I’m still cooking Hello Fresh meals months after canceling my subscription - SFGate

Kasper
Home

I’m still cooking Hello Fresh meals months after canceling my subscription - SFGate

I’m still cooking Hello Fresh meals months after canceling my subscription - SFGate

Posted: 10 Feb 2021 07:47 AM PST

Last weekend, I cooked up a Hello Fresh recipe for something called "Juicy Lucy Burgers. It's basically an ordinary cheeseburger recipe, only the cheese is inside the burger and the whole thing is spiced up with a delicious jam made by frying sliced onions, tomato, olive oil and two and a half teaspoons of balsamic vinegar. I didn't have a guest to share it with, of course, because I'm responsibly quarantining in order to do my part to end this pandemic. If I had had a guest over, I imagine they would've been very impressed.

Since I'd made it before, I knew to cook up more tomato and onion jam than was needed; in addition to burgers, it goes great on turkey sandwiches, or just spread over crackers when I need some extra calories to make it through my daily mid-afternoon slump.

Both the burgers and the sauce turned out better than ever before – which was neat, considering I canceled my Hello Fresh Subscription four months ago.

Select Your Plan - hellofresh.com

8.99Shop Now

Back in July, I wrote about how I was experimenting with using my Hello Fresh subscription as a cooking class rather than a substitute for grocery shopping. Once I felt like I had built up a healthy collection of tasty recipes, I canceled my subscription and started using my folder full of recipes as a shopping list, and six months later, I'm happy to report that it actually works this way. That's right: The Juicy Lucy burgers I sourced myself are even better than the ones I got delivered to me in a big box.

This is significant for me because I'm usually not that good at cooking. Though I frequently ate home-cooked meals growing up, I never memorized the recipes and fell out of the habit once I moved to cities where delivery is frustratingly convenient. Now, as the pandemic nears its one-year anniversary, I'm finally ready to become the self-reliant, domestic, boring adult man I've always known was my destiny.

You know: the kind of guy who owns leather folders.

You know: the kind of guy who owns leather folders.

Joshua Sargent

As far as I can tell, there are two reasons for the improved food.

The first is that the ingredients that come in a Hello Fresh box often aren't great. Back when I was getting the food delivered, it wasn't uncommon to find  wimpy carrots, spotty tomatoes or – my biggest bugaboo – sub-par hot sauces. When I do my own shopping, I pick out good vegetables ... even if the only recipes I know how to use them in are gleaned from an online grocery delivery service.

The second reason is simpler: I've been able to customize the recipe to my own tastes. For example, instead of using potato buns, I use regular white or wheat buns, because I'm a f***ing American (I also just like them better). And, as compared to all Hello Fresh recipes I've used, I reduce the recommended sour cream by about 75%, because Hello Fresh doles out dairy like it's a 1400s-era forest witch trying to fatten up a couple lost German children.

But the main reason I do this? It's cheaper, my friend. $7.49 per serving (plus shipping) isn't exactly restaurant prices, but it's a heck of a lost worse than grocery store prices, and since I live alone and have the supplies required to shop safely during a pandemic, I'm happy to pocket that difference for a rainy day. Or, more realistically, a big party for when my dinner dates start being real again. With Hello Fresh and other subscription services, you're paying for convenience. You still get to cook fresh food, unlike with takeout, but you don't have to do the shopping. That's the whole point.

If you're like me and want to do as much of your own cooking as possible while saving money, but also feel like your repertoire or recipes could use some refreshment, why not give a Hello Fresh subscription a chance – if only for a little bit?

More Shopping

Artem Chigvintsev heading to cooking school | Entertainment | pdclarion.com - pdclarion.com

Posted: 10 Feb 2021 03:00 PM PST

Artem Chigvintsev is heading to cooking school.

The 'Dancing with the Stars' professional discovered a new passion for food with all the time he spent at home during the coronavirus pandemic and he's enlisted at The Culinary Institute of America, his fiancé Nikki Bella has revealed.

She said: "It's cute because I feel like I'm always pressuring him to have more content on social media because, you guys, when Artem posts cooking stuff on his Instagram - it's mindblowing to me - he will get a minimum of 1,000 DMs about, 'How did you cook it? It looks amazing.'

"Everyone loves seeing him do it. I told him, 'Artem, the universe is showing you your niche. People want more cooking from you.' He meets again with a guidance counsellor, but he's going to CIA, which is the cooking school in St. Helena. They have a historic gorgeous one in St. Helena. And he's gonna start there! He's gonna be going to cooking school."

