What is this?
Somehow or another, I’ve come to really enjoy cooking and baking.
Through most of 2020 and 2021 as the coronavirus pandemic swept the world, I got into a nice rhythm doing meal planning and sharing it with the world through a newsletter. Especially in the first months, I had to eat at home, and I wanted to minimize grocery trips. As the pandemic began winding down, that became harder: I don’t want to be that person who takes photos of everything at restaurants, or who shares my opinions of my friends’ cooking online.
I thought about trying to write a cookbook, but instead I’ve settled on setting up my second attempt at a food blog. I’m hoping the lessons I learned through my pandemic newsletter experience will translate into something more successful than my first try at this.
Why online?
While I still think it would be fun to publish a cookbook one day, as I was thinking about it, the online medium really is great. It can always change, adapt, and be updated as I learn more, or my tastes change. It also means I don’t have to be confined to recipes, and can perhaps mix in other content that’s more timely.
Quirks and foibles
On the metric system
You’ll probably notice that my default is to metric units, despite being in the US.
While it definitely takes getting used to, it’s really a much nicer way to work. The metric system is all base 10, so it’s a lot easier to scale recipes up and down. It’s really complicated to double something like 2 pounds and 10 ounces. (It’s 5 pounds and 4 ounces.) Whereas doubling even something as arbitrary as 541 g is easy. You just double the number.
Copyright and IP policy
Remix, considerately
This entire site — even the source code itself — is open-source. You’re more than welcome to do whatever you want with it with a couple of restrictions. First, don’t take what I’ve done and sell it. Non-commercial use only, please. Second, please credit me.
Equipment
The Essentials
A Good Knife
There is nothing more dangerous or more frustrating than being in the kitchen without a good, sharp knife. Dull knives mean that you don’t have control, and it’s that, not the raw cutting power, that’s dangerous. You also don’t have to work as hard with a sharp knife, which will make prep that much more pleasant.
I honestly don’t care enough about knives to have deeply opinionated recommendations. As long as it’s sharp and a shape you find comfortable, it’s a good knife.
The essentials to have on hand are:
- 8" chef knife
- 4" paring knife
- 10" serrated bread knife
Brands I’d recommend:
- Cut Brooklyn
- Kan Kitchen
- Shun
- Victorinox Fibrox
- Wüsthof
A Digital Scale
If cooking with bad knives is the most frustrating, then not having a kitchen scale is a very close second. Putting aside precision, they make cooking a lot easier. You don’t have to hunt down the right size measuring scoop and then wash a dozen of them when you’re done making a simple cake. With a scale, you can tare and then drop each ingreident into the same bowl.
Not that the precision doesn’t matter at all. Especially with difficult ingredients, it can make a huge difference. No matter how hard you try, you’ll never get consistent quantities of flour or brown sugar out of the bag with a measuring scoop.