Finding Inspiration In an Uncluttered Kitchen

What percent of your kitchen cookware and dishware could you get rid of and not miss? Could you do most of your cooking with a fraction of the stuff you own?

This is a question I'm thinking about while we are neck-deep in the process of moving to a new home. It occurred to me yesterday morning when I opened a cupboard and, for once, didn't see forty coffee mugs of various sizes jammed every which way. Instead, I saw just two. Our two favorite coffee mugs, plus one backup mug just in case. Laura had boxed up everything else the night before.

I'd normally have a series of choices to make at this point (Hmmm, let's see: the Hawai'i mugs? The Somerset Eye Care Mugs? The "You're 40!" mugs?), but on this morning, I didn't have to agonize at all over which mugs to use for our morning coffee. I literally had no choice! It was a relief.

This was tantalizing, so I opened another cabinet. And there, instead of our stash of twenty wine glasses, I saw only two. Our two favorites.

Amazingly, 70-80% of our stuff is gone, yet nearly everything I need is within arm's reach and easy to get to. There's got to be a lesson here, if I could just put my finger on it.

And it can't be just a coincidence that my desire to cook--which has gone AWOL for the past few weeks--instantly reappeared in this now-uncluttered kitchen.

(Permit me a brief tangent: before this move I smugly thought of myself as quite the minimalist. Sadly, that notion was horribly, horribly flattened under an infinity of boxes I personally lugged over to our new townhouse. Moving doesn't just suck, it crushes your illusions too.)

A final point. I've talked before about how there's an 80/20 Rule at work in cooking. Most of us do the majority of our cooking and eating on a small fraction of our equipment and dishes. The rest of our stuff collects dust, takes up space, or just gets in the way.

I guess I never thought how much further I could go to exploit this rule, and how much of a relief it could be to get rid of even more stuff in my previously-thought-to-be-minimalist kitchen. Of course, like any idea, it can be carried too far, but every household is highly likely to have plenty of items that are rarely or never used. Why not give them away to someone who will use them?

Which brings me back to my original question: What percent of the items in your kitchen could you get rid of--and not miss?

Today, when I opened my kitchen cupboards, I discovered that it was a much higher percentage than I thought. How about you?

Related Posts:
How to Give Away Your Power By Being a Biased Consumer
Scarred For Life By a Food Industry Job
Guess What? We Spend Less Than Ever on Food
A Few Thoughts on Habits and Food
Overpriced and Overengineered: Kitchen Gadgets for the Non-Frugal

How can I support Casual Kitchen?
If you enjoy reading Casual Kitchen, tell a friend and spread the word! You can also support me by purchasing items from Amazon.com via links on this site, or by linking to me or subscribing to my RSS feed. Finally, you can consider submitting this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, digg or stumbleupon. Thank you for your support!

Cookbook Exploitation: How to Get More Mileage Out of Your Cookbooks

Ever since I first addressed "cookbook exploitation" in my How to Apply the 80/20 Rule to Cooking article, and then polled some of my favorite bloggers for their favorite cookbook titles, I've been thinking of ways to get more mileage out of my own stash of cookbooks.

For example, has anybody out there actually made every single recipe in one of their cookbooks--or even come close?

Even in my few most favorite "critical few" cookbooks, like Jay Solomon's Vegetarian Soup Cuisine, or my tattered old Better Homes and Gardens Cookbook (a sentimental favorite which was a gift from my Mom when I moved out), I've cooked maybe at most 25% of the recipes.

The math is even more discouraging when I think about the cookbooks that aren't in my heavy rotation. We have several cookbooks that we use for just a few recipes each, and there are four or five cookbooks sitting on our shelves that we haven't even delved into at all. They're just sitting there, collecting dust.

This means that across my entire cookbook collection, I'm probably ignoring at least 95% of the recipes available to me.

What a waste!

Ergo, I can get a LOT more mileage out of my existing cookbooks just by stepping out of my comfort zone and making a habit of trying some new recipes here and there.

In that spirit, I hereby declare the month of April to be Cookbook Exploitation Month, where I will try to cook at least one totally new recipe per week from my collection of cookbooks. I'll blog about the new recipes as I go. Join me and exploit your cookbooks, and feel free to leave me a comment on how your new recipes came out.

No more cookbooks collecting dust around here!

Related Posts:
Six Secrets to Save You From Cooking Burnout
How to Tell if a Recipe is Worth Cooking with Five Easy Questions
How to Modify a Recipe

Braised Pork in Guajillo Chile Sauce

Tienen guajillo chiles?

Si. Pica?

Forget about the stresses of working on Wall Street: the most stressful thing I did last week involved walking into our town's local Mexican specialty food store, breaking out my high school Spanish, and asking for a type of chile that until two weeks ago I'd never even heard of.

