Retro Sundays

I created the Retro Sundays series to help newer readers easily navigate the very best of this blog's enormous back catalog of content. Each Retro Sundays column serves up a selection of the best articles from this week in history here at Casual Kitchen.

As always, please feel free to explore CK's Recipe Index, the Best Of Casual Kitchen page and my full Index of Posts. You can also receive my updates at Twitter.

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This Week in History at Casual Kitchen:

An Easy Granola Recipe (January 2007)
One of the first high-traffic recipe posts here at CK. An easy, really tasty and trusty granola recipe that absolutely beats the crap out of HFCS-laden branded, boxed cereal.

Ten Rules for the Modern Restaurant-Goer (January 2007)
A popular post from early in CK's history--especially after an argument broke out in the comments about tipping.

How to Make a Mole Sauce: Intense, Exotic and Surprisingly Easy to Make (January 2008)
This recipe probably the best known and most cooked of all the hundreds of recipes here at Casual Kitchen. And once you make it, you'll see why.

Six Cookbooks That Should Be the Foundation of Your Cookbook Collection (January 2009)
As readers of my posts on cookbook exploitation well know, it's all too easy to have many of the cookbooks you buy just sit on your shelf, wasting space and money. These six reasonably priced cookbooks can be the foundation of great--and heavily used--cookbook collection.

Rumbledethumps (January 2009)
An unusual, striking and absolutely delicious recipe from one of our all time favorite cookbooks: Sundays at Moosewood. Death to the Red Hag!

Finding Inspiration In an Uncluttered Kitchen (January 2010)
Could you do most of your cooking with a fraction of the stuff you own? And what percent of the items in your kitchen could you get rid of--and not miss? This post marks where I began embracing some of the key concepts of food minimalism, thanks to the inspiration of great food writers like Jules at stonesoup.




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3 comments:

Brittany said...

Slowly working on those 6 cook books... I finally bought a Moosewood cookbook (not Sundays... it's called The Moosewood Cookbook--I think it's a modified later edition) at a used book store recently. Talk about a well spent $7! I've been working my way through their casseroles--I can't wait to not work so much so that I can time to cook more of their cook-it-and-eat-it-right-away meals. Everything in the book looks delicious.

Melissa said...

Any time you mention tipping, you can expect arguments and indignation on both sides. Ay ay ay. But rereading that post, the dessert thing is what stuck out to me now. It's good advice. :D

And thanks for the granola. I was just telling Steve a few weeks ago that I want to make homemade and then promptly forgot about it. *Copying*

Sally said...

The granola recipe you use is very similar to the one I use.

I don't necessarily agree with your six cookbook choices, but agree that everyone should have a few that form that foundation. Pam Anderson's "How to Cook Without A Book" is one of those for me, basically because it gave me a template to follow for many dishes -- it taught me to cook, rather than rely on recipes. I found this article interesting: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/linda-buzzell/pattern-recipes-the-cure-_b_811588.html

Given that we're all reading this on the internet, I think a web site (or two) is appropriate, too.

Rumbledethumps is similar to colcannon and bubble and squeak -- favorites of mine. The recipe is an interesting variation. I'll have to try it.

I'm loving my down-sized kitchen. I do have quite a bit in storage, but there are only a few things I miss -- like my wine glasses and my electric mixers! Though I'll admit that I'm rethinking how many of those wine glasses I need to put in the cupboard! When we get to clearing it out, most will go to Goodwill. I already have a box started. Oddly enough, the one thing I'm finding that I don't have enough of is storage containers, especially those that are small. I must be the only person in America without enough storage containers!