Anarchist's

I just finished reading Turtle Island: Foods and Traditions of the Indigenous Peoples of North America. I read it cover to cover and I am unsure if I will ever make a recipe out of it. But man was it interesting, informative and captivating to learn about the native foods in North America. I can't recommend it enough

I reread The French Laundry Cookbook frequently. It changed how I think about cooking.

Followed by the Good Eats cookbooks, Vol 1-4. Alton Brown NEEDS a Pulitzer, or the cooking equivalent.

The science of cooking has become more important to me than cookbooks/recipes.

"Dessert Person" and "What's for Dessert?" by Claire Saffitz. Really great recipes ranging in difficulty from easy to difficult, interesting food and flavor combinations, and a focus on flavors themselves instead of excessive sweetness.

I've made some absolutely delicious desserts from these books, my favorite so far is the toasted sesame banana cream tart.

Justine Cooks: Recipes (Mostly Plants) for Finding Your Way in the Kitchen - Justine Doiron

We’re not vegan/vegetarian but with the increasing meat costs and environmental impacts it has, we’ve leaned into this book a lot. Also so cheap to soak a 1lb bag of beans the night before.

One of my favorites is Mandy Lee’s The Art of Escapism Cooking

I think there’s maybe a bit more complexity to the recipes and some require like various set up spice blends or sauces or what have you but the recipes are a lot of fun. There’s a really fun fusion and play element to her recipes and if you like Szechuan food, you’ll get a lot of those flavor profiles.

Just finished the Food Lab by J. Kenji Lopez-Alt, and I really loved it! There are plenty of recipes in it, but it is more focused on techniques and the "why" behind a lot of things. I'd also recommend his YouTube channel super heavily.

I am always very into Fuchsia Dunlop's Sichuanese and other Chinese books. Great recipes, great info, and so much passion for the food and the land. Land of Plenty, Every Grain of Rice.... I don't know if I could pick a favorite. I pick them up just to browse regularly. I can't recommend her enough, especially the hot pot broth.

Recently got a copy of her Revolutionary Chinese Cooking and am looking forward to getting into it.

Also recently rereading Hot Sour Salty Sweet by Alford and Duguid. Beautiful and informative book. Best nuoc mam cham recipe, too (but of course your preferences may vary).

The Dungeon Crawler's Cookbook.

zaitoun - palestinian cookbook we keep coming back to

Matty Matheson's Soup, Salads, and Sandwiches. Lot of good recipes and I enjoy the layout.

Mashed potatoes is Irish guacamole.

Following recipes are great at teaching you how other people make food. For an almost infinite amount of reasons, that isn't necessarily how you should make food.

The more I've learned and the more I've become comfortable, the more I think cooking is one of the few things that are actually just vibes based. Relax. Cook what makes you feel good. Mistakes are rarely fatal (to you or the meal). The stakes are low. Try new things.

It's not so much a lesson as it is an opinion: being any sort of purist when it comes to food is dumb. Good food is good food. The name or inspiration for it is irrelevant.

Mine won't be particularly helpful to anyone else but... I have ARFID (avoidant restrictive food intake disorder) and for me that looks like textures and flavors grossing me out so bad I can't eat a lot of things.

What I've learned lately about cooking is that it's actually ok to try new things. If I don't like it, I don't have to eat it. And no one is going to yell at me or anything else crazy.

A second thing I've learned about cooking is, I don't hate it. I wouldn't quite call it a hobby but, it's not a chore I hate doing with a passion anymore. But that might be partially due to having a partner who makes it fun.

I'm sure I'm about to learn a lot more now that I've given myself permission to not only actually cook but to actually try new things.

Remove the cardboard from the frozen pizza BEFORE you put it in the oven.

Decide what you want to eat. Pick-up can or ready meal of product… read ingredients and place back on shelf. But ingredients separately. Go home. Make approximation of meal you wanted. Edit and repeat until happy.

I'm currently working on my cooking skills now. Always admired food and other peoples cooking IQ (learning what flavors come together, what cooking techniques, etc). Trying to actively learn more.

I never knew until recently my fish always broke because I tried to turn it too soon for example ... I'm super new 😅

Ive recently started cooking lentils a lot. They are so much faster than beans.

I made a batch with carmelized onions, and now I dont think I am capable of making lentils without carmelizing some onions first.

Legit amazing.

I soak my freezer fries in water to remove freezer burn and loosen the gluten makes them crisp up nicer.

