The Dungeon Meshi renaissance is making me want to share the resources that taught me how to cook.
Don’t forget, you can check out cookbooks from the library!
Smitten Kitchen: The rare recipe blog where the blog part is genuinely good & engaging, but more important: this is a home cook who writes for home cooks. If Deb recommends you do something with an extra step, it’s because it’s worth it. Her recipes are reliable & have descriptive instructions that walk you through processes. Her three cookbooks are mostly recipes not already on the site, & there are treasures in each of them.
Six Seasons: A New Way With Vegetables by Joshua McFadden: This is a great guide to seasonal produce & vegetable-forward cooking, and in addition to introducing me to new-to-me vegetables (and how to select them) it quietly taught me a number of things like ‘how to make a tasty and interesting puréed soup of any root veggie’ and ‘how to make grain salads’ and ‘how to make condiments’.
Grains for Every Season: Rethinking Our Way With Grains by Joshua McFadden: in addition to infodumping in grains, this codifies some of the formulas I picked up unconsciously just by cooking a lot from the previous book. I get a lot of mileage out of the grain bowl mix-and-match formulas (he’s not lying, you can do a citrus vinaigrette and a ranch dressing dupe made with yogurt, onion powder, and garlic powder IN THE SAME DISH and it’s great.)
SALT, FAT, ACID, HEAT by Samin Nosrat: An education in cooking theory & specific techniques. I came to it late but I think it would be a good intro book for people who like to front-load on theory. It taught me how to roast a whole chicken and now I can just, like, do that.
I Dream Of Dinner (so you don’t have to) by Ali Slagle: Ok, look, an important part of learning to cook & cooking regularly is getting kinda burned out and just wanting someone else to tell you what to make. These dinners work well as written and are also great tweakable bases you can use as a starting place.
If you have books or other resources that taught you to cook or that you find indispensable, add ‘em on a reblog.
May I also suggest:
Cooking Comically the site is hilarious and all the recipes are given with step by step picture instructions as well as a rating for how easy/difficult they are. They guy is really funny and has some great simple recipes on there. The book is also absolutely worth getting.
Throwing You Suck At Cooking into the mix - they're three to six minute long videos which alleviate the frustration of being Videos by being very funny in a deeply absurdist way that manages to work some very good, basic, dependable cooking tips in there (I still make lemonade based off of their video) and I believe the website has scripts of the episodes as well.
for my science side of tumblr peeps, may I suggest The Food Lab by J Kenji Lopez-Alt? I definitely remember processes better when I understand what they're for and why they work, and this book helped me with a lot of that (it's right up there with Salt Fat Acid Heat for me in this regard).
