WHEN I BEGAN MY COOKING JOURNEY, I HAD NO IDEA WHERE TO START. WHILE I WASN’T completely lost in the kitchen, my default meal was Creamy Chicken Ramen. Most people either learned how to cook as a child or, like me, had to do some serious ketchup. Enter the good ol’ Internet. Except, as I started searching, I immediately felt overwhelmed by the endless amount of information on how/what to cook. Who could I trust? And how could I start from a simple—but solid—place?
This is the cookbook that I longed to find back then—a beginner’s manual with a kick. Although I don’t pretend to know everything about cooking, I’ve put what I do know in a condensed and easily digestible format that doesn’t require any Internet connection or a French dictionary.
I wrote and organized this cookbook in the way I actually learned how to cook. The Basics section contains a general overview of techniques, equipment, ingredients, and food storage, without which learning to cook would be costly and wasteful. The recipe sections are divided into the themes that I search for when looking for a recipe: breakfast, salads, sandwiches, soups, etc. And within those categories, there is a range of recipes with distinctly different taste offerings, to help you define your palette and learn the methods that are fundamental to gaining that much-desired acuity.
I chose each meal using as many different, fundamental ingredients as possible—vegetables, poultry, meat, fish—without using specialty ingredients, which can be expensive and hard to find. Some recipes include shortcuts with time-saving helpers, like bouillon cubes or frozen pie dough, so you can adjust cooking time to fit within your lifestyle. While I aim to cook from scratch, I’m not against premade foods. I just don’t recommend chemically harmful ingredients that can be sneaky and hard to recognize.
Furthermore, all the sections have a short personal story, sharing whatever memory these flavors stir up, and a few hard-won food tips sprinkled within. These recipes were the medicine that I used to heal my body, educate my mind, and find out what I love. I continue to cook them regularly and hope you’ll join me.