Meg Wolfe - Minimalist Cooking.pdf
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Minimalist Cooking | 27 Practical Recipes
Kicking the Marketer out of the kitchen and letting the Cook back in.
By
Meg Wolfe
I hope you enjoy my cookbook. All the photos are of the food I’ve
actually prepared in my own home kitchen—and ate afterwards! Love
and hugs to my family and friends.
-Meg
minimalistcook.com
minimalistwoman.com
2
Contents
SKILLET SUPPERS
42
Potato-Sausage Skillet Supper
44
How I Got into Minimalist Cooking
4
Frittata
45
Recommended Equipment
10
Caribbean Chicken Chile
46
Hoppin' John
47
BREADS
11
MAIN COURSE SALADS
48
No-Knead Bread
13
2-Bean Chopped Salad
49
Baguettes
14
Chicken Pecan Salad
50
Pizza Dough
15
Mediterranean Tuna Salad
51
Flatbread
16
DESSERTS
52
VEGGIES
17
Apple Crisp
54
Carrot and Raisin Salad
20
Oatmeal Crisp Bar Cookies
55
Brocolli – Cauliflower Salad
21
Peanut Butter Cookies
56
Steamed Green Beans
23
Easiest Frozen Yogurt
57
Scalloped Potatoes
25
Simple Rustic Apple Sauce
58
Roasted Root Vegetables
27
Roasted Italian Vegetable Mix
28
MAIN COURSES
29
The Simplest Possible Roast Beef
31
Roast Chicken
32
Baked Cod with Lemon
33
Meat Loaf
34
PASTA DISHES
36
Spaghetti
37
Baked Pasta
38
Veggie Lasagne
39
Macaroni and Cheese
41
3
How I Got into
Minimalist Cooking
The striving
for a higher level of domestic artistry was
met by an astounding range of increasingly available products,
from specialized gadgets to imported foods and coffees. Even
small towns sprung their “gourmet” and “lifestyle” stores. Gone
were the days of cranking open a can of cream of mushroom
soup to make a sauce for baking chicken. The new method
meant buying one’s own mushrooms, cleaning them with a
mushroom brush, making the white sauce, etc. The differences
really were noticeable, but that made the consumer even more
vulnerable to the same intensive marketing (and soft-focus
designer photography) which eventually made Martha Stewart a
billionaire.
My cooking
history began at 4:30 one morning when I
was very small. I had awakened to the smell of the stuffing my
mom was making from scratch for Thanksgiving turkey. The
scent of celery and onion sautéing in butter was irresistible and I
just had to get up, walk through the dark living room to the bright
kitchen and check it out. I got to stir up the filling for the pumpkin
pies. I do know the first eggs I ever cracked were for pumpkin
pie filling, and that I had a tremendous sense of satisfaction from
not messing it up. I also got to periodically toss the cubes of
bread to make sure they were dried out enough for the stuffing. I
think that was the first time I realized how different foods could
be put together to make even more amazing food.
Over the past
twenty years I’ve continued to cook,
adapting the methods to the needs of the time, especially health
needs. I’ve cooked preservative-free, gluten-free, salt-free,
sugar-free, lactose-free, egg-free, fat-free, vegan, vegetarian,
with sauces, without sauces, and cuisine of various ethnicities
(the most challenging was an authentic Indian dish that had
something like 56 ingredients and took two or three days). I’ve
also cooked for various purposes, from large multi-table sit-
down dinners, to buffets for 100 people, to meals for one or two,
and to customers in restaurants and coffee shops. Sometimes
the needs were real and evident, but sometimes they were only
perceived; I remember when a coffee shop almost stopped
offering bagels and muffins because so many of its customers
were on the carb-free Atkins diet.