And Nikki has revealed Artem wants to go to the cooking school to prove to chefs that he is skilled too.

She explained during The Bellas Podcast about Artem's thoughts on the whole thing: "I feel like chefs are looking at me like ... this guy doesn't know what he's doing. So he goes, 'I'm gonna go to school and I'm gonna get the degree.'"

Meanwhile, Nikki previously revealed she and Artem planned to start attending couple's therapy with their "life coach".

Speaking in November, she said: "I would be lying to say, 'Oh, it's great.' It has definitely been a struggle for us. It's hard. We have so many ups and downs. It's been so difficult on our relationship because I need so much from him, but he's, like, torn between his job that requires so much from him and then us at home. It's with our life coach. After 'Dancing with the Stars', we're going to start classes as a couple because we've realised that we both feel like we're not listening to each other … We finally both just said, like, 'We need to bring someone in to help us so we don't get [back] into that place.'"

Maria Guarnaschelli, influential cookbook editor, dies at 79 - The Washington Post

Posted: 10 Feb 2021 05:23 PM PST

Mrs. Guarnaschelli was widely recognized as one of the most influential forces in the world of cookbook publishing, cultivating writers whose cooking guides became mainstays of American kitchens. Her reputation grew along with their success.

"I'm a powerful woman," she told the Los Angeles Times in 1997. "Even my husband has told me he's a little afraid of me. I'm unconventional. I'm relentless. I'm passionate. When I believe in something, I'm like a … warrior. That's frightening to people. Maybe in another century I would have been a witch and burned at the stake."

She earned the devoted loyalty of many of her writers, who over the years included Jeff Smith of the "Frugal Gourmet" franchise; Rose Levy Beranbaum, author of "The Cake Bible" (1988) and other baking classics; Lynne Rossetto Kasper, former host of the popular public radio program "The Splendid Table"; Judy Rodgers, author of "The Zuni Cafe Cookbook" (2002); Molly Stevens, author of "All About Braising: The Art of Uncomplicated Cooking" (2004); and J. Kenji López-Alt, author of "The Food Lab: Better Home Cooking Through Science" (2015).

"She didn't just make beautiful cookbooks," culinary expert Rick Rodgers said in an interview, reflecting on Mrs. Guarnaschelli's career. "She made cookbooks that changed the way Americans cook."

For Mrs. Guarnaschelli, her manuscripts were not the kitchen equivalent of coffee table books — things of beauty that telegraphed sophistication but rarely imparted it from their places of repose. Rather, cookbooks were essential tools to be written with professionalism and precision.

Working with Levy Beranbaum on "The Cake Bible," she insisted that the book include metric weights, which afforded more exact measurements of flour and sugar than the cups and tablespoons more commonly used in American kitchens.

"Who but Maria would have had the daring to publish a cookbook with charts and weights and put her heart and soul into the work," Levy Beranbaum wrote in a tribute to Mrs. Guarnaschelli. They worked together on seven volumes, Levy Beranbaum said in an interview; 'The Cake Bible" is today in its 56th printing.

In international cuisine, Mrs. Guarnaschelli was credited with elevating the sophistication of books available to American home chefs through her work with writers including Julie Sahni — author of "Classic Indian Cooking" (1980), which was Mrs. Guarnaschelli's first cookbook — Rick Bayless, a doyen of Mexican cuisine; and Fuchsia Dunlop, a food writer who specializes in Chinese cooking.

She allowed them "to use unusual and exotic ingredients with no apology," Rodgers observed. "The reader had to come up to the level of the author. The author did not come down to the level of the home cook and make excuses like, 'I know you're not going to be able to find this chili . . .' "

Mrs. Guarnaschelli took on her most high-profile project in the early 1990s at Scribner, which by then was the publisher of "Joy of Cooking," the gargantuan red-and-white volume that generations of women received when they married or otherwise left home. By the time Mrs. Guarnaschelli's update of the book was published in 1997, the saga had become, in the description of the Los Angeles Times, "one of the biggest cookbook stories of the decade."

Irma S. Rombauer, a St. Louis homemaker seeking income after her husband's suicide, had published the first edition of "Joy" in 1931 as a collection of recipes from her kitchen and those of her neighborhoods. The book was handed down through the family — her daughter, Marion Rombauer Becker, and then a grandson, Ethan Becker, oversaw subsequent editions — and through various publishers on its way to becoming one of the most popular cookbooks in American history.

By the early 1990s, it had not undergone an update since 1975, and Scribner, along with some readers, had concluded that one was long overdue. The task, and a $5 million budget to complete it, was entrusted to Mrs. Guarnaschelli.

