Cooking with (and without) a Book

A young friend graduated from college this year, married and moved across the country. It’s an exciting time in her life, with many new things to learn.  I sent her off with a crock pot, knowing there will be many days when she and her husband will both be out for long hours and neither will feel like cooking when they get home.

Today I am sending her a cookbook of graduate-student-budget-friendly slow cooker recipes, with a few thoughts written in the front cover. It’s a copy of a cookbook I drew from when she and I ate together this past year. Remembering my own early learning to cook days, I penned a note which includes a few thoughts on learning to cook more effectively:

When you use a cookbook, keep a pen or pencil handy. If you try a recipe, date it and make notes in the margin on how well you liked it.If you try something different from what the written recipe calls for (substitutions, etc.) write down what you changed, whether or not it worked and what you’d like to try next time.

Consider creating a list inside the cover of the book or on one of the endpapers, jotting down the name and page number of a recipe you liked, and/ or highlighting it in the index to make it easy to find it again. Cookbooks are tools; personalize them for yourself.

Sometimes substitutions depend on how an ingredient is functioning in a recipe. e.g., an egg may serve to provide fat or leavening, or be a binder to hold things together, so you might use oil, baking soda, or unflavored gelatin as a substitute for an egg depending on what it needs to do. Wine, vinegar, buttermilk, yogurt, citric acid, vitamin C powder, or cream of tartar might be interchangeable if one is used to provide acidity in a recipe. (They won’t all work flavor-wise in every situation. Think about it. You wouldn’t use wine in lieu of something else in a pastry recipe. Almost any other item on the list would be fine, though.)

If an acidic ingredient is in a baked good and you eliminate it, you will need to reduce or eliminate it’s companion ingredient, baking soda, because they are used to counterbalance each other. Compare recipes and you’ll discover relationships.

One more thing: You can use inexpensive meats in a slow cooker but *don’t* skimp on spices!

With love.