by Slow Food USA

Slow Food USA believes that slow food, as in cooked from scratch, shouldn’t have to cost more than fast food. They decided to put their philosophy to the test with The $5 challenge. September 17th was the day to take back the “value meal” by cooking a meal from scratch that costs no more than $5 per person. My twist on the challenge was to use one chicken as the basis for three meals that each feed four people, with each meal costing no more than $5. That gives me $1.25 per serving to work with.

Herb Roasted Chicken Legs & Vegetables served over Garlic Polenta

Starting with a Washington-grown free range chicken from Trader Joe’s costing $6.95, which breaks down to $2.32 per meal, I had $2.68 of creative wiggle room per meal to work with. Here’s my menu:

• Day 1: Herb Roasted Chicken Legs & Vegetables served over Garlic Polenta.
• Day 2: Chicken Soft Tacos on Homemade Tortillas served with Brown Rice & Black Beans
• Day 3: White Bean & Vegetable Soup

This 4.11 pound chicken is the basis for three meals.

First things first, Chicken butchery. Not a difficult thing at all as long as you think finesse rather than brute force. With a little practice, it’s a task that can be knocked out in nothing flat. The key is learning to slip your knife between the joints rather than trying to cut through bones. Take on a whole bird and you’ll be rewarded for your DIY prowess at the register because the cost per pound of a chicken you cut up yourself is significantly less than buying pieces-parts.

The rewards for DIY butchery don’t end at the cash register. Just like a box of Cracker Jacks or the coveted secret decoder ring hiding in the dark depths of a cereal box, there are surprises in your chicken if you’re lucky. Plunge your hand into the bird’s cavity and see what you pull out. A neck? Score! Liver? Score! Heart? Score! There’s no guarantee that you’ll get the bonus parts, but it’s exciting when you do because it’s more good stuff to work with.

The third big reward for going with a whole bird, is the carcass. You have the bones to simmer for stock…don’t click away at the first mention of stock making, hear me out. The reason you always hear that homemade stock is far better than anything you can buy is because it is, but as I recently learned it doesn’t need to be the big production that it usually is. I’ll explain shortly.

Whole chicken portioned into three meals.

Here’s how I decided to parse out my chicken, the thighs and drumsticks will be roasted with veggies for meal one. The breast meat, separated from the bone, will become shredded chicken filling for tacos on day two. The bones and remaining parts will be gently simmered in water to form the basis for soup on day three. (Gently simmering the bones in water is actually all there is to stock. No big production, I promise.) I was lucky and found good bonus-parts surprises hiding in my bird. The neck goes in the soup pot and the liver in the roasting pan.

Chicken bones in water is a flavorful start on a pot of soup.

I’ve been reading Michael Ruhlman’s new book, Ruhlman’s Twenty: 20 Techniques 100 Recipes A Cook’s Manifesto. In it he presents twenty core cooking skills that once learned set you up to be able to make just about anything, recipe or not. I especially like his treatment of stock as a sub-technique in the chapter, Water: The Unrecognized Miracle in the Kitchen. He rightly points out that most people are intimidated by the perceived effort of making stock. I make stock enough that it’s become a routine process, but when I find myself short admittedly my first thought is to head to the store for a can. Ruhlman has effectively removed that thought from my mind for good.

“Pour water over meat and bones and vegetables, heat the mixture and eventually all the flavor from the meat and vegetables and all the protein from the bones and cartilage will wind up in the water. It’s simple and easy, and is probably the single most important difference between restaurant cooking and home cooking.” – Michael Ruhlman in Ruhlman’s Twenty

The simplest Stock, done.

“Where did we get the notion that stock making requires giant pots and huge amounts of time?…The carcass of a roasted chicken makes about 4 cups of an amazing stock. You don’t even have to use a whole carcass, just parts. Let the water do it’s magic on a single piece of chicken if you want. It’s beautiful.”  – Michael Ruhlman in Ruhlman’s Twenty

With my $5 budget I didn’t have the money to buy an onion or carrots or celery for the stock. I trusted Michael Ruhlman’s argument that a homemade stock of just chicken bones without all the areomatics would still be better than than stock from a can. I simply covered the bones and miscellaneous chicken parts with about two inches of cold water, tossed in a bay leaf, a few peppercorns, and the ends of the carrot I’d cut up to be roasted. I set the pot on a low heat and let it come up to the barest simmer. Not letting it boil or even fully simmer keeps the liquid clear and beautiful. You know what? That Ruhlman fella is right. I started my stock right after cutting up the chicken  and let it simmer while I went about making, eating and cleaning up from dinner. About 3 ½ hours later I had just over four cups of clean fresh tasting beautiful stock. No big pots. No need to set up rows of storage containers to be filled, labeled, and wrestled into the freezer. No fuss. My soup for day three’s recipe is already well underway.

Homemade chicken stock, the minimalist way.

The Herb Roasted Chicken and veggies require nothing more than tossing the veggies and chicken with a bit of oil, vinegar, and seasoning and letting it roast in the oven for 45-50 minutes. Making polenta is just as easy involving only boiling, stirring, and simmering. This meal requires very little tending to during the cooking process. For this minimal effort a dinner so satisfying with great flavor, texture, color and nutrition is your reward. 

Chicken and veggies ready for the oven.

