Laura Karr - The Can Opener Gourmet: More Than 200 Quick and Delicious Recipes Using Ingredients from Your Pantry

THE Can Opener Gourmet More Than 200 Quick & Delicious Recipes Using Ingredients from Your Pantry For my grandma, Laura Elizabeth Karr Contents Acknowledgments All books are a collaborative effort, but cookbooks especially require the help of many people, and Im going to name names. First, I want to thank my agent, Liv Blumer, for responding to the query of a complete stranger (me) and for getting this book sold so quickly. Special thanks to my editor, Jennifer Lang, for her relentless encouragement, confidence, and good cheer. Id also like to thank my grandma, Laura Elizabeth Karr, not only for being available at any time for quick kitchen tests and professional advice, but also for making the kitchen such a fun, loving place to be for a kid. (And thanks to my dad for taking me to visit her every weekend.) Exponential thanks go to my intrepid home-testers, some of whom I knew and others who were recruited by friends and family. These folks bravely tasted or tested these recipes despite their busy schedules, and gave me honest feedback about both the winners and the do-overs: Chris Agnew, Lori Aretz, Sally Bisher, Cheryl and Todd Cain, Erin Caslavka, Toni Colley, Dorothy and Rod Chronister, Cristen and Al Ferguson, Christine Hock and family, Barbara Johnson and family, Chris and Jennifer Karr, Jim Karr, Laura E.

Karr, Penny Karr, Don and Tona Killingworth, Vita Patel, Scott and Sheila Petri, Julie and Kevin Reager, Michele and Brad Reager, John Redmon, Jonette Saunders and family, Carol and Harvey Snyder, Curtis Strampello, Joyce Vernoga, Marsha Vernoga, Sabine Whipple, and Eileen Workman. For hand-holding and cheerleading above and beyond the call of duty, special thanks to Chris Agnew, Arthur E. Hilger, and Cindy Mobley. And for hand-holding, cheerleading, and occasional coaching, special thanks, too, to Neil Patel. Introduction People have asked me how I came up with the idea for this book and I tell them the truththat I wanted a cookbook like this and couldnt find one. Im also a little obsessed with finding the easiest, most efficient way to do things.

Some might call that lazy; I call it enterprising. And just so you understand, Im a big fan of gourmet cooking. I love creating extravagant meals for holidays and special events. I adore big shiny cookbooks with lots of color photography showing me how to make food people will talk about weeks later. This is not one of those books. (Yet with that said, you may find recipes here that you can use to help out with your special events, such as Olive-Walnut Tapenade or Pear, Brie, and Hearts of Palm Salad.) And I know that the emphasis in cooking today is on fresh, fresh, fresh ingredients. (Yet with that said, you may find recipes here that you can use to help out with your special events, such as Olive-Walnut Tapenade or Pear, Brie, and Hearts of Palm Salad.) And I know that the emphasis in cooking today is on fresh, fresh, fresh ingredients.

I thought this might be a sizable hurdle for people in considering this book. But I also thought about the fact that in television, there is something called counterprogramming. That means that when you have a show that totally dominates a particular time slot on a particular night, you can count on the fact that there are some folks out there who arent into it. So you put on a program thats pretty much the exact opposite in hopes of reaching them. For instance, if a sitcom about young people commands most of the viewing audience, you could probably pull in the nonconformists with a mature drama or mystery. Well, thats kind of what I decidedthat I could develop a counter cookbook for those days when youre not ready to go the distance in the kitchen, but dont want to resort to fast food.

So I set out to create truly good food with ingredients you probably already have in your pantry. I also tried to give a few tips along the way about using low-fat ingredients. You may note, too, that I dont use a lot of saltIve always believed its easier to add salt than to take it back. I also have not used any shortening or margarine in virtually any of my recipesthey have a lot of trans-fatty acids, which at this point appear to be liquid cement for your arteries. (Perhaps future generations will find the opposite is true, and that a pastry a day will keep the doctor away. But until then ) Only one recipe calls for shortening and that is the 3 tablespoons in my grandmothers Maple-Buttercream Frosting.

I didnt touch that. A classic is a classic. It is my sincere hope that youll find many dishes you can work into your weekly rotation. And I want you to feel free to experiment with the dishesI always do. To me, a recipe is simply a jumping-off point. I also want you to feel free to substitute fresh ingredients if you likeIve given a list of equivalents so that if you have fresh ingredients on hand you may use them if you wish.

After all, cooking is all about making food that tastes good to you. CHAPTER ONE Getting Started Gourmet cooking has become one of Americas favorite pastimes. In fact, foodies seem to follow cooking shows the way groupies once followed the Grateful Dead, hoping to glean something new from each performance. But the problem, to quote comedian Richard Jeni, is that many of these celebrity chefs are using spices you never heard of, tools you cant afford, in kitchens nicer and bigger than my house. But what if there was a different way to cook altogether? What if regular folks could create truly delicious meals quickly, with foods in season or not, without preservatives, and knowing the exact nutritional value of each dish? The answer to that question is probably already in your cupboard, waiting patiently for you to notice it. Its called canned food, and youre about to learn a new way to cook with it. How This Got Started The thing is, it never used to occur to me to use canned items other than tomato sauce.

Then I got married and came face-to-face with the ugly specter of preparing some kind of meal every night, not just for special occasions and not just peanut butter with a side of popcorn. Suddenly, marriage made that seem wrong somehow. After about a year I understood how being the only person in the house who can cook might work against me. Man, it was a huge pain. Not only making the food, but the monotony of thinking up something, anything, then shopping, chopping, cooking, and cleaning up afterwards. I began to look for easier ways to make dishes we liked.

This was a challenge because both my husband and I were pretty picky eaters, despite the peanut-butter-and-popcorn confession (although the peanut is a legume and popcorn is a grain, so there you have the amino acid chain for a whole protein). One of my hobbies had been to re-create some of the dishes wed been served in some of our favorite fine restaurants. I was pretty good at guessing ingredients and usually had the right ones on hand or at least knew which markets might carry them. But as every cook knows, lack of ingredients is the mother of invention. For me, it was the pork loin chops with plum sauce. Id already set out the chops to thaw when it occurred to me that not only did I not have any plum sauce, I didnt have any plums, and they werent even in season.