NOTE #1: [Michael] We. Love. Onions. And garlic. We’ll try to behave when we put recipes on here, but we can’t make many promises. If you look at a recipe and think, “Wow that’s a lot of onion,” feel free to use less. Also feel free to contemplate how much better your life could be if you loved onions more. If you look at a recipe and think, “That seems like a reasonable amount of garlic,” then welcome to the club, but you should know that we probably actually use more when we make it for ourselves. Sure, the point of cooked mushrooms is the mushrooms. But, ya know, sometimes I just really want my mushrooms to be 50% garlic. (Luckily, my husband loves garlic just as much as I do, so he never exiles me to the opposite end of the apartment).
NOTE #2: [Michael] Salt is important. It’s tasty and it pulls a lot of weight in convincing various ingredients to be friends with each other. However, I don’t use it nearly as much as most Americans. My husband got used to eating low-sodium meals when living at his parents’ house for a while, and so I got into the habit of low-sodium cooking to match his taste. This means we both are much more sensitive to salt and more keenly aware of its presence in most meals. Recipes usually call for salt to taste, and that will definitely be the case with most of my recipes–the amount that I include in ingredients list will need to be taken, well, with a grain of salt.
This only applies to cooking, not to baking. As far as I understand it, the chemistry behind baking is much more exact than in cooking and is much less forgiving. I always follow and will always give exact measurements for baked goods, even the salt.
WARNING #1: [Michael] In case you’re new to cooking and haven’t considered this aspect yet, we want to warn you up front: you are going to waste a lot of food and resources. It’s inevitable. You’re going to mess up recipes. You’re going to make recipes perfectly but end up hating it anyway. You’re going to make a tart and only need three-quarters of the crust dough and wind up throwing away the rest. You’re going to make a recipe which calls for half a cup of buttermilk but then have nothing to do with the rest of the buttermilk but you’ll hang onto it just in case you do until you realize you’ve had it for three months and there’s no way it hasn’t spoiled. And then there’s all the waste of packaging and things like spare bits of parchment paper that you can’t do much with unless you’re far craftier than I am.
Don’t misunderstand. I’m not offering a free pass. We should always do our best to waste as little food and few resources as possible. If you’re buying two lemons from the supermarket, you don’t need to use one of the little produce bags. If you plan on baking lots of pies or tarts or other dishes that require a blind-baked crust, it’ll eventually be better to buy reusable pie weights rather than use and toss rice or beans each time. What I am offering is a sometimes-you-just-gotta-and-that’s-okay pass.
Twelfth Dimension Kitchen 