How To Eat Gourmet The Easy Way And A DIY Cookbook
I love good food, but don’t love to cook;
therefore, we eat gourmet the easy way.
Then invented an Easy Gourmet DIY Cookbook.
So you, too, can record your recipes made your way.
My personal definition of a gourmet cook: someone whose idea of fun is perfecting the minutest detail of a recipe and then gets an endorphin high by sniffing the resulting culinary delight. Eating it isn’t totally necessary, but watching the expressions of delight on others’ faces as they savor the dish is crucial to the endorphin experience.
I actually know someone who loves to peel and chop and slice and dice and toss and swirl food ingredients without end.
She says it’s therapeutic.
Not me.
Watching her, or doing it endlessly myself, makes me want to toss things across the room. Or swirl right into my recliner.
If there’s anyone else out there who doesn’t have a close relationship with kitchen appliances and grocery ingredients, come sit by me.
Since I don’t love being in the kitchen, I shouldn’t claim to arrive at anything close to gourmand status. But at least people who eat my food don’t realize that I almost never spend more than an hour a day cooking, and often it’s half an hour.
(At least they haven’t said so, and they haven’t asked for enzymes or anything.)
Over here at my house, there’s more value in presentation than preparation. I guess you could say I cook the way The Fly Lady cleans. Fifteen minutes at a time. What I love is to spend time making menu charts and finessing meal preparation speed, because that’s more fun than actually cooking.
That’s why having a DIY cookbook is important. Not very many cookbooks imitate a time management spreadsheet, because the people who write cookbooks love to cook and don’t care how long it takes. They’re the Venn diagrams of hunting and gathering and blending and tasting and circling in on ingredients that is the gourmand’s delight.
My Venn (am I, perhaps, misusing that word? I am so unscientific) circles around paper art, not food art. The art that makes a cookbook beautiful, then records your favorite recipes with your personal touches and shortcuts.
If I’d had to learn to cook from a vintage cookbook my family would have starved. I’m so glad there’s been a
Cookbook Evolution.
Source: Google Images
In this “reciepe” the cook stirred the whites of eggs last beeten to a stiff froth. What happened to the egg yellows? She says to sift the flour and baking powder three times. Sift? With what? And what do you do with the rest of the ingredients?
So, after a few years of trying to decipher her friends’ recipes, “Betty Crocker” came to the rescue. She gives step by step directions on everything. For example, if you don’t know your way around a cow, there’s a diagram for that.
Cooking With Cow 101
Source: KeepingItSimple.com
Who knew there were all those parts to a cow? For that matter, I wonder how old my children were before they realized their taco meat came from AN ANIMAL that had moving eyes and horns and hair and a swishing tail at one time. Awwwww. And then – ewwwww! (The first time a niece saw a Holstein she said, “Look, mom! Dalmatian cows!)
Have you ever had hanging tender? Butcher steaks? Shoulder clod? Top-bottom-eye? I don’t think I’ve ever met any of those in the grocery store.
Easy Gourmet DIY Cookbook
When I started serious cooking for a husband, even Betty Crocker kept me in suspense. For example, I still blame her for the rock hard pie dough I served to guests the first time I attempted pie in my very own kitchen. One guest asked for a chain saw to cut her piece. Betty should have told me that there was a flour for breads and a flour for pie crust, and they were not one and the same. And the part where you mix only till moistened? Capital Letters, in bold, because how was I to know the dire consequences of kneading pie crust like bread dough?
Raise your hand — how many of you finally learned how to make pie crust at a Tupperware party?
Yep. Good old Tupperware lady cut in the shortening, added the water, put the lid on “really tightly” and began to shake that bowl until we heard a thunk, thunk, thunk. Like a washing machine with an unbalanced load. Voila! When she opened the lid, there lay one ball of mixed-just-right, flaky pie crust dough.
Of course I bought that magic bowl! Who wouldn’t? The pictures on the pie recipes she handed out were insanely gorgeous. Leaves on a fall apple pie, browned to perfection? The artist in me just knew this was the answer. Fool people into loving the pie by making it beautiful. The steak knives on the side of the dessert plate? They were in the past now.
Today, our easy gourmet pie crust favorite is this one. But along the way, this happened. An example of the evolution of our personal style of cooking.
By now, perhaps, you understand our need to be the Betty Crocker of personal cookbooks! We knew we couldn’t be the only ones who struggled in the kitchen. Our journey brought us to the…
DIY Easy Gourmet Recipe Album
Given the above scenario, when my daughter reached the age of wanting to cook by herself, I knew that my recipe shorthand, which had greatly improved by then, would not work for her. Just as it had not worked for my son when he baked chocolate chip cookies the first time. He added his version of my listed ingredient, “1 t b.p.” Have you ever eaten flat cookies with black pepper? I hadn’t either. That recipe didn’t make it into the “family traditions” recipe keeper.
We won’t overwhelm you with the whole DIY Recipe Book today. We’ll extend the fun for a few Wednesdays, so you can slowly get used to Speed Cooking. They say you have to slowly reset your brain to declutter your life the KonMari way, and after it’s reset, you’ll never go back. It makes sense, then, that a person would have to slowly learn speed cooking.
To help you finesse your speed cooking
or keep track of all the recipes handed down in your family from generation to generation
put our
DIY Easy Gourmet Cookbook
pin on your recipe book boards:
