Sara Moulton’s Home Cooking 101: How to Make Everything Taste Better
The ultimate everyday cookbook you’ll turn to again and again.
HOME COOKING 101 is Sara’s fourth cookbook and is in stores now; you can also order it at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or IndieBound (A community of independent bookstores). Here is a link to the Publisher’s Weekly article about it.
Sara Moulton, the trusted host of public television’sSara’s Weeknight Meals and the author of the popular “KitchenWise” column for the Associated Press, is back with an ambitious new cookbook entitled SARA MOULTON’S HOME COOKING 101: How to Make Everything Taste Better (Oxmoor House; March 8, 2016; Hardcover; $35).
Not just a collection of wonderful recipes, HOME COOKING 101 is a teaching manual aimed at the home cook. The recipes will indeed make it easier to put dinner on the table on a weeknight, but, as Sara notes in her introduction, “more important is that each recipe specifically demonstrates a tip or method that can make you a better and more confident cook while also teaching you to make your dishes taste better.”
Accordingly, the book’s first chapter is a compact and handy rulebook entitled “The Ten Basics of Good Home Cooking.” It advises the home cook as follows:
* Shake hands with your stove
* Buy a good knife
* Get organized
* Follow the recipe exactly the first time you make it
* Dispense with mise en place
* Reach for the salt
* Balance flavors
* Build umami
* Use all your senses
* Don’t waste food
As for the recipes, there are 150 of them—all new and accompanied by photographs that illustrate, step-by-step, the book’s key techniques. The book also boasts guest recipes from a stellar cast of some of Sara’s favorite chefs and cookbook authors, including Rick Bayless, Amanda Cohen, Hiroko Shimbo, Jacques Torres, Marc Vetri, and Grace Young.
In sum, Sara writes, “The goal of this book is two-fold: to sharpen your sense of taste and to provide you with a raft of time-tested techniques that I hope will become second nature to you.”
As user-friendly and approachable as Sara herself, HOME COOKING 101 embodies a lifetime of experience. Sara was schooled in the French classical tradition, worked for years as a restaurant chef, and tested and developed recipes for Gourmet magazine. She spent a decade as the Food Editor for ABC-TV’s “Good Morning America” and was the host of several popular shows during the first ten years of Food Network. Sara, like her mentor, Julia Child, has devoted the bulk of her career to teaching, and specifically to helping the home cook put dinner on the table on a weeknight…a task that too often seems daunting.