Cooking, more than anything else, is what makes us human. While we are not the only cooks in the animal kingdom (Japanese macaques salt their potatoes and a bonobo and his son have learned to toast marshmallows), we are definitely the most talented. Cooking has contributed inestimably to our biological evolution and to every human culture on earth. A shared meal is at the centre of many religions. Food is key to welcoming, celebrating, and mourning: birthday and wedding cake, drinks at a wake, Christmas pudding, Thanksgiving turkey, Pancake Tuesday, Passover seder, soul food. Before coming to Trinity, I was a chef for a decade. I’m not saying that everyone needs to achieve a professional standard in the kitchen. But of the more than 1000 meals you’re likely to eat this year, you’re losing something of your essential humanity if you can’t competently produce at least some of them yourself.
Knives
The quintessential symbol of a chef, a good knife is indispensable. Before even a pot, you need a knife (you could at least make yourself a cold salad; with only a pot, you could maybe have hot water). You’ll probably need to buy yourself one; like most of the stuff in rented flats or shared digs, any knives you luck into are likely to be ones too crummy for the previous tenants to nick. Forget the knife block sets: knife blocks ruin your knives by dulling the edge every time you slide one in or out and trapping moisture, which damages the blade. You need at most two knives to begin with, a big one (a chef’s knife, eight to ten inch blade, or similarly, a santoku knife) and a little one (an office/utility knife or a largish paring knife, three to four inches). IKEA is a good place for affordable knives; TK Maxx sometimes has quality-brand knives at a discount; Aldi sometimes have a good deal on individual Asian-style knives. Expect to spend between €10 to €20 on a big knife and €5-15 on a little knife. If you’re only buying one, get a big knife and don’t be intimidated. A well-balanced, sharp chef’s knife is surprisingly versatile, even for small work, and your average professional chef usually has only one or two favourite knives they do most of their work with. A small knife is more dangerous than a large one: the heavier weight and larger blade of a big knife does more of the work for you than a small knife, which can slip more easily and requires more pressure to get through tougher food. The only time I’ve ever required stitches was the result of trying to get a dull knife through a sweet potato. Making soup shouldn’t require a detour to A&E. Treat yourself and also buy a sharpener: get a pull-through style one with notches, not a steel. Sharpen your knife after every few uses.
Other Basic Equipment
Once you have a sharp knife, you will need something to cut on. Using your counter will typically violate the terms of your lease, and using a plate is not only difficult, it’s like nails on a chalkboard. Get an inexpensive wood or bamboo cutting board. Wood has natural antibacterial properties and wears harder than plastic.
With a knife and a board, you have all the requirements for a cold salad, ceviche or steak tartare. But because we are not chimps or on a raw diet, let’s assume you have a heat source (an electric or gas cooker, or a grating placed over a garbage can fire) and therefore require a vessel to cook food in (a pot or scavenged metal bucket). The most versatile is a large saucepan, in the vicinity of 3.8 liters, with a lid. We have an oven (either as part of the aforementioned cooker, or construct a solar one out of a stolen box and tin foil; Google for instructions), so we’ll want at least a sheet pan or some other flat piece of metal we can bake things on. Buy or whittle a wooden spoon, and that completes the most basic equipment that you will require to feed yourself.
Reconceptualising Recipes
If you want to easily cook for yourself, the other thing you’ll require is a fundamental shift in the way you conceptualize food. I think — no matter how good the recipes are — books like Mark Bittman’s How to Cook Everything: 2,000 Simple Recipes for Great Food constitute a form of psychological warfare, in which cooking something simple for yourself evidently requires a 2-kilo tome more complicated than the user manual for the space shuttle. Start thinking of food in terms of categories and archetypical recipes for those categories. For example, you don’t need a recipe for Tomato Soup, and then another recipe for Mushroom Soup, and then another recipe for Asparagus Soup. You need a basic, flexible recipe for SOUP, which you can then use and change to fit your whims: take the framework of SOUP, but vary the ingredients, change the seasoning, puree it or leave it chunky.
