Professional Tips for the Hands On Home Cook

• Have a menu, but be flexible – Be on the lookout for great deals, loss leaders, specialty items.
• Waste Not, Get Fired Not – Scrape condiment jars clean, use leftovers
• Ingredients do double or triple duty – After slicing a tomato, use the ends for salads, bits and scraps of foods are a resource
• Outsource where it makes sense – unless you keep dairy animals, it makes more sense to buy cheese and butter, for instance.
• Embrace simplicity
• It’s easier to cook everyday – it becomes a natural rhythm and will be easier than going out to eat or grabbing burgers on the way home.
• Those aren’t leftovers, they are prep – pre-clean veggies when you get them home, grill up some meat and turn your fridge to a grab and go salad bar / deli counter. Re-purpose leftovers – mashed potatoes can become the topping for a casserole, or potato pancakes. Corn from last nights dinner can be tossed with tonight’s salad.
• Use your freezer. It’s only trivially more time and effort to make a big batch of something than to make a small portion. Use this to your advantage by making double batches of basic dinners and freezing enough for those nights when you need heat-it-and-eat-it convenience.
• Recipes are more like guidelines. Read through a recipe carefully and make sure you understand what ingredients are needed and what kind of time commitment the recipe is going to take, but understand that a million variables—from the humidity in the air to the age of dry beans to the calibration of your oven—all effect the final outcome of your dish. Truly great cooks must trust their senses more than rigid steps in a recipe, because, no matter how well tested a recipe is, your humble cookbook author cannot predict how all those variables will come together in your home. Once you understand flavors, you can swap different herbs and spices. You can often swap out a protein (although cooking time/temp may need to be adjusted)
• Make recipes your own.
• Go Seasonal – in season food is fresher, better tasting, and often less expensive, and good to support local farmers. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel every season. The same basic recipe, like a flat bread or fruit crisp can be re-imagined over and over by tweaking a component or two to include a local seasonal ingredient.

Essential Equipment for the Hands On Home Cook

• Cast Iron
• Cutting Boards
• Dutch Oven
• Food Processor
• Instant-Read Thermometer
• Kitchen Scale
• Knives – Chef Knife, Bread Knife, Paring Knife
• Large Pot (Water Bath Canning)
• Portion Scoops – Skip the overpriced and weak portion scoops available at fancy kitchen stores and go straight for the industrial versions available at restaurant supply stores. They will have color-coded plastic handles and a number that indicates the scoop size, based on how many level portions of the scoop will fill a one-quart container. A #60 scoop creates a one-T. portion, a #8 creates a four-oz. portion. Get the sizes that make sense for the items you scoop (meatballs, cupcake batter, etc.)
• Sheet pans and Parchment paper
• Stand Mixer
• Whisks, Spoons & Other Hand Tools