But I just saw an episode of Daisy Cooks! on PBS that made me drool like nothing I've seen on TV in years (I don't normally drool). After twenty minutes of watching her cook the very recipe I'm going to write about today, I'd been cured in advance of my next several cases of cooking burnout.

So I bought her new cookbook* and made Braised Pork in Guajillo Chile Sauce. Below I'll share the recipe and my experiences making it.

Bottom line: it was a huge hit in our home, and it's one of about 40 recipes in her cookbook that I can't wait to make. I'll be adding this cookbook to my collection shortly.

But back to my guajillo chiles.

When I'm considering a new recipe, I typically use the five easy questions test to decide if a recipe is worth cooking. In this case, question #2 ("does it contain any bizarre or impossible-to-find ingredients?") could have been a key failure point.

Fortunately, in our town we've got a pretty big Latin American population, so I have two local Mexican specialty food stores to choose from. Daisy herself suggests places like mexgrocer.com, amigofoods.com and cubanfoodmarket.com where you can buy hard-to-find ingredients online. So if you decide to try this recipe, don’t let the one unusual ingredient stop you. It can be found more easily than you’d think.

But I was far too impatient to wait for my guajillo chiles to arrive in the mail.

And as I suspected, the girl behind the counter didn't speak a lick of English, except for a friendly "bye!" which she said to me as I walked out the door.

But I asked my question (and she actually understood me), and she sold me an enormous bag of guajillo chiles for just $2.50.

And yes, I took the hot ones.

I have a hunch Daisy will be sending me back there soon for some other ingredients.
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Braised Pork in Guajillo Chile Sauce
Slightly modified from Daisy Cooks!

3-4 lbs pork shoulder or butt, cut into 2 inch cubes
2 Tablespoons sea salt or kosher salt
1 bay leaf

10 guajillo chiles

1 large onion, peeled and cut in half through the middle
3 fresh plum tomatoes, cut in half lengthwise

1/4 cup olive oil
2 Tablespoons white flour

1) Put the pork in a large pot and cover in cold water by 2 inches. Add the salt and bay leaf. Bring liquid to a boil and simmer, covered, for 1 hour. Skim off any foam as necessary.

2) Bring 3 cups of water to a boil in a medium saucepan. While the water is coming to a boil, remove the stems from the chiles and shake out the seeds. Heat a nonstick pan on medium heat. Toast the chiles in the pan, turning them frequently, until they start tochange color and crisp up a bit, about 4 minutes. Lift the chiles out and place them in a bowl and pour enough of the boiling water over the chiles to cover them fully. Soak for 20 minutes until chiles are softened, then drain well.

3) While the chiles are soaking, place the onions and tomatoes, cut sides down, in the skillet. Turn heat up to medium high and cook, turning the vegetables until blackened on both sides.


4) After the pork has been simmering for 1 hour, remove 2 cups of the cooking liquid and pour it into a blender or food processor. Add the onions and tomatoes and puree until smooth. Then add the chiles and puree until smooth. Remove another 2 cups of the pork cooking liquid and set aside. Drain the pork and wipe out the pot.

5) Set the pot over medium heat and add the canola oil (please, only use lard if you truly have no respect for your arteries). Stir in the flour and cook for 3-4 minutes. Pour the pureed chili sauce into the pot, add the pork and simmer, covered, for another 1 hour. If the sauce becomes too thick or isn't fully covering the pork cubes, you may add some of the remaining 2 cups of cooking liquid to the pot.

6) Serve with rice, makes enough for 5-6.

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A few notes on the recipe as well as our experiences making it:
1) Don’t try and substitute any other kind of chili here. First, Daisy will probably hunt you down and kill you. But also the guajillo chiles add an unusual dimension to the sauce. They have a smoky, almost chocolate smell to them (hmmmm, might explain why I like them so much), and doubtless this is part of the authenticity of the dish. A further note: these chiles can be pretty hot. If you don’t like very spicy food, you can try halving the pepper count to five instead of ten. We used only six chiles the first time we made it, but I have to admit now that I regret not doing the recipe by the book first. We definitely could have handled the extra heat. I’ll be using the whole ten on my next attempt.

2) As you can see from the photos, when Daisy says "blacken" she really means it. You have to literally burn the onions and tomatoes.

3) I’ll note that TV version of the recipe differed slightly from the cookbook, although in fairly minor ways. For example, in her show, Daisy has you brown the chiles in a dry pan (same as with the veggies), but the cookbook inexplicably tells you to brown the chiles in oil. I corrected the cookbook version above to match the show. There were also some modest differences in cooking times too, but again these were minor.

4) Finally, I highly, HIGHLY recommend this cookbook for any adventurous cooks out there who want to sample some truly authentic yet accessible Latin cuisine. Click the graphic link below to go directly to Amazon.com.

