About

Learning to cook

Everyone has a different level of comfort with cooking. I was lucky enough to have parents who taught me to cook with them and passed on a number of recipes. There were a couple of things I’ve thus far found useful while learning to cook, though none of them are a substitute for practice and experimentation.

Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat (Samin Nosrat) is a book about the theory behind cooking and flavor. No points for guessing the four main components. I’ve found this book helpful because it talks about why certain techniques are used, which made it easier for me to remember when and how to apply them. It’s fairly long, but it includes some great illustrations and starter recipes. (Borrow / Buy)

The Ultimate Meal Prep Cookbook (America’s Test Kitchen) has a lot of good advice on planning out what to cook for the week. Since I like to plan things out and get all of my grocery shopping done at once, this book has been pretty helpful. (Borrow / Buy).

Paprika is a useful little app that saves recipes from websites and can build grocery lists from meal plans. I use it to keep all my recipes in place and also to build this website.

Recipes

I usually find recipes by browsing New York Times Cooking and saving things that look fun to try. Most websites worth developing a recipe webscraper for are worth checking out! When I want to try a new recipe, I usually find three or four versions of it online and cross reference them to figure out the key ingredients. Then I start building up an idea of what I actually need from there. It gives me some room to experiment for myself!

I also sometimes borrow out cookbooks from the library, page through them, and copy down anything that looks interesting. How to Cook Everything (along with its vegetarian and fast counterparts), the King Arthur Flour Baker’s Companion, and anything by Alton Brown are good places to start.

The Website

I made this website so I could easily access and share my recipes with friends and family. Cooking is better together!

This website is hosted on GitHub Pages. My recipes are stored in Paprika, fetched with a python script, and then built into webpages by Hugo. The documentation and code repository are both public.