All the best recipes I’ve cooked since shelter in place started
I’ve gone from eating 3 meals a day at the office to being a devoted home cook. Every week we’ve cooked 5 to 10 new recipes and these are favorites that keep making it back to cooking rotation. They taste as good as or even better than I’ve had at restaurants and come with clear enough instructions for beginners. If you follow my instagram cooking adventures, I’m pretty new to the cooking game myself! JP and I are still part of the barbaric class of people who puts their chef’s knives in the dishwasher.
This is the dish that turned me into an instant pot true believer. Taiwanese pork over rice has gone from a weekend indulgence to my go to weekday lunch.
I cook this with rice and some sautéed green veggies for a complete meal. If you keep the extra sauce/stock mixture after the first time you cook it to braise the meat for subsequent meals, you can get a fantastic meal cooked with 10 minutes of active prep time. We like to shorten the Instant Pot cooking time for a slightly firmer bite. We buy our pork belly in bulk from Costco.
This pad thai recipe splits the difference between the sweeter Americanized pad thai I did all my 2am college p-sets to and the more authentic fishier pad thai’s I had in Thailand.
What I like about this recipe is that they have a tamarind sauce version (which is better) but also a ketchup based substitute that can be made with ingredients you can find at a Whole Foods or Safeway. I’ve sneaked some extra veggies into this recipe with no degradation in taste.
This is what I cook when I only have 15 minutes to grab lunch. #managerlife I usually swap out the walnuts for whatever I think will go well best with the ravioli favor.
If you drop the chopped walnuts, it shorten’s the cook time down to just 5 minutes. The brown butter with the balsamic vinegar is so good. I’ve never ordered a brown butter sauce at a restaurant after learning how effortless it is to do at home. If we want to get really specific, I’m partial the having these with the mushroom ravioli from Trader Joes.
Unlike the other recipes above, this one isn’t super fast but it makes me so happy to be able to make such fancy seeming food at home.
I love all of Just One Cookbook’s recipes because they explain how to do Japanese cooking with precise instructions that assume you know absolutely nothing. They teach you why you have to do each step and how the art of cooking from their recipes. In this one, she gives you the tips and tricks for how to plate the dragon roll so it looks just one the ones at the restaurant.
5. Instant Pot Jambalaya by Boulder Locavore
I had the great misfortune of having jambalaya and gumbo for the first time in New Orleans which means I’m both obsessed with these dishes and can never be satisfied with anything less. I’ve gone to so many Southern restaurants only to come home disappointed. I thought I was just humoring my partner JP when he suggested cooking this and to my shock, I loved it. To be honest, my standards have probably dropped since it’s been 4 years since I was in New Orleans but I think this is almost as good.
Bonus: The three highest ROI meta cooking things I’ve done are:
1. Read Salt Fat Fire Acid
Everyone raves about it for a reason. It’s helped me break through the I can successfully follow recipes but too scared to improvise barrier. The biggest lightbulb moment for me in the book is understanding that I need to use culturally appropriate fats and acids to get authentic tasting regional cooking.
2. Stop asking Google how to cook and start asking Youtube
Youtube is far better at demonstrating and explaining how to cook.
3. Learn how to freeze meat correctly (aka wrap it in plastic wrap and stick it in a ziplock) Then you too can shop at Costco for a household of 2! On a side note, we cooked a $12/lb Costco Ribeye last week and it was seriously the best non Japanese wagyu steak I had in my life. I’m starting to get real suspicious of tasting menus…