Sarah Kallio - The Stocked Kitchen: One Grocery List . . . Endless Recipes

the stocked kitchen A Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
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Copyright 2011 by Sarah Kallio and Stacey Krastins All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information, address Atria Books Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020. First Atria Books hardcover edition July 2011 ATRIA BOOKS and colophon are trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc. The Simon & Schuster Speakers Bureau can bring authors to your live event. For more information or to book an event, contact the Simon & Schuster Speakers Bureau at 1-866-248-3049 or visit our website at www.simonspeakers.com . Designed by Suet Yee Chong Manufactured in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 ISBN 978-1-4516-3535-5
ISBN 978-1-4516-3537-9 (ebook) To Craig, Andrew, Charlie, Larry, Lexie, and Ellathank you for all your unwavering love and support.S.K.s

What I planned for doesnt sound good. I dont have any time to cook, let alone get to the store. We are all searching for a way to make the process easier. Many of us get discouraged into prepackaged complacency, which doesnt satisfy any real cravings. (Weve never heard anyone say, You know what sounds good? Powdered milk with dehydrated broccoli!) Bookstores contain a myriad of cookbooks touting catch-phrases like quick and simple or cheap and easy. The recipes may be quick, but they often require us to purchase random ingredients that we need a pinch of and then will never use again.

We have, in the past, cluttered our pantries, refrigerators, and cupboards with hundreds of dollars worth of cookbooks and specialty items like red pepper paste. We were still left missing an easy-to-use, versatile, and effective system for getting dinner on the table. This is why we created The Stocked Kitchen. The Stocked Kitchen is the first complete meal creation system with only one standard list of groceries. If your kitchen is stocked with these ingredients, you will always have what you need to create any of our recipes. These recipes have been used for all our own dining needs, including meals for drop-in guests, special occasions, and every-night dinners for our families.

This system encompasses all parts of the meal creation process from shopping to storing to cooking to serving. The results are delicious, guestworthy meals made from real, basic ingredients. We have proved The Stocked Kitchen system works. It has reduced our grocery bills, our stress levels, our trips to the market, and our food waste. We create more delicious meals while removing the handcuffs of preplanning. It is so simpleStart with the listbut once youve incorporated it into your life, you will see how powerful The Stocked Kitchen philosophy can be.

One grocery list, endless recipes!

We both often found ourselves offering or being asked to host and organize bridal showers, baby showers, holiday parties, and reunions for family and friends. We were the only people we knew who had guests over regularly (up to fifty people in the backyard on a random Friday night). Friends and family would make comments like How do you do it? We decided to collaborate on an entertaining book to make it easier for everyone. We wanted this book to be something that we ourselves could and would use in our own kitchens. We began by questioning why entertaining is so much work and so expensive. Over countless playdates, we started to realize that what made hosting people costly and time consuming was the fact that most recipes call for random ingredients that require extra cost and trips to the market.

To alleviate some of the burden on us, we would often ask our husbands to pick up missing ingredients on their way home from work. They were even more confused than we were as to where to find items like tahini paste. So, for our entertaining book, we decided to list all of the specialty items, explain where they could be found, and describe what they looked like. We also decided to limit each dinner party to only three specialty items hmmm actually, no, how about only one item? Wait! Why do we need any specialty items at all? In fact, we already owned too many ingredients that didnt get used enough and didnt work together. We decided that what we needed was to invent a way to standardize the items in our kitchens without limiting our ability to create a wide variety of dishes. Plus, we realized that this wasnt just important for entertaining: this system could be incredibly beneficial for cooking in general.

We investigated our own pantries and asked ourselves what items could be used in multiple ways, what more common items could be used to substitute for specialty items, and more obviously, what items we didnt ever use. We researched what would be found in traditional ethnic pantries and how to derive those flavors from ingredients that we already used. We then began to create recipes using only these ingredients to prove the system worked. After a year of ingredient negotiation and recipe development, we created The Stocked Kitchen Grocery List. This list is now the only list we use to make all our meals. We had a list and a lot of recipes, and were in awe of what we had created.

We couldnt wait to share it with all of our friends and family because we believed that they could benefit so much from the list and recipes. We did know, however, that we needed to protect our idea properly, so we copyrighted the list and trademarked our brand name, The Stocked Kitchen. We then began to share The Stocked Kitchen philosophy and get peoples opinions. We developed a prototype book called Taste and in just seven months sold nine hundred copies, mostly in our small community through home shows, our website, and local retail stores. The world should never underestimate a womanslet alone two mothersability to find creative and realistic solutions to a problem. The Stocked Kitchen system is so integrated into our lives and has made cooking so much easier that its hard to remember how we did it before.

Since weve limited the ingredients we use, we feel that we have so many more options. There are no more Sunday evening recipe planning sessions. There is no more grocery list making. There is no more standing in front of an open pantry, full of random ingredients, saying,