Once again, you are welcome to take a look at the full photoset from Flickr for a larger collection of pictures on the making of this recipe.

* Note: if you enter Amazon via a link on my blog and buy something, I'll get a small commission on that purchase. Please think of it as my "tip jar"--and thanks so much to those readers out there who support me!



Related Posts:
Shrimp in Garlic Sauce (Camarones Ajillo)
How to Make a Mole Sauce: Intense, Exotic and Surprisingly Easy to Make
The Bhut Jolokia Pepper--The World's Hottest Chili
How to Make Burritos


How can I support Casual Kitchen?
If you enjoy reading Casual Kitchen, tell a friend and spread the word! You can also support me by purchasing items from Amazon.com via links on this site, or by linking to me or subscribing to my RSS feed. Finally, you can consider submitting this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, digg or stumbleupon. Thank you for your support!

Six Secrets to Save You from Cooking Burnout

You know the feeling: You have to cook dinner, but you sure as hell don't want to. Forget cooking with love. At best, you might obligatorily slap dinner on the table tonight.

Worse, all of your recipes seem tired and old. You're sick of all of 'em.

You're just not inspired in the kitchen.

This is cooking burnout. Everybody faces it from time to time. And yes, even at Casual Kitchen we can get really sick of cooking on occasion.

Fortunately, thanks to quite a few years in my 20s of living alone (thus the only person who was there to cook for me was… well, me), I picked up some trade secrets on the subject that I’m going to share with you today.

Read on, and never let cooking burnout bring you down again!

1) Try out a totally new cuisine…
It would be obvious to the point of worthlessness to suggest to my readers to “try some new recipes and you’ll be less burned out!” Martha Stewart might be able to get away with that, but not me.

The point here is that you are not even close to being in the mood to cook. Telling you to buck up and try some new recipes is like saying “turn that frown upside down” to a person on suicide watch. Less than helpful.

What I’m talking about is doing something much more radical. I’m talking about stretching your palate to experience types of food you’ve never tried before, or never even heard of before, and using those experiences to inspire you.

Have you ever tried Mongolian food? Or Korean? Afghani? How about Cuban food? Or Chino-Latino?

I’m sure foodie readers from major US or world cities could say “yes” (in a bored-sounding voice no less) to all of the above. But that misses the point. There has to be something (or even multiple somethings) you haven’t had before, and that’s what I want you to go out and try. Go to a restaurant that cooks a cuisine you’ve never eaten. Order something unusual as well as something ethnically typical from the menu. And while you’re eating, think about how you might cook something similar, or how it might influence your cooking.

Even if you live in a smaller city, you’ll be surprised by the diversity of food available to you. Take a good look at the restaurants section of your phonebook (I know, how deliciously quaint to use the yellow pages…) or ask any of your ethnic friends or colleagues to recommend a place. Take a quick look at the Ten Rules for the Modern Restaurant-Goer for more suggestions on how to make the most of a restaurant eating experience. Finally, recall in the Ten Rules that, where possible, we want to patronize owner-operated restaurants rather than chains.

2) …And then teach yourself to cook it.
Once you’ve stretched your palate in somebody else's kitchen, let that experience inspire you to stretch your talents in your own.

How cool would it be to be able to say you can cook Cuban food or Afgani food? Go to your local bookstore or visit Bookmooch.com and find a cookbook and try it out. Again, I am not talking about making just moderately different foods. I want you to get started on a truly different cuisine that makes you stretch your mind. This is what makes cooking a voyage of discovery and a source of new experiences. And you’ll find that it’s the kind of thing that makes cooking fun again.

It was during a particularly bad period of cooking burnout in my life when I picked up Chef Paul Prudhomme's Louisiana Kitchen. I had to work through my share of cooking intimidation at first, because I needlessly assumed that Cajun and Creole food would be more difficult to make than it really was. But after several batches each of Shrimp Creole, Barbecued Shrimp, Hush Puppies and of course The Greatest Chocolate Mousse in the World, I've gotten pretty good at making this cuisine. Best of all, it cured a bad case of cooking burnout too.

3) Learn to cook something you’ve always dreamed of cooking.
Is there something you always dreamed of cooking but you never really got around to it? For my part, I've always dreamed of making baked bread. And I mean real baked bread, with yeast and everything. So I’ve already decided that the next time I get a case of cooking burnout, I’m going to use that as my excuse to learn how to bake bread.

And if you didn’t think I was obsessive before, you’ll think it now: For the case of cooking burnout I get after that, I’m going to learn how to cook real tamales. I already have the cookbook sitting on the shelf, ready to go.

Clearly, I must be a real tool to plan ahead for my next two cases of cooking burnout.

