The Homemade Pantry

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Perused Alana Chernila's The Homemade Pantry: 101 Foods You Can Stop Buying and Start Making (2012) this morning.  Home economics is a topic I enjoy reading and learning about (more than embracing... ?) See earlier post about Jennifer Reese's Make the Bread, Buy the Butter.

I plan to buy this book after this copy goes back to the library because it contains many recipes I am interested in trying out (cream cheese, fruit leathers, marshmallows, ketchup/mustard/hot sauce, roasted butternut squash soup, among many others) and one great, sets-it-apart feature: each entry contains instructions for applicable room temperature, refrigerator, and freezer storage, including duration.  I see a lot of freezing in my future.

You can follow the author's blog here.

America's Test Kitchen (pause for genuflection) has a similar cookbook coming out in October (can't wait): The DIY Cookbook and two others that I will just buy anyway, The Science of Good Cooking (likely in the vein of Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything series and Mark Ruhlman's Ratio and Ruhlman's Twenty: 20 Techniques, 100 Recipes, A Cook's Manifesto) and The Quick Family Cookbook (I have the other ATK ringbound cookbooks- Family, Baking, and Healthy - and use or reference them frequently.  Quick is a desired characteristic often lacking in ATK offerings.)

Currently on the last jar of strawberry jam that I made in late March and I still feel a swell of accomplishment when I reach for the mason jar in the fridge.  I am told homemade mayonnaise is the pinnacle of DIY deliciousness (Tamar Adler had nearly an entire and entirely reverential chapter about its powers) - and it's only an egg, some oil, and some whisking away...