Durand Faith - The kitchn cookbook : recipes, kitchens & tips to inspire your cooking

We dedicate this book to our readers

Copyright 2014 by Apartment Therapy LLC
All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Clarkson Potter/Publishers, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company, New York.
www.crownpublishing.com
www.clarksonpotter.com

CLARKSON POTTER is a trademark and POTTER with colophon is a registered trademark of Random House LLC.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.

ISBN 978-0-7704-3443-4
eBook ISBN 978-0-7704-3444-1

Cover design by Danielle Deschenes
Interior and cover photography by Leela Cyd

v3.1

T he kitchen is the most important room of the home. Its the space where we nourish ourselves and we feed the people we love. Its where families tell each other about their day while the pot of pasta boils or where friends gather before the meal is even served. But a lack of basic cooking skills is a real obstacle to enjoying these moments of togetherness, not to mention eating wholesome, healthy meals, and without a properly set-up kitchen space, cooking those meals on weeknights after a long workday will never compete with the temptation of the takeout menu.

The Kitchn began in 2005 as a sister site to Apartment Therapy, a website intended to help people live better in their homes, and to help them create healthy, beautiful, and organized spaces. And what is more important to a healthy home than the kitchen?

Throughout the early days of Apartment Therapy, Sara Kate sat down to write weekly stories about how life takes shape in the kitchen, but she had no idea what would follow. As a food writer, she thought she was just adding more context to a website about home design, honoring the place of the kitchen in the home and helping people cook more. But it quickly became clear that life in the kitchen deserved its own conversationand website. We took a leap, and created The Kitchn.

In the early days Sara Kate wrote the site alone, either from her famously tiny apartment or in Apartment Therapys funky shared office space in Tribeca. She posted recipes, tidbits of culinary news, musings on the whys and whats and hows of home cooking, answers to readers questions, cookbook reviews, and tours of peoples kitchens. When her daughter was born in 2006, the team grew as well, to include Chris Phillips, who now runs sales and marketing for Apartment Therapy, and Faith Durand, the executive editor of The Kitchn, and cowriter on this book.

Faith came to Apartment Therapy and The Kitchn first as a reader, as she fell in love with the warm, practical advice and community crystallizing around these young websites. She joined in the conversation as a reader, then a commenter, then a writer, and now an editor who understands firsthand that The Kitchn is created by our readers as much as our writers.

The Kitchn was meant to be a destination on the web for people like ushome cooks who like to get their hands dirty while they cook and who desire a communal table online to ask questions and share their experiences. We longed for a virtual place to gather with others who care about the quality of their food, and how it affects their health and the health of the planet, while keeping in mind the realities of home cooking across America. As Apartment Therapys sister site, we were also naturally interested in design, so The Kitchn quickly became a clubhouse for cooks who care about making their kitchen not only useful, but also beautiful. It was, and still is, a place to dive in deep and embrace the joy of one of our basic needs: food, the kind cooked at home, and the kind served with spirit.

Miraculously, our readership has grown from our mothers, our best friends, and Sara Kates high school English teacher to people all over the world; today The Kitchn is read by millions of cooks. They are beginning cooks and experienced cooks. They are cooking in their dorm rooms; they are single guys learning to make chicken for the first time. They are large families hosting potlucks and Thanksgiving; they are new families, busier than they could have ever imagined, but committed to the nourishment of homemade food.

We publish posts daily that inform and inspire every aspect of home cooking, from recipes and cooking lessons to product reviews, kitchen design, and renovation advice. The website comes together each day thanks to a vibrant, diverse team of writers, recipe developers, and photographers from across the country. Many of them contributed to this book.

After almost eight years and over thirty-five thousand posts, Faith, our recipe editor Emma Christensen, and Sara Kate wanted to boil down some of our greatest recipe hits and the most essential information into a book you can use when you unplug. Although we publish a website, we believe in cookbooks. With so much information behind a glass screen, this book of curated content feels even more necessary. We wanted you to have something to hold and keep by your side as you cook, when youre curled up in front of a fire, dreaming of asparagus season.

This book is also meant to be a go- to resource for someone who wants to understand how to work the keys to their kitchenthe first-time apartment renter, or the new parents, or the empty nester. Its a book to splatter with grease, to stain with the bottom of your teacup. Itll help you organize and personalize your kitchen so that you can quickly get in and out and have more time at the table to enjoy the good food youve made, or so that youll want to spend even more time in there mastering new techniques and cooking side by side with friends. Once you experience the magic of a truly efficient kitchen, its our hope that youll cook in more often.

The book begins with a meaty section about setting up and caring for your kitchen. Here youll find hints, tips, and lists of tools that will make your cooking life breezier, such as how to make your own natural cleaning solutions, how to recognize a smart kitchen layout, and how to keep your kitchen in usable and inspiring shape every single day.

Once you feel at home in your kitchen, our attention turns to the practical skills of everyday cooking. The second section of the book is your launchpad for cooking safely and more efficiently, your personal trainer with a bonus guide to your new exercise routine. We talk you through stocking your pantry and refrigerator, with tips for planning meals around what you have, and then our Cooking School shares what we feel are fifty of the most essential techniques for cooking.

The cookbook comes next. One hundred and fifty recipes, including some favorites from the site, but many updated (we give many new variations for our one-ingredient ice cream!) plus dozens of new recipes developed with you in mind: a curious home cook who cares about food and is working to fit home cooking into a busy schedule and competing demands on your time.