Introduction
If you are reading this book, you are probably related to me. So, you may already know a few of the family stories about my cooking, especially the dramatic failures. I have been collecting recipes since I was assigned the task of making 20 recipe cards as a Home Economics project in the seventh grade. I still have most of those cards and hundreds more, gathered from cookbooks, friends, online, and magazines over the past decades.
This cookbook is a compilation of about 250 of those recipes. I put it together so that I could share it with my children, who sometimes call and ask, “How do you make...?” Some of these recipes are family favorites, and others are something only a committed vegetarian could love. A few the recipes are complicated, because cooking is a form of entertainment for me. But many of the recipes are quick and easy, because cooking isn’t fun when it is 6:00 p.m. and your entire family is tired, cranky, and hungry. With a few exceptions, which I have noted, I have personally cooked and eaten every recipe in this book.
But be aware that some of these recipes are quite old. Styles and tastes in food change over time. Many of the recipes call for more salt and oil than are commonly used today. For some recipes, such as breads, you should be careful not to change the proportions of ingredients, as this will affect the final product. But for most recipes, consider reducing the salt by as much as half. For example, any recipe with a significant amount of cheese may be salty enough with little or no added salt.
My cooking software does a nutritional analysis, but it isn’t very accurate. For example, the software is just not smart enough to realize that you don’t eat all the oil you used for deep-frying. Please take the nutritional notes as a very general guideline.
Some people have claimed that I can’t cook without directions. That is not quite true. I use a recipe as a starting point. I know if I follow the recipe that I will get a predictable result, and then I vary the recipe from there. For example, I might review 2 or 3 recipes for quiche, and then make a quiche that is a combination of all the recipes. For this reason, I keep multiple versions of many recipes. In this book, I have tried to pick my favorites, or my favorite variation, to avoid too much duplication.
For the past 25 years or more, Steve has done most of the day-to-day cooking for our family. You would think that I would have many of his recipes in this book, but there are only a few. Steve is almost my opposite in the kitchen - he rarely uses a recipe, and barely follows the directions in any case. Steve has no need for recipes for Chinese stir-fry, or Chicken and Dumplings, or mashed potatoes, or almost anything else. And like everyone else, we eat frozen vegetables, canned vegetables, and plain steamed vegetables, etc. These are all things that don’t require a recipe. So, this cookbook really doesn’t reflect our “normal” diet. I have tried to include a few of the basics, but any decent all-purpose cookbook will do that better than I can here.
One of my pet peeves about many cookbooks is that I can’t find the recipe I want. One reason is that many recipes could be included in more than one chapter. I put the recipes where I felt they fit best and attempted to compensate for different points of view by including an index to the recipes. I tried to index this cookbook thoroughly, by recipe name, by category and even by key ingredient. However, compiling these recipes took longer than I ever imagined, and I can’t claim that my indexing is completely consistent throughout the book. But don’t forget to look in the index to find a recipe that you remember, even if you can’t quite remember its name.
I hope you will look in this cookbook when you want an old family favorite, when you need something fast, and when you are feeling adventurous in the kitchen. And I hope you will receive as much pleasure from using this book as I have in making it for you.
Lisa Guinn, January 2000