DEBORAH CROMBIE: I know quite a few of us have been cooking-challenged in the last couple of weeks. When you can't get out to the store, for whatever reason (iced in for a week here!) you have to get creative. So did I pull out my favorite cookbooks as I was perusing the pantry and planning meals?
Uh, nope, I'm a little embarrassed to admit. I searched for recipes online. Don't get me wrong–I love cookbooks. But I'm more likely to read them than I am to actually cook from them. I've almost finished reading the copy of Samin Nosrat's GOOD THINGS I got for Christmas, but have I made anything from it? Oops, no, although I even bought the special vinegar for one of her salad dressings... Maybe tomorrow...
I do, however, have favorite online cooking sites that I use practically every day.
#1 is New York Times Cooking.
I know it's a subscription, but to me it is absolutely worth it. I love that I can save recipes in my searchable Recipe Box. And I really love the comments from other readers. They can be incredibly helpful and have often made the difference between a recipe that is just okay and one that goes on instant dinner repeat.
#2 is Jeanine Donofrio's LOVE & LEMONS. I actually have one of her cookbooks that I never think to open. We're not vegetarian but I'm always trying to ramp up our fruit, veggie, and grain proportions, and she's a terrific resource on how to cook all of those things.
#3 is another vegetarian site, COOKIE + KATE. If one of your New Year's resolutions is to eat healthier, this will inspire you.
I also subscribe to The Washington Post's Eat Voraciously column (free with the paper's digital subscription) and I subscribe to Mark Bittman's substack, The Bittman Project which does require a small fee but is a great resource for healthy eating and food news.
And of course there is Ina Garten, the Barefoot Contessa, who can be relied upon for many a great recipe. (Short ribs, anyone? Yum, I think, with this cold weather, those might need to go on my menu this week…)
Darling REDs, do you turn to favorite internet cooking gurus in a pinch, or do you actually use your trusty cookbooks?
LUCY BURDETTE: I requested and received 3 cookbooks for Christmas and Birthday, including Good Things. I’ve only made one recipe from Dorie Greenspan’s cake book. John wonders why I need cookbooks when I get everything online? BIG SHRUG. I’m an addict!
I love New York Times Cooking, Once Upon a Chef, Sally’s Baking Addiction, King Arthur, and most recently, Alexandra’s Kitchen. And more…
DEBS: Oh, I use Once Upon a Chef, too!
HALLIE EPHRON: My go-to source is The New York Times Cooking, too. But I also find myself dipping back into the first cookbook I ever used: The Joy of Cooking. It’s cover has decayed and many of the pages are stained, but it’s so easy to follow, simple and reliable. I’m not a fan of recipes that include obscure ingredients or fancy equipment. (No air fryer or sous vide or crockpot even …)
And then there are all the recipes I’ve cut out or printed over the years, which I keep in a series of manila folders (Mains, Desserts, Soups…)
DEBS: For some reason, I've never really cooked from Joy, even though I have the 1970s edition and the newer one. You Joy fans will have to list me some of your favorites to try.
JULIA SPENCER-FLEMING: Ladies, I have to confess. I cook because I like to eat. Any small stirrings of cooking as a creative act were trampled underfoot by thirty years of making dinners (and lunches) for a family of five. If I could hire someone to make delicious, healthy meals for me, I’d do it in a minute, and I’d never open the oven again except to re-heat take-out pizza.
That being said, if I am looking for a recipe for a dish I’ve never made before, my technique is to search with a list of the main ingredients, see what pops up, and then sort the recipes by the number of reviews and how many stars each one received. Then I go back and forth, reading several of them. Sometimes, I choose just one. Other times, I mix and match. If a dish was a success, I’ll bookmark it, which is the modern version of the manila folders with newspaper and magazine clippings which I, like Hallie, collected.
Where are they now? I guess we’ll find out when my Swedish Death Cleaning is complete.
DEBS: Julia, mine in are the kitchen bookshelf, and I do actually use some of them!
RHYS BOWEN: I have become anti-cooking. After fifty years of feeding a family every night all I want is a personal chef to call me when dinner is on the table and delight my senses. But one thing I do still enjoy is making soups in the winter. My friend Susan Shea gave me a lovely book called Sunday Soups for Christmas and I have already tried a couple of them.
I do save recipes I see online but I have to confess that my rule for trying them is now how good they might taste but how many ingredients they have. If I scan down and read “first grate the ginger, crush the garlic and saute the xxx then put aside while you…” No. My favorite meals these days are things like lamb chops, asparagus and new potatoes or pan fried petrale sole.
