Payne - The hip girls guide to the kitchen : a hit-the-ground-running approach to stocking up and cooking delicious, nutritious, and affordable meals

For my grandmother Bertha Burnham
and everyone who encountered
those unfortunate rolls.
Who cares about dinner rolls anyway?

contents

PART I
Stocking Up:
Setting the Stage for Success

PART II
Feeding Yourself:
Lifes Pesky Eating Requirements

PART III
Feeding Others:
Entertaining and Sharing Food
with Friends

I met Kate Payne in 2009, shortly after Id published a book on canning. At the time, she was working on her first Hip Girls book, a millennial-generation approach to the chores and joys of maintaining a home. That first book was a swirl of tips and solutions and ideas for pulling a first household together; it took the panty hose off Hlise. But in this book she settles down and focuses on matters of the kitchen. It makes sense: there is no space more essential to the definition of home.

Kate recognizes that the kitchen paradigm has changed. The use of fresh regional produce and proteins has become a choice rather than an imperative, and that choice is dictated by a bevy of considerations: flavor, health, economics, environment, and politics. Deciding how to eat today is laden with self-identifiers: Am I gluten free? Vegan? Paleo? What percentage of my time and dollars should be devoted to disengaging from the grid? Should I boycott General Mills, Nestle, and Tyson Foods? Todays food choices are not just about whats for dinner. They promulgate personal truths and values.

Prewar families used local foods, put up preserves, made dishes from scratch, and utilized the waste stream of foods, even their bones and stems, out of necessity. During the Cold War era, those kinds of kitchen ecosystems were increasingly replaced with cheap, premade, high-calorie foods with an enhanced shelf life supported by chemicals. Kate is a part of, and has had her values shaped by, todays postCold War era, when the values of corporate America in general and industrial agriculture and its cohort, the biotech industry, in particular have become suspect.

The artisanal movement, once the arena of hereditary family operations, has risen (in part) in reaction to our fast-food culture. Every year we learn of new cheese makers, picklers, chocolatiers, preservers, and specialty farmers of all sorts who offer tempting alternatives to heavily processed, transported, or treated foods. Supporting these endeavors is a food enthusiasts passion. Its also a hobby for the rich, for while artisanal producers address key issues of health, environment, and flavor, their products are often expensive, a reflection of the David and Goliathlike challenges of competing with the industrial food system.

Community-supported foodways have evolved as a response to both the tyranny of the industrialized food complex and their allies in Congress, and the fiscal realities of artisanal products. Shared bulk purchases, co-ops, canning swaps, repurposing, reusing, recycling all this is creating food communities that reinforce values and politics beyond the question of whats for dinner. When Kate describes herself as a hip girl, she is really talking about embracing these.

Her book shows readers how to be more food savvy; how to get hip to what their options and, actually, their obligations are. This is not a cookbook, but rather a primer for those setting up or beginning a life lived in the kitchen today, facing todays limitations and opportunities. Her recipe palette is not ethnic, its multicultural; and her recommendations acknowledge the dietary trends of the current generation and their slender pocketbooks, too. Kate is trying to reach a large and unruly audience, but her solution is the right one: the key to successful cooking is to get in touch with what you like to eat and be realistic about what you have the time and money to prepare. If you are honest about your food preferences and priorities, and you let your conscience determine your choices, then your cooking will be easier and more satisfying.

Frugality and functionality are the pillars upon which flavor rests here, and Kate describes these virtues. Humble tools assure that the cook is preparing foods by hand, and when a food is prepared by hand, it is controlled: pestos arent too smooth, doughs are not overkneadedbecause at the end of the day, it is skill that determines good cooking technique, not gizmos. That is what is so untranslatable about your grandmothers recipes. Likewise, when the home cook uses regional foods that are, by nature, only marginally processed and transported, dishes prepared with those foods simply taste better. Thats what makes Italian food so good; its not about the recipes. It is about getting out of the way of fresh ingredients.

So heres the takeaway: Cooking well is synonymous with cooking with integrity. Recipes that are uncomplicated and unpretentious, that are prepared by hand using good seasonal stuff, make a kind of honest meal, and it is that honesty that is tastiest.

This is the real but often elusive truth of good cooking: values matter.

Eugenia Bone

Ive come a long way in the kitchen, believe me. My twenties were paved with good intentions and a shameful lot of wasted groceries. Besides the fact that I was missing all that money that was literally composting at the bottom of the refrigerator, I was also missing that amazing feeling that comes when you realize you are able to feed yourselfto walk into the kitchen and use what you have on hand to make something edible, and maybe even delicious.

My version of kitchen confidence is as simple as knowing how to feed yourself from basic ingredients in as much or less time than it takes to go buy something premade from a grocery store, restaurant, or deli. And that confidence can change your day, your week, and your life.

Our society seems to like the idea of cooking much more than the actual cooking, as evidenced by our obsession with buying cookbooks, food magazines, and fancy kitchen gear; watching chefs make stuff on TV; downloading apps; and trying to technologize ourselves out of and around the matter at hand: cutting up food and cooking it. All these great resources and tools are at our disposal, and yet we often feel too busy to prepare meals at home. The disconnect between our cutting boards and the dinner plate is paramount.