The Silver Palate Cookbook

It's funny to think that my mother, who in her Practically Perfect way has always amazingly balanced being the caretaker of the family with work, art, fun, and amazing personality, was at one point, back when she was a young art student, vehemently opposed to conventional domesticity. Back then she was kind of a hippie, and for a long time she thought that typical home and family life would mean certain death to the creativity and personality. Eventually she got over it, realizing that things like marriage and children did not have to turn you into a soulless suburban drone, but it happened in stages. She was young when she decided she wanted to get married, but she still wasn't interested in things like having kids, or much in the way of homemaking. Both my parents are neat freaks, so that wasn't so much an issue, but cooking definitely fell under the heading of domestic servitude, so for ages she never really cared to learn.

She had a friend, however, who was a talented and enthusiastic cook. Her way of viewing cooking intrigued my mother and got her to see it as another form of artistic expression, and one with particular power to bring people joy. So, now interested in learning to cook herself, Mom asked her friend where she got all of those fantastic recipes. Her friend directed her to a book called The Silver Palate, from which she proceeded to teach herself her way around the kitchen.

Now the Silver Palate is really not for beginners. It is, in the way of most entertainment-oriented cookbooks, intended for experienced cooks with the resources to throw fancy parties with menus that require intricate planning. So my mom was kind of thrown into things in the toughest possible way, having to navigate recipes that usually demanded a higher level of skill and tended to be very complicated. Lucky for her she's one of those people who's good at everything! :-P Someshow she found her way through it, and is amazing in the kitchen today, but she often says that getting thrown into the deep end like that is probably the worst way to learn how to cook. When I was learning, by contrast, she directed me to easier cooking styles like Rachel Ray's to master easier stuff before moving on. But because of this series of events, the Silver Palate became the staple cooking reference in our house, and I grew up on its techniques and recipes.

Last Christmas my mother gave me the complete set. She said since I'd gotten so good at cooking by this point, and since so many of our family's favorite recipes had come from them, she wanted to share the sources with me. Complete with the eighties-tastic picture of the authors on the cover.

I have been trying more and more to incorporate recipes from this book into my repetoire of dishes. But to be honest, I am quite glad I learned the basics of cooking before I tried to make any of the recipes in this book. They really do require a lot more skill on average to put together, and  they usually call for approximately eight million ingredients per dish. Having more experience and knowhow really helps when tackling these recipes. For example, I'm now knowledgeable enough that I can look at these ridculously long ingredient lists and make educated decisions about what is necessary to the character of the dish, and what can be eliminated for the sake of simplicity. (Of course, sometimes that is influenced by my particular likes and subjectivity. I can't taste parsley, for example, even Italian flatleaf, so I rarely bother to include it in a dish. Though perhaps I should be more considerate of whether or not guests might enjoy it.)

This past weekend I made sirloin steaks in a shallot wine sauce from one of their recipes. I was quite nervous, as it called for pan-searing, which I'd never tried for steak before, and I'm still kind of intimidated by red meat because of how tough it can be to nail the right doneness. It called for two-inch-thick steaks to be cooked eight minutes on either side for rare meat, but I could only find one-inch-thick, and I prefer my steak medium rare. So I figured it made sense to try four minutes on one side and three on the other to get the one-inchers the way I wanted them. As for the sauce, it called for a bunch of ingredients in small amounts, but instead of a highly seasoned butter sauce, I elected to make it as a simple red wine reduction with sauteed shallots in it. It was delicious, rich yet delicate, and requiring fewer steps and less software. I am quite pleased with myself. It might not be a great leap of logic to halve the cooking time for a half-as-thick piece of meat, but it did require a bit of discernment to simplify the sauce, and I am proud of myself for having developed some.

My minimalist pantry

A while ago captainecchi suggested that if I was interested in a cooking blog, I should check out Stonesoup, written by a cool Australian lady named Jules Clancy concerning keeping a minimalist kitchen and producing delicious dishes in a minimalist fashion. I am very grateful to Lise for the suggestion, as reading this blog has provided me with lovely fascinating reading on one of my biggest interests. One of my favorite entries on Stonesoup is the one about what Jules keeps in her minimalist pantry-- the absolute essentials she keeps on hand at all times due to their importance in her cooking, plus the other, slightly less vital things that she still likes to have. I like this exercise, to figure out what is most important to your cooking and eating like that. So I thought I'd make a version of that list of my own.

I define a pantry essential as a thing you want to have on hand at all times because of the frequency with which you cook with it, the sort of thing you buy as soon as it runs out without having a specific dish in mind. On the secondary list, the nice-to-haves, are the ones that I like to keep around because I use them regularly, but not necessary all the time, so I wouldn't suffer immediately if I didn't replace them right away.

Here's what I have in my minimalist pantry.

( This is the list of my Must Haves. )

( This is the list of my Nice to Haves. )

( And just to round things out, the list of Things I Keep Around Because I Like to Eat Them. )

( And you know what else? Here's my list for Things I Pointedly Do Not Keep Around. )