With our knife (to cut things) and our pot (to cook things), the category of STUFF IN SAUCE opens up. If you think broadly, a lot of different dishes are essentially just STUFF IN SAUCE. By varying the ratio of stuff to sauce, you can go from steak in pepper sauce or chicken in mole (high stuff to sauce ratio), through ‘wet dishes’ like your average Western curry or pasta marinara, to stews and chilis (less stuff, more sauce), to soups, which are essentially all sauce.
I’m going to give you a recipe right in the middle of the STUFF IN SAUCE category, but I strongly encourage you to think creatively about categories of not just dishes, but of ingredients. If a recipe calls for chicken, it probably will suit any white meat, so you could definitely substitute turkey, maybe not-too-fatty pork or pressed firm tofu, or even a sturdy white fish like cod or hake. An ongoing mission in coaching my father-in-law has been getting him to realise that if he doesn’t have leeks, he probably can substitute anything contextually similar in the allium family: mild onions, or chives, or spring onions, or shallots, or wild garlic…
The Recipe: Pasta Sauce
My first recipe for you is a very forgiving pasta sauce that sustained me when I had just moved out, was working two minimum-wage jobs, and was still dead broke. I made up a big pot and ate it with the cheapest pasta I could buy, even straight out of the fridge for breakfast, when I came rolling in at 6:30 am off the graveyard shift. You could eat it as-is over pasta, maybe with a little grated cheese, or throw in some cooked chicken or chickpeas for protein, or extra veggies. It will keep well in the fridge for several days, though I don’t recommend freezing it: the cream in the sauce can separate weirdly.
THE UR-SAUCE
Ingredients
2 TBSP (tablespoons) olive or sunflower or vegetable oil
1 onion, chopped
1 or more cloves of garlic, minced
1 or more shallots, chopped, if you have them
One 400g can diced tomatoes (“Italian-style” or with herbs is nice; pay the extra few cents for chopped versus plum, it’ll make your life easier)
A big pinch or two of each: dried basil, dried oregano, dried thyme (or just go for generic mixed herbs) — use more if you’re using fresh herbs
½ TBSP honey (give or take)
salt and pepper to taste
½ cup cream (whipping, single or double)
1 TBSP butter
Two shots of vodka, if you’ve got it (one for you and one for the pot)
Method
i) In your saucepan, fry off the onion, garlic and shallots in the oil over medium heat. Stir them around so they don’t burn. This will take a few minutes: you want them fragrant, translucent, maybe a little golden.
ii) Add the canned tomatoes, dried herbs, honey, salt and pepper (yeah, you’re guessing at this point with the salt and pepper; put in a reasonable amount and adjust it later). Bring to a boil, still over medium heat, and continue to gently boil 5 minutes or so until most of the liquid evaporates. Stir it as necessary to keep it from scorching on the bottom.
iii) Remove the pot from the heat; stir in the cream, butter and vodka. Turn the heat down and simmer for 5 more minutes but do not boil! (Simmering is bubbling gently just below a boil and it stays in your pot; cream boils over dramatically very very quickly at a boil.)
iv) Taste it again and adjust the salt and pepper, and serve over cooked pasta.
A few notes: like the sugar and salt, the vodka in the sauce bangs the sharp edges off the tomatoes and marries everything together nicely without tasting boozy. Most of the alcohol burns off in the final simmer anyway (although sober cooks probably want to avoid it). The shallots are also optional but classy; a tip I gained years ago reading Kitchen Confidential was that part of the ‘restaurant’ taste was shallots, commonly used professionally but little used in home kitchens. They’re easy to find and have a flavor somewhere right between onions and garlic. I haven’t tried swapping the cream for coconut milk, but I suspect if you also changed out the dried herbs for fresh coriander and a bit of chili, you’d have a very serviceable Asian-ish sauce.
