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An Everlasting Meal: Cooking with Economy and Grace

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I enjoyed the author’s insightful writing about her cooking knowledge; and really, this guide to all things culinary would be on my kitchen shelf instead of in my bookcase, if I’d wanted to remain a full-on omnivorous eater. Through the insightful essays in An Everlasting Meal , Tamar Adler issues a rallying cry to home cooks.

Those are economical, and, if the free range chicken is place sparingly atop the rice, as she recommends, makes an extremely tasty meal while not using much of the chicken. Everything has parsley and Parmesan in it, and everything is served on toast, and worst of all, vegetables are served cold! This book is gratifying in its pragmatic approach to cooking and reviving what has already been cooked. An Everlasting Meal is beautifully intimate, approaching cooking as a narrative that begins not with a list of ingredients or a tutorial on cutting an onion, but with a way of thinking . She made a number of claims that suggest that we have very different tastes- for example, that broccoli stems are delicious if you cook them long enough.

I now make my own beans, and her dead simple (and incredible) parsley oil, and roast farmers market vegetables as soon as I get home, which fills the house with amazing aromas and the fridge with food for the week. Her way of thinking of course owes a lot to MFKF, and is also pretty close in style to Robert Farrar Capon's "ferial" cooking from "The Supper of the Lamb. It does debunk the idea of cooking as an expensive, complicated process using expensive kitchen ware, and this is relevant to all cooks, not just those with a preference for animal produce. Here, in An Everlasting Meal Cookbook, she offers more than 1,500 easy and creative ideas to use up nearly every kind of leftover—and helpfully explains how long each recipe takes.

Simple enough to just ignore her statements about salt and not put it in when following her recipes, but I’m not sure the world needs a voice telling it that such and such NEEDS salt. p.118 anodyne: Adjective--Not likely to provoke dissent or offense; uncontentious or inoffensive, often deliberately Noun--A pain-killing drug or medicine. Fill a bowl with the carrot ribbons, add a light sprinkle of toasted cumin or coriander, a little vinegar and salt, then dress it with a lot of good olive oil. She used quality ingredients, fresh and in season, always prepared correctly -- and always with an eye to using the leftovers in the next meal.Tamar Adler's new book is as much about finding excitement in the mundane as it is about giving new life to old ingredients. Her words are saying that cooking is for everyone and not just celebrity chefs and experts, that food does not have to be perfectly arranged on a plate, that it can be a messy daily thing full of mistakes and made on the spot with leftover ingredients that would have ended up in the trash anyway. What I think makes this book so special is that it is not about food in isolation ("here are a bunch of things that taste great!

I loved her paragraphs on roasting vegetables and what she has to say about adding "a few bunches of dark, leafy greens. There are lines like this, for example, when she exhorts the reader to toast a piece of stale bread and rub it with a garlic clove and then to place it in a bowl. I forget the way bliss can trip into meaning, into vibrancy, into a stunningly pigmented existential composition. It reminds me of all the things I love about "playing" in the kitchen, and why I should spend even more time there. To cook up vegetables, grains and beans and then figure out how to repurpose them for different meals through the week.But if cooking is a more significant part of your world than it is of mine, then it may well be your thing! Once greens are cooked as they should be, though: hot and lustily, with garlic, in a good amount of olive oil, they lose their moral urgency and become one of the most likable ingredients in your kitchen. I love the elegant honesty of Tamar’s writing, the sureness of her direction and the range of her ideas. Tamar Adler's guide to redeeming leftovers is endlessly useful and great fun to browse: it deserves an everlasting place in any kitchen. She recommends turning to neglected onions, celery and potatoes for inexpensive meals that taste full of fresh vegetables, and cooking meat and fish resourcefully.

The author's simple yet clever descriptions and transparent adoration of good food warmed my heart and yes, changed how I think about cooking. Adler's chapter titles (which are lovely) acknowledge her debt to MFK Fisher, and Fisher's style is clearly what Adler is shooting for. Adler's approach is to splice short recipes within long paragraphs of non-recipe prose (though there are recipes in those paragraphs too, just not in recipe form).

But while the word ‘economy’ is in the title, the author uses it to mean ‘not wasting things’, rather than ‘eating cheaply’. If cooking is a basic adult skill, knowing how to make something imaginative out of leftovers is advanced level adulting. I loved the concept, and really wanted inspiration to be more of an intuitive cook and less reliant on recipes all the time, but I was wary when some reviews pointed to the pretentious prose used throughout.

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