Tom Hudgens - The Commonsense Kitchen: 500 Recipes + Lessons for a Hand-Crafted Life

The Commonsense Kitchen

500 Recipes + Lessons For a Hand-Crafted Life

by Tom Hudgens

Welcome to The Commonsense Kitchen. Not simply a catalog of the meals. I served to the Deep Springs College community of fifty people during my tenure as the chef there, this book was originally conceived to inspire the students ongoing discovery of the vital craft of cooking as they embarked upon their adult lives. If you are just beginning to cook for yourself and your family, I hope this book will spark your culinary imagination while introducing you, recipe by recipe, to many essential kitchen practices. If you are a seasoned cook, I hope it will inspire you to see a familiar ingredient, technique, or dish in a new light.

The Commonsense Kitchen is an eclectic, working repertoire of dishes and democratic culinary philosophies.

Youll find recipes for many familiar American comfort food favorites: big breakfasts with eggs, bacon, pancakes, and grits; Southern and Southwestern dishes, including authentic New Mexico red and green chile sauces; a whole chapter on pies, including a thorough run-down on piecrust and the recipe for my Great-Aunt Lelas famous buttermilk pie. There are recipes for pinto beans, skillet cornbread, steak fried in beef tallow, pork chops marinated with fresh apple, and ten different versions of beef stew. I have included many of my mothers and grandmothers recipes: baked custard, cornmeal-fried summer squash, chicken enchiladas, Kentucky bourbon balls.

Alongside such old-fashioned dishes, there are many modern, lighter recipes: oatmeal, granola, and other healthful morning grains; lean meats and fish; and vegetables, soups, and salads galore. In fact, two of the largest chapters in the book are devoted entirely to vegetables: Hot Vegetables and Vegetable Soups, and Salads and Dressings. Both are arranged alphabetically by type of vegetable.

In keeping with the Deep Springs spirit of self-sufficiency, youll learn how to churn fresh butter, bake homemade crackers, prepare a simple cheese from whole milk and vinegartheres even a recipe for homemade soap.

Most of these recipes were developed in the busy Deep Springs kitchen, where there is little time for fussy preparations, little money for expensive or exotic ingredients, and little regard for food trends or food snobbery, but where a great appreciation for any good, soul-satisfying food abides. Deep Springs is the only place I know where a tobacco-chewing old mechanic from rural Oklahoma might be served black truffle risotto on the same day that a distinguished governmental scholar from France is served cherry Jell-O with canned fruit cocktail.

What is Deep Springs? Stated very simply, Deep Springs is a college on a ranch: a very small, fully accredited, two-year college program for academically advanced young men (only twelve are admitted each year), situated on a real, working cattle ranch in an isolated, high-desert California valley. In addition to rigorous academic coursework and the responsibility of self-governance, the students put in about twenty hours of physical labor each week at a variety of jobs on the ranch. Though its not a vocational school, the young men who attend Deep Springs get a good taste of many professions: rancher, laborer, farmer, mechanic, cowboy, butcher, cook.

Over the years, Deep Springs has been profiled in the New Yorker, Chronicle of Higher Education, Los Angeles Times, Wall Street Journal, and many other respected publications. The New York Times once called Deep Springs one of the most selective and innovative colleges in the world. But to describe Deep Springs effectively, its necessary to first set the scene, to describe the timeless physical place that existed, nameless, eons before human eyes ever traced its contours.

For hundreds of miles along Californias eastern side runs the enormous Sierra Nevada mountain range, like a dragons spine. Yosemite, Kings Canyon, Mount Whitney, Lake Tahoe: all these renowned places are part of the Sierra Nevada. The western approach to the Sierra peaks is slow and gradualthe Foothills, Californias Gold Country. But to approach the peaks from the east is to be astonished: they are sudden, towering, startling. On the eastern side, in the Sierras rain shadow, the terrain is desert, with alkali lakes, salt flats, and sagebrush. The beauty here is different, vast, austere, at times brutal, nothing obscuring the near-impossible distances. Death Valley is nearby. You love rocks? Youll love the eastern Sierra.

Deep Springs Valley is small by the standards of the region, roughly twelve miles long and half as wide, running northeast-southwest, ringed by mountains. The weather is extremescorching summers, biting-cold winters, violent winds, torrential downpours, snowstorms. From the college you can see several jagged peaks of the Sierra in the distance. At the southern end of the Valley is an alkali lake. Its water is not only bitter but unapproachable, skirted by moonlike acres of salt-crusted alkali mud.

While the landthe lake, the mountains, the canyons, the intermittent streamsis fascinating (botanists, zoologists, and, especially, geologists flock there), its the sky, the light, that gives the place such a haunting voice. A desert landscape might seem harsh and forbidding to the uninitiated, but with time, experience, and attention, you come to experience the land as a frame for a never-ending, ever-changing show of light.

The light of a clear summer midday in the Valley is overwhelming, so bright your vision dims, colors wash out. You squint, even wearing your darkest sunglasses and widest-brimmed hat. The harsh rays reflect up off the light-colored ground and burn your face. Its almost too much to bear. Or consider the opposite: occasionally a thick cloud cover blankets the Valley. On a moonless night in such conditions, if no artificial light is near, you literally cant see your hand in front of you. It is darker than any closet, as impeccably dark as a deep cave.

Between these extremes, the stark land and light interplay in a perpetual spectacle that is anyones for the noticing. If you are up early enough, when there are thin, high morning clouds over the Valley, you might see them turn from gray to orange to fierce pink, then settle back to white, all within a ten-minute span.

Some rare winter mornings, a low blanket of fog covers the Valley floor, softly but completely obscuring the low hills, the college buildings, the corrals. You go for a walk and the fog encloses you, allowing only the higher peaks and the sharply clear sky to be seen in a circle above you. The climbing sunlight bounces off the blinding white fog, illuminating the peaks to a dazzling gold that lasts but a moment, saturating the skys blue to an intensity you never could have imagined. Notice wellthe conditions that create this white, blue, and gold may not be repeated for years, or in your lifetime, or ever again.