slow Foods is to preserve flavors that are not widely available and are in danger of falling out of production altogether. They are usually unsuited to large scale production and only made in a specific location, often only in a specific season. Some of the more unusual flavors that I work with are found in recipes tagged ark of flavors.Processes that involve living foods, like brewing, making bone stocks, baking yeast breads, yogurt, and pickling are no longer commonly known. I plan to document more traditional methods here.
Seasonal
Wherever you live, you may find the labels for the four seasons useful to find recipes appropriate to the time of year. Look for winter, spring, summer, and fall to find dishes made with what's fresh and in-season.Have an idea for a label, or a request for topic coverage? Email me at likethewatch@gmail.com.
No comments:
Post a Comment