Monday, September 06, 2010

Teach A Man To Fish...

It's still hot here. And this Labor Day, we ran errands and finished off with a trip to the local splash park. So by the time we got home, we were hot and hungry. And I decided to make ravioli.

Crazy, right? Not really. It took about 20 minutes, tops.

I can't publish the recipe here because it's copyrighted and I'm a lawyer so I'm kind of picky about that. Instead, I'll recommend the cookbook, because I use lots of recipes from it anyway.

You know how you can make Mac & Cheese without reading the box? And spaghetti, and a few other things without recipes? Pam (not Pamela) Anderson wants to expand your repertoire with How To Cook Without A Book. She is apparently an incredible cook who would always go out to eat with her family, because cooking was too much work and she didn't want to find and follow a recipe every night. Her mission in publishing this cookbook was to teach some basic cooking rules (i.e. how to sear a meat and make a pan sauce) and then expand on the recipes with different ingredients for different meals. In that way, you learn to make a recipe once or twice with the help of the book, and then can do it from memory.

Let me tell you, I'm reading Ad Hoc At Home by Thomas Keller right now, and that is not his philosophy. But Anderson's recipes really work for those non-special occasion, weeknight dinners. You probably won't need to make an extra trip to the grocery store for exotic ingredients. And her super-easy salad dressings have been a real hit!

How To Cook Without A Book is going on my Christmas list this year (I checked it out from the library), both to give and to get. And I am not a cookbook collector. Do you have it? What do you think of it?

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