🍳Home cooking

Up: shearman.org.uk

Cooking philosophy

Cooking from scratch the vast majority of the time is very valuable as it makes it possible to control:

• the cost of your food shop through the ingredients you choose to buy;
• the quality of ingredients you use;
• ultra processed foods, like those common in ready meals;
• specific ingredients like nuts or gluten if you are allergic or intolerant; and
• calorific intake, predominantly through portion sizes, making it easier to maintain a healthy weight.

These are self-evidently worth having, and yet many people do not cook from scratch most days, so it is important to identify and overcome barriers. One key barrier is a perceived lack of time, yet the above benefits are so compelling they should make cooking from scratch worth the time cost in most circumstances.

Another barrier is complex and hard to deliver recipes that may discourage cooking from scratch through fear or poor understanding. Therefore the vision here is to break down everything as simply as possible for both techniques and recipes, and to provide explanations and basic principles for techniques to enable comprehension of the why that provides opportunities for confidence and creativity in cooking.

Recipes will attempt to minimise salt (which is to be avoided by those with kidney issues and exceeds recommended daily allowance in many ordinary foods) while escaping the blandness sometimes associated with low salt foods by the use of spices such as pepper and paprika.

The recipes find and use opportunities to load more vegetables into dishes; this makes overall diet better and makes the meat go further, which is cheaper and better for the environment.

Finally these recipes are mostly for dishes that kids love or can learn to enjoy (or in the cases of Chicken katsu curry and amai chicken and Chicken korma with Chris' chicken rice, for adults and kids that can easily be prepared together).

These approaches will give access to favourite family-friendly recipes.

Standard measures and conversions

Basic kitchen skills

• Boiling and steaming
• Frying, braising and stewing
• Handling ingredients
• Knife skills
• Making salads
• Oven baking and grilling
• Using herbs and spices

Basic recipe components

Recipes can seem daunting but all food preparation is essentially just following a number of simple processes and combining these in different ways. By breaking down recipes into simpler components, we can see that, so long as we are familiar with the basic kitchen skills above, they are simpler than they might at first seem e.g. our Japanese meal has steps including making Boiled rice. The only difficulty is then trying somehow to do several processes at once, but this gets easier with practice or a second pair of hands.

Here are lists of part recipes that can be used in a number of full recipes; split into components, sauces and dips.

Full recipes

These full recipes use the basic kitchen skills and mostly standard components or sauces to produce simple full recipes.

Recipes - holiday highlights

• Chicken katsu curry and amai chicken
• Stone baked pizza
• Mexican night

Using Internet recipes

The recipes here are simple and easy; this makes them easy to understand and quick to put together. But there are few recipes here, and Internet recipes may be unnecessarily complex.

The recommended solution is to look at a few Internet recipes for the same dish, and see what elements are common as its fundamentals. This should allow you to make a simple version and add any complexities you think may be worthwhile from the recipes. This may work less well with puddings where precision is required but should work with most dishes.