I didn’t
actually do much cooking, though, until after college
and then marriage to a friend from California: the whole West
Coast approach to food emphasized a wide variety of fresh
vegetables and salads, quality breads and whole grains, “real”
cheese as opposed to processed cheese, a diet rather exotic for
a mid-century Midwesterner like me. I learned to shop and cook
in this manner and began to take a serious interest in the
relationship between food and health, even making all my son’s
baby food from scratch rather than subjecting him to the horrors
of chemical preservatives. By this time, the 1980’s, the Midwest
caught up with Food with a capital “F”: every Yuppie wannabe
indulged in pasta machines and food processors, and food-
centered social gatherings took on a decidedly competitive
flavor. These were the days when Martha Stewart’s star was
rising, and both men and women put a lot of effort into trendily
tasteful homes, gorgeous gardens, and memorable dinner
parties.
Over the same
period of time there has also been a
growing consciousness about how much food we eat, what’s in
the food we eat, where it comes from, and its economic and
ecological impact. It is clear from the conclusions drawn in the
books, articles, research, reports, and documentaries released
in the past several years that Food has become so entwined
with consumerism it has lost much of its best and essential role
in our lives: nourishment and sharing.
4
In my own small kitchen
in the universe—and
it is small and modestly appointed—I sometimes felt
overwhelmed by my own options and experience. I had gotten
into the habit of knocking myself out for, say, dinner parties and
other social gatherings. I would obsess over the table setting,
the menu, the seating, the wine, locating the ingredients and the
equipment needed, and the logistics of timing a recipe for stove
space or chilling in the refrigerator. Usually I’d be too tired to
really enjoy the gathering once it happened. This was stupid. I
allowed myself to become a victim of superficial expectations,
and not the hostess providing fun nourishment and sharing. But
I wasn’t the only one—far too many gatherings I’d been to over
the years revealed the same sort of crazy expenditure of time,
money, and energy. I’d overhear comments from guests implying
that setting the bar high for such occasions was to be expected.
Then there were glimpses into many young families where the
children would have tantrums because Mom hadn’t purchased
the right cereal or made their sandwich cute enough to eat; each
family member, including the dad, seemed to insist on their right
to very specific food as if Mom was a short-order cook. It
seemed to me that both the cooks and the ones eating the food
had fallen into the same expectations trap..
Back home
in my own kitchen, I looked around
and realized that in spite of everything I knew how to do
and had the wherewithal to do, it was too complicated for its
own good. My kitchen was jam-packed with appliances,
gadgets, specialized cooking and serving pieces, crockery,
one-off ingredients and seldom-used spices. Of course a lot
of it was acquired during my time as a professional cook
and caterer, but a lot of it was acquired because I felt it was
important to do so, to be an accomplished cook and
hostess and be up on the latest food trends. I felt trapped
by the excess, as if all my stuff was challenging me to keep
expanding, keep growing, keep acquiring. I wanted out of
that feeling. I wanted cooking to be fun and soothing,
organic in process, as natural as sitting down to eat. I
wanted the people who shared the meal to be happy to
simply share a meal rather than to see what new
concoction I’d come up with. In other words, I wanted to be
a cook, not a trendy performance artist.
Our consumerist culture
has embedded in us
the idea of endless choices, so much so that we look at
everything around us with the same “I want this, I don’t want
that” point of view. It also preys on our insecurities, our need to
fit in, making us think “I ought to be this, I ought to do that” and
place artificial expectations on ourselves. This is conditioning
created by marketing. When I say “kick the marketer out of the
kitchen” I mean let’s step back from the bill of goods we’ve been
sold by marketers: magic food, magic appliances, magic
kitchens, magic conveniences, magic image, magic makeovers.
Magic is illusion. We keep buying into it because we’ve been
convinced it’s real, even when it isn’t. It’s completely warped our
social and physical relationship to food and cooking, and we are
only now beginning to realize it. Marketing really is the food that
leaves you hungry for more minutes after you’ve just eaten.
The more I
thought about it, the more I wanted my
kitchen and cooking to reflect the changes I was making in
the rest of my home and personal life: uncluttering,
simplifying, streamlining, minimalizing. The effect on my
personal life and home was so uplifting and freeing, and I
wanted to feel that way about cooking, too. So I took a
good hard look at how my kitchen functioned, the foods we
would normally prepare and eat, and compare it to how I
wanted it to function and how we (my husband and I,
usually) would like to eat.
5
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