Rodale - Scratch: Home Cooking for Everyone Made Simple, Fun, and Totally Delicious

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2016 by Rodale Inc.

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Book design by Rae Ann Spitzenberger
Photographs by Con Poulos (recipes) and Stacey Cramp (lifestyle)
Food styling by Simon Andrews
Prop styling by Paige Hicks
Hand lettering by Veljko Zajc

Page numbers listed refer to the print version. Other images by B. Calkins/Shutterstock (pages 72, 250); Flas100/Shutterstock (pages 2829, 194); Peter Kotoff/Shutterstock (pages 2, 156); and Tina Rupp (pages iii, 110, 282)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file with the publisher

ISBN-13: 9781623366438 hardcover

ISBN-13: 9781623366445 e-book

We inspire health, healing, happiness, and love in the world. Starting with you.
RodaleWellness.com

When something is cooked with love and care, it is always delicious.

MARCO PIERRE WHITE

I believe anyone can cook. I believe that a home-cooked meal made from scratchpreferably with organic ingredients (and maybe even homegrown)is one of the greatest pleasures in life. I believe that when you cut through all the confusion about food and cookingthe fears and insecurities, social pressures, false ideals, or just plain not knowing where to beginthis is where you can begin, right here. I will help you.

In this book, you will find what you need to get to the essence of good, delicious food in the simplest way. So whether you are just beginning and dont even know how to cook an egg, or youre old and jaded like me and have seen it all, Ill show you how to get to simple, from scratch.

Cooking from scratch isnt about impressing friends and neighbors (although you probably will); its about nourishing our families and ourselves. And the truth is, when it comes to making delicious and easy food from scratch, it truly is freaking easy! You can do thisI know you can. And I know you can because I did. Let me tell you my story.

I grew up in one of the most interesting moments, in the most interesting home, with the most interesting food stories possible if you were born in 1962. I spent my childhood on the first official organic farm in America, but I didnt realize that as a kid. All I knew was that the barn was filled with fascinating things, and the fruits and vegetables straight from plants were delicious, and the chickens, pigs, cows, and sheep were both adorable and good to eat.

Even still, I remember being hungry a lot. As the fourth child of five kids in a family where both parents worked, I was constantly foraging for food in my own home and in the garden, and watching what was happening in my friends homes like a hungry anthropologist. Their food was different. Not all of the time, but some of the time. And in some cases there was no rhyme nor reason to it. For instance, we ate tomato soup from a can just like everyone else. We were never allowed to eat at McDonalds though, and yet a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken was a huge treat for us.

Being in a family business that published books and magazines about healthy food, organic gardening and farming, and fitness (at a time when we were pretty much the only ones doing it) brought all sorts of people from all over the world to our farmoften with extreme ideas of what was right or wrong to eat. In the late 1960s, the hippies started to come. In the 1970s, Olympic cyclists from all over the world came to eat at our house on a regular basis. Almost every dinner was some sort of adventure.

My mother fed them all. Not quite happily, mind you, but on time and in abundance. She was a living embodiment of a woman trapped in a traditional wife and mother role, yet who found true satisfaction in her job, which she was not paid for. The feminist movement was unfolding around her, but with five kids and a family business, equality would have to wait. We all helped, but usually not as much as she wanted us to.

And in our kitchen, like most kitchens around the world, some kind of drama would play outthe drama between my mother and father. The drama between kids. The drama between visitors with different food philosophies. The drama between people at work with different business philosophies. At some point I realized that I much preferred to eat food than to participate in drama. But I watched and paid attention and started to notice things.

I noticed that once people were well fed they were a lot less angry. I noticed that a good meal unites people. I noticed that drinking was fine and fun until someone drank too much and then it wasnt fun at all. I noticed that skinny people werent always happy or nice. And just because your body might be shaped like an athletes, it wasnt always healthy. And I noticed that while people were arguing about what was the right way to eat and the wrong way to eat, it seemed to me that the most important thing was that the food should come from nature and be real, not fake. For example, I was always suspicious of margarine. It didnt taste right and it was artificial. I refused to eat it.

Of course, I wanted all my food to be organic. But it was super hard back then. This was the time when food co-ops were just starting, and the produce looked horrible and the grain often had moth infestations. We briefly had an organic grocery store in town, but it went out of business. So I had to mostly shop at the health food store, where choices were limited and the smell of weird vitamins filled the air. But in order to live I went to the regular supermarket just like everyone else. I was used to compromising.

When I went out on my own, as a single mother aged 20, my only cooking specialty at the time was a zucchini, garlic, and tomato saut to which my mother said: I hope you find someone to marry who likes garlic. So there I was in my little apartment with my little baby and a box of Bisquickbecause that was ubiquitous in my mothers houseand one day I happened to read the label, which listed a bunch of highly refined and processed ingredients. I had an existential crisis.