Twelve Ways Cooking Is Empowering:
- When you look into the refrigerator at what used to elicit a wail of “there’s nothing to eat,” you see the makings of a frittata, pizza, or fried rice.
- After making and eating the frittata, pizza, or fried rice, you can gloat about not having wasted the scraps in the refrigerator.
- Scraps in the refrigerator start to look less like clutter and more like material for a creative project.
- If you’re working on a creative project unlikely to generate income, such as a book of poems, you can turn humble ingredients into excellent food.
- What’s in your food is under your control.
- You can’t always control how a dish will turn out, but you can learn from disappointments.
- Even with occasional disappointments, your house smells terrific and feels like a home.
- After cooking, you’re forced to clean your house, or at least the kitchen, thus supporting another round of cooking.
- You can directly support people who are sick, mourning, occupied with a new baby, protesting, or simply living their lives.
- If you live in a place where restaurants don’t serve what you long for, you can still have many of the dishes you crave.
- You have fewer cravings for sweets and snacks because you don’t feel, after a meal, that something is missing.
- Fewer things are missing.
Twelve Usable Cookbooks:
- America’s Test Kitchen, Bowls
- Irene Kuo, The Key to Chinese Cooking
- Florence Lin, Florence Lin’s Chinese Regional Cookbook
- Deborah Madison, Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone
- Peter Meehan et al, Lucky Peach Presents 100 Easy Asian Recipes
- Urvashi Pitre, Indian Instant Pot Cookbook
- Susan Purdy, The Family Baker
- Julie Sahni, Classic Indian Cooking
- Lorna Sass, Whole Grains Every Day, Every Way
- Ellen Schrecker, Mrs. Chiang’s Szechwan Cookbook
- Alice Waters, The Art of Simple Food
- Online archives of Fine Cooking magazine (technically not a cookbook, but as trustworthy as #1-11)
(Ed note: This post first appeared on June 5, 2020)