Cooking Basics

Sometime after Parker was born I picked up Julie Powell's book, Julie & Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen, at the library. The book was inspired by this woman's blog where she shared her experience cooking her way through volume one of Mastering the Art of French Cooking. It was entertaining reading, and her one-by-one in-order approach made sense to one who has always been slightly overwhelmed while slogging through books like Better Homes and Gardens New Cook Book.

Anyway, Jamey shared that she rarely uses recipes and over the weekend she kindly loaned me How to Cook Without a Book by Pam Anderson. It's funny that I had picked the book up before, at the same time as Julie & Julia, and while the book seems to be everything I have ever wanted in a cookbook, my own tiny apartment kitchen was hardly up to challenge.

Times they have changed. My current kitchen, while not ideal, is much more suitable to the tasks involved in actual daily cooking. I realize that I'll have to take it slowly and really try and digest what Anderson is suggesting. I cannot simply absorb the information through my fingertips as I would certainly prefer. A wonderful woman named Alice once suggested that I use my academic strengths to tackle some of my non-academic problems (cooking, housekeeping, etc.), and that is how I mean to proceed.

Pleasant coincidences: 1. A lot of the content of the book, I think, will help me remember and build on things Melanie taught me earlier in the year. 2. Anderson notes that she prepared a recipe from Mastering the Art of French Cooking as one of her early cooking experiments. 3. She also notes that her mother, grandmother and aunts would sometimes turn to The Auburn Cook Book when they needed refreshing on a formula, a book I was given as a wedding gift just over seven years ago. I never figured out how to reduce that book to formulas on my own, but now, thanks to Anderson and de Simone, the idea has been implanted. I think it is interesting how book reference and relate to each other even across genres.

Note: I plan to add a photo of my new kitchen later, that is assuming I ever get it clean enough to photograph again. My old kitchen was posted earlier this month when I wrote about the Possum in my kitchen.