Cooking 4 One E-Book

Peter Mulraney

• Herausgeber: Peter Mulraney
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Beschreibung

Cooking 4 One

Leseprobe

Cooking 4 One

An introduction to cooking for men who find themselves living alone.

Peter Mulraney

All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review, without the written permission of the publisher.

Copyright © 2014 Peter Mulraney

ISBN: 978-0-9924269-5-8

Created with Vellum

Contents

Introduction

Some basic stuff

Breakfast

Lunch

Dinner

Sample menus

Entertaining

Summary

A note from Peter

Also by Peter Mulraney

Introduction

This is a basic cookbook written with the intention of helping you master feeding yourself, now that you’re the one who has to do the cooking.

There are no intimidating pictures of perfectly prepared meals.

In fact, there is nothing fancy in this book at all.

This cookbook tells you how to cook the meals I discovered I could cook for myself, without having to decipher the secret language of all the fancy cookbooks on the shelf in the kitchen or available in bookstores or online.

When you look inside most cookbooks, the first thing you notice, after the glossy pictures, is that all the recipes (that’s the fancy word for cooking instructions) are for preparing meals for two or more people. Not much help if you only want to cook for yourself, and you haven’t done much of that before.

In this cookbook you’ll find instructions for cooking 4 one.

For convenience, I’ve grouped the meals under the headings of breakfast, lunch and dinner, but you can eat any meal at any sitting. It’s your life. When you’re living alone, if you want to eat a breakfast meal for dinner or vice versa, there’s no-one there to complain or tell you to do otherwise.

Some meals could be listed under more than one heading. I’ve chosen the heading that makes sense to me.

Where possible, I focus on process so that you don’t have to wade through a lot of repetition of the same instructions under different meal headings. For example, I look at pan frying (a process) instead of listing separate instructions for cooking steak, pork, sausages, chicken and fish.

If you’ve never cooked before, take comfort in the knowledge that if you can boil a pan of water on a cooktop, you already have one of the main skills required for success in the kitchen.

You also have a lot of other skills, like being able to read instructions and measure things, that will come in handy. If you’re good at project management, some of those skills can be transferred to the kitchen as well.

The first part of the book covers buying and storing food, and a few other basic instructions I think you’ll find helpful.

Towards the end of the book, I’ve included a chapter on entertaining, for those of you who want to cook a meal to share with friends - after you have the basics under the belt.

When you’ve mastered the basic cooking skills in this book, I encourage you to venture into some of those fancy cookbooks with the glossy pictures - they won’t seem so intimidating once you have an idea of how this cooking thing works.

Disclaimer: I am not a chef or a nutritionist - although plenty of men are. I’m simply a practitioner. At the time of writing, I’ve been cooking for myself for around five years, using the ideas you’ll find in this cookbook.

Some basic stuff

Buying food

You probably know where to go to buy food: the supermarket, the butcher's, the baker's, the greengrocer's or fruit and veg shop. If your life has been anything like mine, you've probably been sent down to one or more of those places with a list at some point in your life.

Now that you're on your own, the challenge is writing the list before you go. And, writing a list is essential, if you don't want to blow your budget or wind up with a lot of stuff that you'll end up throwing out.

I started by doing my food shopping in the supermarket, and moved out to the specialty stores, like the butcher and fruit and veg shop, once I had some degree of confidence that I knew what I was doing.

If you can't find something to eat in a supermarket, you're not looking. Not only do they stock the basic ingredients for the dishes you might want to cook, they also have prepared meals that only require the application of heat, and ready made salads that only need to be opened.

The first time you go to the supermarket, spend some time getting yourself oriented with the layout, so that you can structure your list to align with the layout as you move through the supermarket. This saves a bit of backtracking, but don't get too carried away because, every now and then, they shift things just to see if you're awake.

My preferred option is to cook but if you need to start with prepared meals, start there and progress to cooking.

The other thing about shopping is to set a budget. How much do you want to, or how much can you afford to, spend on food? If you haven't been the one doing the shopping until now, you might get a surprise (shock) when you get to the checkout.

The thing to remember is that it' [...]