Recipes I

and my food philosophy

Hello to my darling readers - as promised I have my first *paid* post for recipes. I’m still experimenting with this so am not sure if recipes will always be paid only, but this is for now.

I think meal prepping can be fraught and also kind of disgusting as a concept. It’s all so unromantic and the opposite of gourmet. Mary Frances Fisher would be disappointed in a lot of the food that I cook. But food can’t always be romantic so I find that prepping things is the best way to go about it, saving you the option of being too tired to do a Lamb Tagine with fresh flatbread without having to doordash. I’m a bit horrified by the large-scale adoption of “hitting macros” as something that is so widely discussed. I wholeheartedly agree that food should be healthy and that “macros” should be “hit,” but you are likely not an athlete or professional bodybuilder, so you don’t have to speak like that in public.

It's difficult to talk about a guiding principle when it comes to food; it is kind of like “you know it when you see it” to me. One’s food should be enjoyable without compromising on nutritional value. I don’t like to eat ultra-processed food and I like to have things be as homemade as possible; for example if I had the time and the skill I would like to bake all the bread necessary for my household. But bread can be finicky and time consuming. It is better to buy a worse loaf than risk having no bread because of a slight decrease in temperature. In the past I have made pickles, and they turn out really well, but they involve a lot of care and take two weeks to be ready to eat, so I don’t regularly do this, but in an ideal world I would always have homemade pickles. I have been making my own hot sauce and salsa verde. I always make my own salad dressing, but I usually buy chicken stock. I like to have a combination of fancier recipes, like a beautiful roasted chicken or a braised piece of beef, and things that are simple and will make six servings with 10 ingredients for busier nights.