The Kitchen Patterns Manifesto Creative restrictions keep things interesting.
- First things first: I think of cooking as a form of play and I encourage you to try that perspective on for size yourself.
- Kitchen Patterns uses mainly “primary ingredients” and by that I mean we are going to really hold back on the processed foods, folks. Your grandma’s grandma didn’t have frozen pizza. Let’s StP (Shop the Perimeter) of the grocery store and save oodles of money. Oodles. I mean it.
- Measurements for herbs and spices are not precise here. More = more and less = less. Leave something out entirely and you won’t taste it at all. Within some sort of reason, quantities of pepper or thyme will not break any recipe and if you don’t like turmeric in the first place and decide to leave it out, well that might even make your recipe better. ;-)
- Nutrition is not hard and is definitely worth thinking about.
- Kitchen Patterns refuses to be afraid of using semicolons; sometimes even inappropriately.[^semicolons] Secretly, I am working for a strong comeback of the inappropriate semicolon. In the kitchen as in life you will often find that you have to do something wrong before you can figure out how to do it right.
- And also that many of the rules don’t apply.
- I’m encouraging you to go to the farmer’s markets and buy regional and seasonal. Because quality, quality, freshness and quality. Besides, once you get started you’ll be amazed how great it feels to know that a significant part of your grocery budget, that money you worked hard at your job to earn, goes directly into the pockets of the very nice person from whom you bought your eggs and your kohlrabi. In this way we are closing a much-too-wide-open circle and I think, over time you will find the feeling immensely satisfying.
- Leftovers are an ingredient. One more time: Leftovers are your secret ingredient to a one-of-a-kind dinner.
- I’m probably going to talk a lot about thrift in the form of wyhiwyn (what you have is what you need). Because usually, it is. Or it could be if you took a slightly different approach to the problem of what you need to make dinner.
- Home kitchens are not restaurant kitchens and everything we see happening on TV in restaurant-type kitchens is not everything that is happening. To wit, Kitchen Patterns respects your food budget and wouldn’t think of suggesting that you peel the entire first layer of onion into the garbage. That is yummy onion and belongs in your dinner. Or in your stockpot, which is where it winds up in restaurant kitchens, but nobody talks about that, do they?
Footnotes
[^semicolons] Turns out a clever woman named, Cecelia Watson has written a clever book titled Semicolon: The Past, Present, and Future of a Misunderstood Mark. In this interview she said, “Also, I found that the humanists and their attitude towards punctuation marks in general really resonated with me when I was thinking about, “Well, how would we use them now?” The idea that they were planning, they were experimenting, they were creative, they made up new things to suit their purposes — and they didn’t live by these super strict rules for the most part. That I thought struck me as where I wanted to end up.” That is the Kitchen Patterns way of thinking!