Food Blogs and Home Cooking
To wrap up home-cooking-week, I thought I’d give you all a little summary of the blogs I read most often. These are the ones that inspire my own home cooking, give me interesting ideas, send me off on projects, or that I find inspirational.
The Slow Cook — I love this site — although I’m jealous of his long growing season in DC, I always learn something here. Especially about pickling. This was the site that inspired me to make sauerkraut. He’s got a particularly good piece at the top of the blog right now, Food Lessons for Hard Times.
Chocolate and Zucchini: not a blog about hard times at all, but I like Clothilde’s writing style and her recipes. She brings her French sensibility to home cooking, but she’s never fussy or overwrought. I make her French Yogurt cake all the time — it’s become my go-to hostess gift.
Bitten: Mark Bittman’s NY Times blog — this is a daily read for me. There’s a lot of good advice about home cooking here — good clean delicious food that is neither going to break your bank nor keep you slaving away all evening. Also, he’s just published Food Matters: A Guide to Conscious Eating with More Than 75 Recipes a book that advocates changing the way we eat, outlining a lower-meat diet consisting of more whole grains, fruits and vegetables for our own health and the health of our planet.
Ruhlman: Michael Ruhlman’s blog is another blog I check daily — his book The Elements of Cooking: Translating the Chef’s Craft for Every Kitchenis a must-read for anyone interested in getting beyond recipes and moving into that place where you can become a good instinctive cook. I’ve also got his forthcoming book Ratio: The Simple Codes Behind the Craft of Everyday Cooking on pre-order at Amazon — this is exactly the kind of info I love. I’m bad at following recipes exactly — the ones I love are like the one I got from Clothilde for her French Yogurt Cake — it’s essentially a ratio that you can play around with — changing up the fruit, adding nuts, making it plain, or as I’ve been doing lately, cooking it in a bundt pan.
I love A Hunger Artist, although it’s not a site for folks looking for quick and easy cooking tips — Bob del Grosso was one of Ruhlman’s instructors at the Culinary Institute and is currently chronicling his journey into charcuterie. Which as you all know is a subject I’m fascinated by, so this is on my must-read list.
Thyme for Cooking is another blog I’ve been following lately. I really love her recipes — good solid homey food, especially as Kate and son mari are in the process of renovating a house in France so she hasn’t had a proper kitchen during these past few months I’ve been following the blog. I’m as fascinated by the house renovation as I am by the food, but this is one of those blogs that I nearly always want to cook and eat the recipe of the day.
What blogs are you all reading on a regular basis? What do they teach you about food or cooking or our food systems that you really value? My Google Reader could always use a few more good blogs, so let’s share some tips in the comments …