Turn off the television, don\u2019t answer the phone, just sit and read it through. Make a mental inventory of the sort of equipment you need, the cooking techniques required, the ingredients you have on hand. Note the stages of preparation, and get a sense of appropriate timings.<\/p>\n
Turn off the television, don\u2019t answer the phone, just sit and read it through.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
This is the kind of sage advice you find in Lauren Braun Costello\u2019s new book called Notes on Cooking \u2013 A Short Guide to an Essential Craft. The quote above comes from her chapter on Understanding the Recipe and is exactly the advice I try to give my readers at The Reluctant Gourmet web site and the Reluctant Gourmet blog all the time. Lauren just says it a little more succinctly than I do.<\/p>\n
This is not a book full of wordy chapters but instead there are 217 short \u201cnotes on cooking,\u201d like above, each filled with culinary insight that can help you be a better home cook. Here\u2019s another one I like in The Cook\u2019s Role chapter:<\/p>\n
Work from your Strength. Don\u2019t try to master everything. Become known for a few dishes, perhaps even the near perfection of one. Discover your obsession, then make yourself a slave to it: the mastery of a traditional dish, the combination of ingredients that have never before met, precision in presentation, devotion to a culinary heritage, the introduction of color where it never before existed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
This is an old family recipe for the dumplings, which were originally Polish egg noodles (kluski), and over the years I have modified it to make homemade dumplings. Ingredients Directions 1Place chicken, onion, and celery in a large pot, and then fill pot with water. Season with poultry seasoning, whole allspice, basil, 1\/2 teaspoon salt, …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":18,"featured_media":4473,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[245],"tags":[285,280],"class_list":["post-4186","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-drinks","tag-drinks","tag-recipe"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jannah.tielabs.com\/salad-dash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4186","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jannah.tielabs.com\/salad-dash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jannah.tielabs.com\/salad-dash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jannah.tielabs.com\/salad-dash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/18"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jannah.tielabs.com\/salad-dash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4186"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/jannah.tielabs.com\/salad-dash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4186\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jannah.tielabs.com\/salad-dash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4473"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jannah.tielabs.com\/salad-dash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4186"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jannah.tielabs.com\/salad-dash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4186"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jannah.tielabs.com\/salad-dash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4186"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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