Stocking your kitchen for home cooking

I love cooking. Never a week goes by without some new idea for a dish or a menu. Inspiration comes from all sorts of places: magazine articles, restaurant reviews, a new deli discovered, a holiday recounted, a fond memory jolted. Sometimes I get an idea that spurs me into immediate action and off I go to market: a woman on a mission. More often, however, there is an idea of something that just hangs around, like a forlorn dog waiting for its mistress to take it out for a walk…

While there many practical reasons for learning to cook (alongside the enduring and universal themes of providing comfort, pleasure and bonding with others), the reality is learning to cook, wanting to cook, and choosing to cook are not the same things. Moreover, the cooking ‘bit’ is just one moment among many moments leading up to putting food on our table. All those other moments – planning, shopping, unpacking and packing, remembering to defrost something, prepping, marinating – can often seem less like a labour of love than an endless drudgery of chores.

It should be no surprise, then, that ready-made meals, take-outs and shop- bought desserts are so popular, despite the fact we should regard these as the culinary equivalent of Mad Aunts – fine to drop in occasionally, but not move in permanently.

Now that we are all home cooks – for how long we cannot tell – it is time to get our game face on. Most of us have lived in peace for a very long time, but there are those in our communities who will remember previous crises. Outbreaks of war. Energy crises. Mad cow disease. Recessions and high unemployment, which created financial hardship for many. We could do well to turn to those who lived through those times – how they shopped, how they budgeted and stretched leftovers – and how they endured.

All of the steps in Your Magical Kitchen are aimed at helping home cooks get their kitchen sorted to cover the basics about choosing foods that go together, how to take those foods in various directions, and turning out tasty, healthy and eye-catching dishes. I have kept in the steps for jazzing up a dish (splashes and divas), but I recognise these are the last things you should buy if you are on a super tight budget. For all the other steps, the amount of time and dosh you give over to getting your kitchen sorted and cooking for yourself, your loved ones and your families is very much your choice.

I hope you will share your thoughts, ideas, recipes and experiences cooking at home, which I will include in future blogs. Until then, remember, we will share milkshakes again!