DEBS: So many of the NYT recipes tell you that you can make them in 30 minutes. I will tell you that THEY LIE. I used to think I was just a really bad cook because things would take me at least twice as long, but I see other people in the NYT comments saying that they lie! Maybe in a professional kitchen, with someone to prep...
HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: I think I get a newsletter from–All Recipes? Which I never make anything from, but I get ideas. Like–oh, I have chicken and mushrooms, and that’s an interesting way to put them together. And then I do it my way. Sometimes I enter the ingredients I have, and see what it comes with that’s different. I am less and less inclined to try something complicated. I have NO time for that.
I do have a stash of cookbooks, though, and if I need any advice, I go to Mark Bittman or the Blue Strawberry Cookbook. They always know. I will never give up my young-bride compilation of recipes clipped from the Washington post and who knows where else, some in handwriting on peoples index cards and some weird copies from an office copier (I bet) and all taped with now-yellowed and brittle scotch tape into spiral steno pads. I bet it has chicken divan and fondue sauces and chicken Kiev and french onion soup (Julia Child's) and boeuf bourguignon and fettucini Alfredo.Things like that.
Recently I calculated that in the time I’ve been married to Jonathan I have probably cooked 7500 dinners. Just saying.
JENN McKINLAY: I don’t cook so while I love looking at cookbooks — the Magnolia Bakery cookbook is divine! — I handed my apron to the Hub during the pandemic and never took it back. So recipe searching isn’t for me, although I will ask the Hub to cook chicken or fish or whatever I’m hankering and he is wonderfully accommodating and a much better cook than I am.
DEBS: How about it, dear readers? Do you reach for a cookbook, look up a dinner recipe online--or order out!
I enjoy cooking so if I look up a recipe, I'm likely to do some tweaking of the recipe as I'm cooking. I'm probably evenly split between searching for a recipe online or looking something up in one of the many cookbooks on the kitchen shelf. When I do search for recipes, I'm most likely to select one based on the ingredient list. I don't mind the "grate, crush, sauté" ones; it's the ingredients I don't have or don't want to include that will put me off of a recipe . . . .
ReplyDeleteJoan, the ingredients not had is part of my cooking retirement. In moving five years ago, I found so much in the pantry so far out of date and realized arriving in my new home how expensive and wasteful restocking would be. Elisabeth
DeleteMy husband does the cooking - I always had the longer commute, plus he enjoys it more than I do. I do occasionally cook something from Alton Brown’s Good Eats cookbooks - I like learning the science behind the recipes.
ReplyDeleteI have a subscription to New York Times Cooking and use that frequently. (Just used it to remind myself how to cook Swiss Chard, as a matter of fact.) I also use Allrecipes.com that Hank mentioned above. Those are my two main go tos online, though a friend has recommended Smitten Kitchen which looks intriguing. And Debs, though I weeded my cookbooks about a year ago, I still have plenty I could use — but for the most part don’t any more.— Pat S
ReplyDeleteI have a raft of cookbooks that I rarely open. I do look things up on line, more to find new things to do with whatever falls out of the pantry/fridge. If I see something I like, I print it out, have a notebook filled with these. But the only time I really use a recipe is for baked goods, cakes and pies and breads and cookies.
ReplyDeleteAll that being said, I do love to put a great meal on the table. This week it was stuffed pork loin. And I’m still bragging about it! Julie found a whole loin at a great price. It was the size of my thigh! I cut two roasts and ten chops from it, vacuum packing all but one of the roasts. That one I butterflied, pounded out to about a 9 x 13 rectangle and filled it with Pepperidge farm stuffing, rolled it into a tight tight roll and tied it. I’m a fan of convection roasting and my oven probe. That went into the interior, set at 150 degrees. I roasted it on top of Brussels sprouts, until it reached the set temp and served it with roast potatoes and a mix of yellow wax and green beans. Plus homemade applesauce.
We inhaled it! And I saved a slice for Jannette, our household Angel. She said it was the best pork she’d ever tasted. And such a pretty dish, each slice a pinwheel. Pru and Paul would be proud!
Mark me down as one of the “retired” cooks. But I do love reading recipes and used to love cooking and baking. And, in the family of my heart at least 3 very talented cooks. NYT Cooking is my favorite source (and since I subscribe to the NYT, it is no added charge). Find a recipe, forward it to those 3 talented cooks (and as long as I don’t exceed 10 recipes a month no added charge) and voila! The next family dinner features one of these. Enjoy your days, All. Elisabeth
ReplyDeleteI'm a mix of all of that. I pull out my mother's Joy of Cooking for standbys like banana bread. I dip into my New Basics Cookbook for things like pizza dough and beef bourgignone (crap, how do you spell that, anyway? I'm leaving it at my third try...). The little Wild About Muffins book has been my rock for years (I like it so much I found pre-owned copies for both my sons for Christmas). I have my blue folder of recipes found online that I print out and try, and if they're good, into the folder they go (like the dry rub for the spatchcock chicken, orginally from NYT Cooking, I have the NYT subscription, and I often just make up a dish. Oh, plus my recipe box from my teen and young adult years, which holds my grandmothers' and mother's cookie recipes.
