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    7x7 Cooking: The Art of Cooking in a Small Kitchen
    7x7 Cooking: The Art of Cooking in a Small Kitchen
    7x7 Cooking: The Art of Cooking in a Small Kitchen
    Ebook138 pages45 minutes

    7x7 Cooking: The Art of Cooking in a Small Kitchen

    By Hope Korenstein and Jennifer Silverberg

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    About this ebook

    With three feet of counter space, two pans, and one pot, author Hope Korenstein breaks down how to make satisfying meals no matter the size of your kitchen. A city-dweller herself, Korenstein understands the limitations urban kitchens place upon today’s chefs: with limited counterspace, no dishwasher, and miniature appliances that make it difficult to prepare complicated recipes. Dining out or ordering food to-go all the time can become expensive; Korenstein helps home cooks reclaim their kitchens with simple recipes that address the need for low-cost, quick and healthy cooking, all while saving space.

    7x7 Cooking is broken down into six easy chapters: Salads and Starters, Chicken and Meat, Fish and Seafood, Pasta, Vegetables and Sides, and Foolproof Desserts. Korenstein’s recipes focus on bold flavors and few ingredients so the pantry stays manageable—and so readers avoid spending hours in the kitchen getting dinner together. With quick sautés, bakes, and broils, readers learn how to prepare easy and satisfying meals that the whole family will love. No space for a grill? Korenstein teaches you how to love your broiler. With a few helpful tips, cooking in a small kitchen has never been easier!
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSkyhorse
    Release dateAug 1, 2013
    ISBN9781628733969
    7x7 Cooking: The Art of Cooking in a Small Kitchen

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      Book preview

      7x7 Cooking - Hope Korenstein

      Introduction

      More and more, it seems like cooking is treated as a source of entertainment, rather than a means of getting a delicious dinner on the table easily. Turn on the television and you’re bound to see a bunch of people competing to make something delicious out of cow intestines. Or else witness a celebrity chef de-boning a duck or whipping lumps of crab meat into mousse. It might be fun to watch, but it’s not something most people will try to imitate at home, especially after a long day at work. Better to call the take-out place around the corner and get delivery food for half the price of the cost of a whole duck. Or take a short trip to the supermarket prepared foods counter, which has everything from eggplant parmagiana to fried chicken and sesame noodles. No wonder people eat out an average of 4.2 meals per week!

      If you live in a small city apartment, you have even less incentive to cook than the average suburbanite with a kitchen island and a six burner stove. If you’re lucky, your apartment has a separate kitchen, rather than a row of miniature appliances lining one wall of the living room. With a small kitchen and dozens of quick dinner options only a phone call away, it becomes easy to avoid cooking altogether.

      But there’s a catch. Take-out food is, with rare exceptions, soggy and cold by the time it arrives. Prepared foods at the supermarket have probably been sitting under a heat lamp for ten hours or more. The stuff just doesn’t taste good.

      There is another way! You don’t have to choose between eating out, microwaving a plastic container of macaroni & cheese, or eating expensive but nonetheless soggy takeout every night. In my experience, cooking can be a relaxing and satisfying experience, even if your kitchen is nothing more than a mini refrigerator, a mini stove, and a sink lined up along a wall. Certain adjustments can be made.

      What does it mean to cook in a small kitchen? First of all, a small kitchen means that you don’t have a whole lot of counter space. Let’s say you’ve become obsessed with cooking a recipe that involves stuffing, glaze, and three different sauces, all of which need to be prepared separately but assembled at the same time. Cooking this recipe will require simultaneous use of lots of different bowls, saucepans, and platters—and you don’t have the counter space to support all of that. Before you know it, you’ve got a colander full of food resting in the sink, and several pots of food balanced precariously on your couch. That is if you have enough pots, pans, and bowls to spread all over your apartment. Generally, if you have a small kitchen, you also have small cabinets, which hold only a limited amount of cookware, gadgets, and assorted kitchen tchotchkes.

      And speaking of gadgets you don’t have, let’s talk about dishwashers because you don’t have one! So after you’ve finally finished cooking the aforementioned recipe with stuffing, glaze, and three sauces, every single dish you own is dirty and needs to be washed—by hand. The list of appliances you don’t have, by the way, is not limited to the dishwasher: you also don’t have a large food processor, or a deep fat fryer, or an electric mixer. All of those recipes that sound great and look easy, but require something to be deep fried, or blended, or otherwise whizzed into mush, are not an option.

      SIDE NOTE: For those lucky few who do have some spare counter or cabinet space, manufacturers have some budget friendly appliances available that can help cut down on some of the work—known as mini- or hand held appliances. (Think mini-food processors, handheld mixers, and emulsion blenders.) These won’t be able to do the same work load as their larger counterparts, but they work in a pinch if you’re cooking for two.

      The problems of cooking in a small kitchen are multiplied during the summer. When it is hot outside, it is even hotter inside, especially in an apartment that may not have central air conditioning, or even very good ventilation. Under those circumstances, turning on the oven pretty much amounts to turning the entire apartment into a sauna.

      Since the recipes in this book are geared toward how I live and cook, and also the budget I work with, it’s easier for me to list all of the stuff that the recipes in this book don’t have:

      • Tons of ingredients—okay, that’s not always true, but if I do use a lot of ingredients, it’s mostly spices. Usually the ingredient list is small and manageable.

      • Lots of different components to a single dish that must be separately prepared—which would take up too much space and create too many dirty dishes.

      • Processed, puréed, or foods made extremely small by using something other than a sharp knife. But you will need a seriously sharp knife. Believe me, it’s worth the extra money, and a good knife lasts forever.

      • Deep fried foods. Unlike those chefs you see on television, I do not have a deep fat fryer sunk into my countertop.

      • Grilled foods. I don’t have a barbecue. I will, however, teach you to love your broiler.

      • I don’t use any expensive meat or fish. You won’t find a dish that sounds pretty good, and then caviar, or lump crabmeat, or something incredibly expensive is added in to make the dish even more appealing.

      Just to even the score, I thought I would throw in a list of ingredients that I use all the time and some techniques that show up quite a bit in my recipes:

      • Lots of chicken, fish, and pasta. I use as much cheap protein as I can find. Mussels, for example: they are inexpensive, are easy to cook, and taste great. Salmon and cod are usually not very pricey, and are very versatile. Chicken, obviously, the canvas of any

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