🍳Home cooking

Cooking philosophy

Cooking from scratch the vast majority of the time is very valuable as it makes it possible to control the quality of ingredients and portion sizes. This enables controlling intake of anything easily, whether that is calories (e.g. through portion sizing, recipe choices and ingredients), ultra processed foods (cooking is not ultra processing if using ingredients found in many homes) or specific ingredients e.g. nuts.

A low barrier to entry is vital, as complex and hard to deliver recipes will not enthuse cooking from scratch. 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 the understanding of 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

Short form	Full name	Amount
tsp	teaspoon	5 ml
dsp	dessert spoon	10 ml (seldom used)
tbsp	tablespoon	15 ml
pt	pint	568 ml
oz	ounce	1/16th lb
lb	pound	454 g or 1/14th st

Info

A "cup" is an American measure designed to create entire recipes in cups where the size of your cup is irrelevant as the recipe will scale to it. There are cup measures, although these are only fluid measures and not weights, but even then they won't always be the same in Internet recipes, so try to avoid. If you must use a recipe with cups, use about 240 ml, although you should be immediately concerned to be measuring ingredients like flour in ml (sifting will change its volume).

Tip

Imperial measurements may seem archaic but can be easy day-to-day e.g. a pound of mince is the size of a ball that fits in an adult hand and will happily make a bolognese sauce or chilli con carne for a family.

Basic kitchen skills

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.

Component	cuisine	time
Boiled rice	Chinese Indian Japanese	30 minutes
Breaded cutlet	French German Italian	10 minutes
Dumplings	British	30 minutes
Eggs	British French	10 minutes
Pastry	British	10 minutes
Potatoes	British	30 minutes
Yorkshire puddings	British	30 minutes

Sauce	cuisine	time
Amai sauce	Japanese	10 minutes
Katsu curry sauce	Japanese	30 minutes
White sauce	British	15 minutes

Dip	cuisine	time
Guacamole	Mexican	15 minutes
Hummus	Greek	10 minutes
Tomato salsa	Mexican	5 minutes
Tzatziki	Greek	5 minutes

Full recipes

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

Recipe	cuisine	serves	time
Banana bread	British	8	1 hour
Beef stew	British	4	4 hours
Chicken katsu curry and amai chicken	Japanese	4	1 hour
Chicken korma	Indian	4	45 minutes
Chilli con carne	Mexican	5	1 hour
Chris' chicken rice	British	1	30 minutes
Cottage pie	British	4	45 minutes
Grandad Eric's 'Curly wurlies'	Spanish	4	45 minutes
Italian meatballs with pasta	Italian	4	45 minutes
Macaroni cheese	British	3	30 minutes
Mexican night	Mexican	4	1 hour
Mushroom risotto	Italian	2	45 minutes
Pan fried chicken with mushrooms	Italian	2	45 minutes
Ribollita	Italian	4	1 hour
Spaghetti bolognese	Italian	4	30 minutes
Stone baked pizza	Italian	4	2 hours
Toad in the hole	British	4	45 minutes
Vegetable fried rice	Chinese	2	45 minutes

Recipes - holiday highlights

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.