Seriously though, this suggestion gets to why we cook in the first place. Cooking is at its most fun when it’s a voyage of experience and discovery. What new foods do you really and truly dream of cooking? What do you want to learn how to do? What would be really cool to be able to cook? Even just asking yourself these questions might inspire you a little bit, but the true satisfaction comes from getting into the process of learning and developing new cooking skills.

4) Get a one-year subscription to Bon Appetit Magazine.
I know this suggestion might sound just a bit too metrosexual for some of the men out there, but indulge me. I learned this trick by pure luck back in 1994, when I got browbeaten by some telemarketer into buying a subscription.

But the unexpected benefit was that in that year, I had absolutely zero experiences of cooking burnout. Not one for the entire year. Each month, when the new issue came in the mail, it would flood my mind with a whole batch of new cooking ideas, cuisines and recipes. There were quick and easy recipes, long and involved ones, examples of different types of cuisine, etc. There were always several viable new things in there that would pass the five easy questions and that I would really want to make.

And the subscription turned out to be well worth the money, because I’m still using that single year’s worth of Bon Appetit today, some 13 years (now 14 years) later. Each issue had so many recipes and ideas that it will be years to come before I'll have worked through the inventory.

5) Improve Your Cooking Mechanics.
Get faster at cooking. Learn the five easy questions so you’ll be able to choose easy meals to make. Master prep work. Learn how to find recipes that scale well into double or triple batches. And learn to rely on a group of favorite, easy, heavy rotation meals.

If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you’ll have seen some of this advice presented in Seven Ways to Get Faster at Cooking. In that post, however, I presented that advice in the context of how to cook when you don’t have the time. Here I’m repeating the advice because it’s even more valuable when you don’t want to spend the time cooking. I encourage you to take another quick look at some of those suggestions.

Let’s say you’re of a mind to obligatorily slap dinner on the table tonight. Wouldn’t life be a lot less painful if you had made a double batch of dinner the other day so that you could just reheat it again for tonight? There’s no better cure for cooking burnout than not having to cook at all. If you can cook any meal much faster or much more efficiently, or if you can scale up a meal and get 2x the food for 1.2x the work, then by definition it will be much less of a pain in the ass to get food on the table when you're just not in the mood.

Note that this isn’t so much a cure for cooking burnout, but more of a tool to minimize your suffering. The more efficiently you can get a meal together, the less you’ll suffer the process when you’re just not up for it. Think of it as a form of pain management.

6) Quit!
No, I don’t mean quit your job--although between you and me, I'm considering making a move myself to getting a job here. And I don’t mean for you to quit cooking forever either. What I am suggesting is that you take a break from cooking for a specific time. Say, one week. Or even two weeks.

For that one or two weeks, eat out or order takeout EVERY night. In fact, you can combine this with tip #1 and try out a few exotic restaurants while you’re at it.

If you are at all used to cooking for yourself, my guess is you’ll get pretty sick of restaurant food if you take this long a break from your own kitchen. You’ll probably start to feel overwhelmed with salt, excess fats and oils--and after several days you’ll probably start to feel loagy and weighed down.

When Laura and I go on vacation for a week we’ll usually treat ourselves to a complete break from cooking. But after five or six days of eating out exclusively, we usually really start to long for our own home-cooked food. Maybe we miss the familiarity of our own kitchen, or we miss being able to control exactly what goes into our own food. Or maybe it's just that creeping, heavy, loagy, I-feel-like-I-need-an-angioplasty feeling you get after eating out too many days in a row.

Regardless of the reasons, the result is the same: after only one week, no more cooking burnout. We can’t wait to get back to our own kitchen.

So instead of waiting until your next vacation, why not create a vacation from cooking the next time you feel cooking burnout coming on? You’ll certainly save on airfare. And best of all, you’ll cure your burnout.

Note that this isn’t exactly what I’d call financially responsible advice--readers of this blog know that cooking at home typically is laughably cheap compared to eating out. But if by using this tip you cure yourself from cooking burnout--and you get back to being happy to cook in your own kitchen--then in the long run this tip can be a big money-saver for you.

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Good luck! I can't promise that you’ll never get sick of cooking ever again. Heck, I still fall into a state of mild-to-moderate cooking burnout on occasion, and I’m the one supposedly giving all the great advice here. But the next time you feel a case of cooking burnout coming on, you should be able to use these secrets to master it, rather than have it master you.

Related Posts:
Using Salt = Cheating
Ten Rules for the Modern Restaurant-Goer
How to Apply the 80/20 Rule to Cooking
How to Tell if a Recipe is Worth Cooking With Five Easy Questions
Eight Tips to Make Cooking at Home Laughably Cheap

Related Links:
Tamales 101: A Beginner's Guide to Making Traditional Tamales*
Chef Paul Prudhomme's Louisiana Kitchen*
Bon Appetit Magazine

* Full Disclosure: if you purchase any of the items via the links provided, I receive a small affiliate fee. Thank you to my readers for all of your support!