"When I learned that the monumental undertaking had fallen to me," Mrs. Guarnaschelli later reflected, "I was so daunted that while going from the city to the country, hoping to sort out my thoughts, I drove my car straight into a trailer truck."

Mrs. Guarnaschelli enlisted 130 cooks, many of them specialists in particular cuisines or styles of cooking, to produce what she envisioned as a thoroughly modernized version of a book that previous readers had known as the standby of their mothers and grandmothers.

The amount of butter in recipes was reduced, if not cut entirely. Also eliminated were more than a few dishes calling for chicken livers and sections on canning and preserving ("Who does that stuff anymore anyway?'" Mrs. Guarnaschelli quipped). Out went raccoon meat and beaver tail; in came tofu. Gone were instructions in how to skin a squirrel.

Instead of "macaroni with tomatoes, livers, mushrooms and cheese," the new "Joy" offered "roasted red pepper and goat-cheese lasagna." In place of "tomato-soup mystery cake" was "reduced-fat chocolate mousse cake." Rather than "Chinese meatballs with sweet-and-sour sauce," readers of the new edition received a recipe for "spicy Sichuan noodles" along with tips on how to use chopsticks.

Of the 4,500 recipes in the updated "Joy," only 50 were unchanged from the earlier edition.

Most controversially, the folksy voices of the original Depression-era author and her progeny were replaced by a more expert, but also more impersonal, third-person authority — the voice, a reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle observed, "of high-powered New York editor Maria Guarnaschelli."

Responding to criticism of contributors and readers who missed the old "Joy," Mrs. Guarnaschelli remarked to the Chattanooga Times that "my motto is 'change or die.' 'Joy of Cooking' was in danger of becoming quaint."

The updated edition, released after more than three years of toil, sold an impressive 1.5 million copies in five years. Subsequent editions restored a degree of the volume's original voice, with a 2019 edition bearing the names of Irma Rombauer, Marion Rombauer Becker and Ethan Becker, along with Irma Rombauer's great-grandson, John Becker, and his wife Megan Scott.

Maria Albano DiBenedetto was born in Brookline, Mass., on April 18, 1941. Her father was a salesman, and her mother was a homemaker. Alex Guarnaschelli said her mother began to develop her interest in cooking as a child.

She received a bachelor's degree in foreign languages from Emmanuel College in Boston in 1962 and a master's degree in Russian literature from Yale University in 1964. The following year she met her husband, John Stephen Guarnaschelli, who died in 2018.

Besides their daughter, of New York City, survivors include a sister; two brothers; and a granddaughter.

Along with cookbooks, Mrs. Guarnaschelli edited nonfiction works including "You Just Don't Understand" by linguistics scholar Deborah Tannen and "The Language Instinct" by neuroscientist Steven Pinker, among many other works of science, as well as works of fiction by Edward P. Jones, Anne Enright and Novuyo Rosa Tshuma. But she remained best known for her work on cookbooks, foremost among them "Joy of Cooking."

Through all its turmoil, the book remains a standard in American kitchens, the sort of gift some brides receive twice or more at their wedding showers, because so many gift-givers regard it as indispensable.

"Nobody likes change, especially because 'Joy' is connected to I think happy times in people's lives, or important times, crucial times, when people get married, when they get their own apartment, even when they get a divorce," Mrs. Guarnaschelli said on PBS in 1997. "This is like a friend, a sign of stability."

17 cooking tips that these food reporters swear by - Seattle Times

Posted: 10 Feb 2021 06:12 AM PST

[unable to retrieve full-text content]17 cooking tips that these food reporters swear by  Seattle Times

Virginia chef offers online cooking classes - WDBJ

Posted: 10 Feb 2021 12:59 PM PST

Virginia chef Antwon Brinson saw an opportunity to expand his reach when the coronavirus pandemic limited his in-person training classes in 2020.

Brinson, founder and CEO of Culinary Concepts AB, began offering live cooking classes online in April 2020.

The online classes offer prep and cooking instructions for Italian, German, Ethiopian, French, Hawaiian cuisine and beyond.

"When COVID hit, it was an opportunity for us to really kind of dive in and really develop out the cooking classes and do something in a way that not only keeps people entertained but teach them a skill," Brinson said.

Brinson says these classes also offer a way to connect people with local resources, as well as show ways to use local ingredients.

For more information or to schedule a class visit https://culinaryconceptsab.com

Copyright 2021 WVIR. All rights reserved.


from What to Cook https://ift.tt/3jEmPru
google-playkhamsatmostaqltradent