10.20.08
Dinner Club, Part 1
My [just-out-of-college] friends and I have decided that in order to mitigate our collective failure to cook anything other than freezer food and pasta when we’re cooking only for ourselves, we will take turns hosting Monday night dinners for the whole gang.
Tonight was the first night of the Dinner Club, and I cooked. Now, I have a copy of the joy of cooking and everything, but it seems to be targeted at a different audience. I mean, it seems to assume that I know what kind of dishes exist and just need to know how much x to stir in with the y. This is not a great assumption, especially since I’m new to cooking on a regular basis.
As usual, the internet came through for me. After browsing Elise Bauer’s Simply Recipes for a few minutes, I had easy recipes for guacamole and cheese enchiladas, and Deb Perelman’s Smitten Kitchen popped this wonderful (but slightly more challenging) pumpkin swirl brownies recipe into my RSS reader yesterday.
Anyway, the cooking was fun and everything went over very well. Thanks internet!
Now I just need to learn to cook without completely wrecking the kitchen - it took me about an hour to clean everything up after my guests left, which was a little bit fail.
jackie said,
October 21, 2008 at 4:32 am
May I recommend How to Cook Everything or How to Cook Everything vegetarian, by Mark Bittman, to add to Joy of Cooking? He has a nice range of recipes, from simple to pretty tough, but does a really good job of explaining basic cooking techniques and how to treat different kinds of food (you can search for almost any vegetable in the index, and he always has a few recipes to suggest, and often suggests variations or ways you might think about making this food differently. We have the vegetarian one in Switzerland with us, and it’s amazing.http://www.howtocookeverything.tv/ This seems to be far more reliable and better-explained than depending on the internet.
annemarie said,
October 21, 2008 at 11:01 pm
homeworkland say: I love the Very Basic Cookbook. it’s Very Basically perfect. especially the Very Basic Pizza which I eat like twice a week. it helps to have a pizza stone, though. get one of those. worth the investment. you won’t need parchment paper. just remember to have the stone in the oven while you preheat the oven to get all the moisture out.
for future reference, Wednesday I have class until 10 PM and so tuesday I don’t do anything after work except homework. especially today. b/c I have the storyzor due tomorrow. blaaaaaaah
no i love it but seriously
blah
ps i also recommend split pea soup, though it requires some advance planning, homemade minestrone with cabbage in it, steamed red quinoa with chicken, instant indian dishes from le trader’s with homemade yogurt flatbread (take flour, some salt, and abt a teaspoon of baking powder, add yogurt until it’s dough, then knead just a little bit, flatten and fry) and whole wheat crusted chicken pot pie, munn recipe, which I can give you. it is very filling and nutritious and takes about an hour and a half. oh and applesauce. oh and salad with avocado. oh and anything with potatoes or involving a blender, such as vichysoisse (but for the love of god substitute skim milk for cream if you’re using the joy of cooking recipe; we used cream and it was so rich as to be virtually inedible).
pps tarnation that was a long comment.
Jeremy said,
October 24, 2008 at 3:24 am
I am a strong believer in the cleanup-as-you-go school of thought; part of this comes from having lived in my sister’s studio for two summers, which has a kitchen that would make a postage stamp look roomy. It takes a little bit of practice, but wiping down the counters (if you’re done, obviously) and washing pots and pans while you’re waiting for something to stew/bake/roast - anything that doesn’t need to babied, essentially - can really cut down on your post-cleanup.
Once you have kind of worked out which way is up re: cooking techniques, which the Joy of Cooking should be able to help you with as far as I recall, then I recommend Moosewood’s New Classics. My muhallabia recipe comes from there, as does my biscotti; their drunken bean recipe is filling, good, and relatively simple, as is their red lentil stew (something I plan to make next week, actually). You may need to adjust the spice balance a very little bit, but most of their recipes are pretty easy and you can use their prep time to eyeball how labor-intensive you think things are going to be (I am still horrendous at interweaving prep times for interlocking recipes).
abe said,
October 26, 2008 at 3:41 am
Crap I really need to learn how to cook something more advanced than noodles + olive oil before my turn comes up…