ReplyDeleteBut unusual ingredients? Forget it. I have made exactly one recipe from Ottolenghi's Jerusalem.
I cooked to survive, but now that my family loves to cook, I don't now. If they are not home, I do take-out.
ReplyDeleteYears ago, I wrote a food book called Substituting Ingredients.
ReplyDeleteI've updated it several times and it's still in print (3rd edition).
So now you know the basis of my cooking.
I am one of the least imaginative cooks ever. I have been baking the same Laurel's Kitchen 100% whole wheat bread week in, week out, for 45 years. Because I'm not an adventurous eater and my husband will eat anything, I mostly cook old favorites at this point. My cookbooks on the shelf are sadly ignored. However I do occasionally add to the repertoire. This year Connie Schultz (wife of former/hopefully future Ohio senator Sherrod Brown) recommended a turkey pot pie recipe to use up Christmas leftovers, promising it was easy with a store bought pie crust. It actually WAS very easy, my family loved it, and I printed the recipe for my own manila folder. Right now, with the cold (-1°F before windchill this AM, due to be -20° before windchill this weekend) I'm thinking about soups and stews. Last night I made cornbread and pea soup with the Christmas ham bone. I need to look in the freezer for whatever promising things I can throw together for one night and on the other I'll make corn chowder or squash soup. Plus fresh bread, of course. (Selden)
ReplyDeleteAllrecipes is one of my favorites when I get a craving for something I had at a restaurant that either no long exists, is in a different city, or removed it from the menu. I still refer to my Betty Crocker cookbook that I received as a wedding gift a few decades ago. And I have a folder of print outs of recipes as well as a vintage recipe box.
ReplyDeleteAlso, I have found some fabulous recipes in the little cookbooks sold near grocery store checkout lines.
We enjoy good food and cooking. My husband has taken the initiative the last few years - he has his new specialties. While NYT is our go-to, I increasingly use the database Eat Your Books, which also gives me recipes from Food 52. I have many cookbooks I've rarely cooked from, and we've come up with some real gems in the last few months. So if I have an ingredient I want to use - leeks, for example, I enter that in, and see what comes up. We've even come up with some Hazan recipes we had never made before. One of our real finds was from Six Seasons. I bought the book for all the right reasons, but had never cooked from it. And the squash soup from Falastin was amazing. I could go on.... I subscribe to Milk Street, but hadn't used it much. We made a canned artichoke pasta the other night that was amazing.
ReplyDeleteNormally I do not cook. Many of the cookbooks belong to my husband. He likes America’s Test Kitchen from the TV show. Occasionally I will thumb through the church cookbooks we have. My go to for basic instructions for things most people just know how to make is still my red and white plaid Better Homes and Gardens Cookbook from 1974-75 7th grade Home Ec. My mother had a previous edition.
ReplyDeleteEvery now and again I will think of something specific I would like to have and I will google a recipe for it. I’ve used some All Recipe recipes and I like the Pioneer Woman. For Thanksgiving I tried a different stuffing recipe. It was okay but it that recipe went in the recycle bin. In December, I made a baked orange French toast for Christmas brunch. In January I actually cut an appetizer recipe out of our community newspaper, made it and served it at a neighbor gathering. It was well-received. I copied both of those to recipe cards and crammed them in my box.
I use recipes from my cookbooks and don't mind chopping one thing and grating another. Most of the times, I can anticipate whether a combination of ingredients will be to our taste. I do occasionally list ingredients on Google and see what recipes pop up. I made a delicious soup combining a couple of ideas last week.
ReplyDeleteMore than cookbooks, I have folders full of recipes that I have been accumulating for 53 years. I make notes on the pages and if something is delicious, it gets revisited from time to time.
On line, I follow Epicurious, America's Test Kitchen, Sally's Baking Addiction and King Arthur Flour. Did you ever call the KAF help line? The bakers there are so helpful! I also have called the help line on other products' boxes. I needed a non dairy recipes for cornbread and the Quaker Oats people obliged. Perfect!
As for estimated cooking times, I don't think they include prep, which probably takes me 3 times as long as a trained chef.