The Pleasures of Cooking for One

The Pleasures of Cooking for One (Hardcover)






Authors Judith Jones

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Product Description
Amazon.com Review
From The Pleasures of Cooking for One: Boeuf Bourguignon

Make this rich stew on a leisurely weekend. You’ll probably get a good three meals out of it, if you follow some of the suggestions below. When buying stew meat at a supermarket, you don’t always know what you are getting, so ask the butcher. If it’s a lean meat, it will need less time cooking (in fact, it will be ruined if you cook it too long), but the fattier cuts can benefit from at least another half hour. --Judith Jones

Ingredients

* 2 ounces bacon, cut into small pieces, preferably a chunk cut into little dice
* About 1 1/4 pounds beef stew meat, cut into 1- to 1 1/2-inch pieces
* 1 tablespoon light olive oil
* 1 medium onion, diced
* 1/3 carrot, thick end, peeled and diced
* 2 teaspoons all-purpose flour
* Salt
* 1 cup red wine
* 1 cup beef broth
* Herb packet of 1/2 bay leaf; a fat garlic clove, smashed; a small handful of parsley stems; 1/4 teaspoon dried thyme; 4 or 5 peppercorns

For Vegetable Garnish

* 3 or 4 baby onions, or four 1-inch pieces of leek
* 3 or 4 baby carrots, or the thin ends of larger ones, peeled
* 2 or 3 small new potatoes

Product Details
# Hardcover: 288 pages
# Publisher: Knopf (September 29, 2009)
# Language: English

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Reviews The Pleasures of Cooking for One


I have several other "cooking for 1" cookbooks. For example, a pork tenderloin becomes a small roast, scallopine, a gratinate, hash, and stir fry. Her examples have encouraged me to improvise myself. I can envisage a BBQ pork sandwich, a pasty with leftover pork tenderloin, skirt steak and potatoes.

She encourages playing with the recipes to create a meal exactly to your own tastes. Several of her recipes also include vegetable substitution recommendations allowing for seasonal meals. Or, if you're like me and can't stand a particular vegetable then you can swap it for something more palatable.

This new book is sort of an offshoot of her earlier memoir, which had a short but terrific recipe section. It is a sublime book--thoughtfully designed, detailed but not pedantic, practical, accessible, utterly personal, and completely charming. I'm not sure there is another book out there like this one, which takes us shopping and then into the kitchen to make the most of both common items and ingredients or dishes it might never have occurred to us to try. I can't wait to try most all of them. Of course, a little simple math will ratchet up a recipe for 1-2 to a recipe for 3-4 and so on--so this is absolutely a book for all cooks.