Beef bourguignon is peak pot roast

I’m continually discovering new things my grocery store’s bulk section carries. Casually walking by it usually looks like the Granola Zone. But they usually have a pretty good spice selection too. Once you have some jars for your usual staples, the refills there are about half the price of going to the spice aisle. It obviously varies between stores, but mine’s started doing bulk peanut butter too. I never have a jar in my house, so it’s nice to just grab a couple of ounces when a recipe calls for it. Some spots mighteven have flour or rice.

Outside of that, my biggest food hack has been getting rid of most of my grocery store plastic storage containers. They have a specific container for every shape and culinary situation. It’s good to keep a few oddly specific rectangles around, but almost all my leftovers nowadays go into the “deli containers” that you get from a certain class of takeout. You can get 8oz, 16oz, and 32oz containers that all use the same lid for about $0.10-0.20 USD. Because they’re all just increasingly tall cylinders, everything in your fridge suddenly stacks super well. If anything goes funky, you can also toss the container without feeling too much guilt. https://www.epicurious.com/expert-advice/deli-containers-are-the-food-storage-solution-of-my-dreams-article

Pati Jinich also opened my eyes to a combination I would not have considered - fruit salad with onion! I love it.

On cooking, I guess I'm always learning. Never been a recipe person. Most recently learned that some foods are good burned. Burned cabbage, so good.

It's a dying trend but following a family recipe book is at the same time a travel through time in your language, your society, your family and, as a bonus, how tastes and flavours have changed over time.

Profissional authors tend to create books for an audience, while family cooks tend to put down tips, tricks and thoughts on how and why something works or does not, in the hope it will travel down through the generations and be helpful later on.

My partner as inherited cook books from her family, relatives and friends and this is well know in our circle and she has been offered good money to surrender those books to professional chefs. With no success. In those books there are recipes and tricks completely forgotten to modern day culinary.

keep open avocados in a ziplock sandwich bag to keep them from going brown and gross. I can make an avocado last five days and it's still green 💚

I'm going to sound like a shill (go through my post history if you think so) but this knife sharpening thing: https://www.horl.com/en-US

Friend of mine in NYC introduced me to it, and I was super skeptical it wouldn't just strip five time more metal than a whetstone. I emailed the guy who made my chef's knife, and he said "No, that thing is the bomb."

My knives are always sharp and if they are not, they get sharp in 2 minutes. And one of the disks doubles as a honer. (and yes I know I should have been honing them more before I got this, but could never get into the habit of always using the steel and being afraid my angle was off).

Indian cooking techniques when it comes to spices, like tempering and blooming and dry roasting spices, map over to other cuisines. I got myself a little frying pan specifically for the task to reduce friction. I've also improved my spicing by learning when to add certain types of spices, e.g. ground spices not too early or they'll get bitter.

"Yeah, you can deep fry that."

There is no reason to cheep out on commodity pantry items. Quality flour, potatoes, rice, beans, frozen veggies, and canned goods are never going to break the budget and make a huge difference in meals.

You can afford the good flour.

Eggo sized Belgium waffles made at home and frozen, much better and cheaper!

I love making a huge batch of chili. It's great for hosting friends or freezing and having later.

Basically I enjoy anything that takes a long time to cook and where I can play around with incrementally adding things to bring out flavours.

Sandwiches.

Soups, for sure, but I also very much enjoy making things that occupy my hands for a while. Pierogi, gyouza, etc. So, various types of dumplings, I guess.

I like to make an orange rub rotisserie turkey for holidays. Always turns out perfect, and I glaze the skin at the end with sugar, such that it mixes with the fat on the skin and carmelizes. It's pretty easy, so long as you make sure you get your rotating gear tightened up enough and check it once its up to temperature, as you don't want your bird not turning!

Such a difficult question as I do enjoy cooking in general. But sourdough bread has to be the winner. It's magic. Anything that has a magic transition like that I enjoy making. Mayonnaise, meringue. Banana bread goes through a stage that looks like vomit, then as I add ingredients, a silky batter.

I also like hosting Thanksgiving at my house, staging all that cooking, making everything nice.

Smoking meats hands down. From balogna to brisket, anything smoked is just better. The labor for a long smoke is worth it

Enjoying an overpour on the rocks while the smoke chugs from the Weber bullet is a great way to pass the time on a cool Fall evening. The weekend feast of primal cuts transformed is my favorite, seemingly endless meal.

I married the pickiest girl west of the Mississippi. I swear it's like trying to feed a fussy teenager. But when I need to cook dinner on my own, it's usually Chinese inspired. I make a mean Three Cup Chicken, and my Buddha's Delight is second to none.