In my opinion a great gift for the little one is a wire push type egg beater. No, it’s not too early to get that little one comfortable with kitchen chores. I say chores because if you strip away all the baggage of cooking “celebrity” and gourmandise what’s left is the truth that knowing your way around the daily work of the kitchen is a big part of a satisfying personal life.
Learning how to cook at a young age is like learning how to drive. The younger you are when you begin the learning process the more ingrained and effortless the moves will be as you mature. I use myself as an example. I don’t even remember being taught by my mother. A woman, by the way, who wasn’t by any measure a great cook. However, she did get dinner on the table every single night of my childhood with very few exceptions. So I learned the moves incrementally, effortlessly and naturally.
It started with pot banging. Raised in a household where a “toy” was anything that would entertain me, I was encouraged to open the doors to the lower cupboard that held the pots, drag them out and bang on them with a wooden spoon made available to me for this purpose. I don’t imagine mom understood that she was making a cook. She was just trying to give me something to do where she could watch me while she made dinner.
Where do you get recipe ideas? Cooking shows? Food magazines? The Wednesday food section of your newspaper? Blogs? (Um, I hope you nodded "yes" to that last one.) How about Twitter and Facebook?
If you buy shell on shrimp or fresh shrimp with heads and shell you can make shrimp broth. It’s a very useful frozen pantry item to have for making risotto, fish soup or infusing a seafood pasta, or pan sauce with more flavor. And it only takes a half hour to make. In fact I never actually set out to make shrimp broth, it’s always a by-product of peeling shrimp for another dish, so it’s important to be flexible about what to put in the pot along with the peels in order to end up with a flavorful result.
I'm sure somebody has done this already, but there should be a book solely filled with lentil recipes. A lentil bible. And every kitchen should have one. The lentil is an edible pulse and part of the human diet since Neolithic times.
For me, shopping isn't fun if I don't get a bargain. My grandmother
taught me well, "Never pay retail. If you want to be a good shopper,
you have to pay less than other people and still get as good." In our
neighborhood, Gelson's is the quality supermarket, carrying a full line of antibiotic-free, naturally raised meats. Which is great, except that they're pricey. The trick is to buy the meat when its been reduced, when a rib steak that was originally priced at $18.99/lb, is discounted to $7.99/lb. Any meat that's been reduced is still fresh, but it needs to be cooked that day
or frozen.