• Who: Anyone can cook.
  • When: Breakfast, Lunch, but mainly Dinner
  • Where: home - kitchen
  • How:
    1. Blend smoothie for breakfast
    2. Put together lunchbox for lunch
    3. Cook a dinner off my menu

Flavor: Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat

  • Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat by Samin Nosrat, with awesome watercolor illustrations by Wendy MacNaughton, teaches the basics of flavorful dishes.
    1. Fresh, quality ingredients - here’s a helpful tip, if the ingredient doesn’t taste good by itself, it’s not gonna taste any better in a dish.
    2. Salt - all food needs to be properly salted.
    3. Fat - carries flavor compounds, fat makes everything taste better.
    4. Acid - excites our taste buds, makes us salivates, balances out flavors.
    5. Heat - properly cooking each ingredient is key to a balanced dish.

Basic Cooking Skills

  1. Prep Ingredients - For meat, this means salting it 30 minutes to 1 day before hand (generally, fish needs less time, big cuts need more). It might mean marinating the meat in oil as well, with spices added if you like. For plants, this mainly means chopping, which requires only two things: a very sharp chef’s knife, and a cutting board (ideally wood, plastic okay too).
  2. Cook Meat - The hardest thing to cook, but simple once you get the gist. Basically, get a cast iron pan or dutch oven, preheat the pan, then turn the heat to medium-high or high (as hot as possible without smoking oil). Then, add a little oil to sear, more oil to saute or shallow-fry, and a ton to straight-up fry. I mostly do sears and sautes, with a ripping hot pan, and smack that meat down to cook it.
  3. Cook Carbs - Generally easy to cook because the package gives you directions, e.g. rice, pasta. Bread usually comes pre-cooked unless you’re a wizard/baker. Tortillas are similar, usually cooked, very delicious. Bread and Tortillas and Pasta are not that hard to make by hand, either, they just take forever.
  4. Cook Sauce - Sure, you can make a fresh Pico de Gallo by chopping up and combining Tomatoes, Onions, Jalapenos, fresh Lime Juice, Salt, and Black Pepper in the right ratios, or you can cook the sauce. Every sauce pretty much follows the same order:
    1. Saute Aromatics & Spices - onion first, garlic at the end. Each cuisine adds on to this with stuff like carrots, celery, peppers, ginger, etc, but the cooking is all the same. Add in spices at the end, or really whenever.
    2. Add in Liquid Builders - tomatoes first and other bigger veg like broccoli, then liquids like stocks, broths, milks, creams, etc. Then let it simmer.
    3. Finishers - add in fresh leafy greens if using.
    4. Toppings - top with stuff like fresh herbs, yogurt/sour cream, cheese, etc.