As easy as these recipes are, it did make me realize that there is one important element to the success of slow food over fast food, and that’s cooking skills. Would someone who has never cooked before know the difference between simmer and boil? Or ever consider buying a whole chicken with no idea how to cut it up? Cooking skills matter and it’s the reason I’m so passionate about volunteering for Share Our Strength’s Cooking Matters program. It’s a free six week cooking and nutrition class for low income families. All the recipes we use in the classes are targeted to cost about $1.68 per serving so families receiving SNAP benefits can afford to make them. With low cost recipes and cooking skills, slow food can win out over fast food even for families living below the poverty line. I’ll grant you that it takes time and effort to shop and plan meals, but the return of taste, nutrition, and quality family time spent preparing and sharing a meal together is, as the saying goes, priceless.

Herb Roasted Chicken and Vegetables with Garlic Polenta. $5 total and serves four.

If you have the means and are interested in further developing your core cooking skills I highly recommend the Rouxbe Online Cooking School. Like Ruhlman’s Twenty (which I also reccomend), Rouxbe focuses on technique and uses recipes as a way to practice core skills. TableFare is an affiliate site for Rouxbe and we are thrilled to be able to offer a free 14-day membership to their site so you can test drive their cooking school. If you do buy a month or year membership 100% of our affiliate commission is donated to Share Our Strength to help end child hunger and fund great programs like Cooking Matters. Here’s a little taste of a partial lesson from Rouxbe’s online cooking school. Of course you can also always donate to Share Our Strength directly too!

My Herb Roasted Chicken and Vegetables served over Garlic Polenta was delicious and turned out to be enough to actually feed four people. If you aren’t limited to $1.25 per serving, adding a few more veggies and a nice green salad would round out the meal nicely. A little cheese or butter stirred into the polenta before serving would be a nice decadent touch, but certainly not necessary. Though this recipe is about as stripped down as can be, the flavor is there and I wouldn’t hesitate to serve it to dinner guests just the way it is. 

Here’s how my budget broke down. I made the decision to consider pantry staples like oil and seasonings freebies and not break out the cost per bay leaf or teaspoon of salt; that  just seemed like too much minutia. I did, however, leave a little spare change in the budget as a good faith effort toward the cost of these unaccounted for staples.

1/3 whole chicken   $2.32
1 yellow onion         $0.69
1 medium carrot      $0.25
½ lb. broccoli          $1.13
2 cloves garlic         $0.08
¾ cup polenta         $0.40
Total cost              $4.88
(Spare for staples $0.12)

I hope Slow Food’s $5 challenge will inspire you to embrace the joy and satisfaction that  comes with creating meals for yourself and people you care about. The only thing fast food really has going for it is that it’s fast. With some planning, I contend the food you cook can be just as fast when necessary, but there is something deeply satisfying about letting food happen in its own time and just enjoying the process. The meals for day two and three will be separate posts that I will link to once they are up.  

I’d love to hear what kinds of low-cost meals you like to make, please share in the comments.

Recipe Links:

• The $5 Challenge Herb Roasted Chicken Legs and Vegetables
• The $5 Challenge Garlic Polenta

The recipes I’ve made from the Rouxbe website have always been outstanding, but this one caused near obsessive behavior as repeatedly chose to eat more of this bread rather than anything else. Maybe Just another slice, this time toasted with some jam.

The texture of this Irish Brown Soda Bread is what had me on my knees begging for more. A most magical chewiness made it downright addictive. It helped that I was slathering the slices with fresh homemade butter, but even sans slather, I couldn’t seem to stop eating this bread. I credit the steel-cut oats for pushing the texture to a level of pure delight. They not only added chewiness but the oat grains almost popped when bitten into. If you’ve had the pleasure of eating a bowl of steel-cut oat cereal, you know what I mean about the distinctive pop as the individual grains are chewed.

Irish Brown Soda Bread

Don’t be intimidated if you aren’t a bread baker because this is a quick bread. As in, mix the dry ingredients in one bowl, the wet in another, stir them together and pop it in the oven. No more complicated than making cornbread or muffins.

It was buttermilk that led me to making this bread. For my own private little celebration of St. Patrick’s Day I tried my hand at making butter. Of course buttermilk is a byproduct of the process and when I saw this recipe and realized it would not only put my freshly extracted buttermilk to good use, but act as a suitable delivery vehicle for the the gorgeous butter I’d just made, I got right to work.

Steel-cut oats

If you don’t have steel-cut oats on hand, get some. Not only can you make this spectacularly simple bread, but you can make this…

Steel-cut oats cereal with cranberries and pecans

Check out my guest blog post for Girl Power Hour to learn how to make the best bowl of oatmeal. The key is starting with steel-cut oats.

Happily the success I had makeing this bread wasn’t a fluke; I’ve made the bread twice now. I also wanted to be sure it was just as good with commercial buttermilk, and it is. For a different twist on Irish Soda Bread, check out Imen McDonald’s post about her Wild Garlic Flax Seed Soda Bread. It looks gorgeous.

Recipe Links:

• Irish Brown Soda Bread, from Rouxbe.com
• Wild Garlic Flax Seed Soda Bread, from I Married an Irish Farmer

TableFare is a Rouxbe affiliate site. Please enjoy a free 14-day membership to the entire Rouxbe site and online cooking school. If you buy a Rouxbe membership 100% of our affiliate fees are donated to Share Our Strength to help end child hunger in America. Read about our affiliation with Rouxbe.

In addition to great spice storage, a sharp knife, cast iron skillet, and a kitchen scale, every kitchen deserves a thermometer. It’s the most reliable way to cook foods to the proper/desired doneness. Well, it’s reliable if your thermometer is correctly calibrated.

Thermometers galore!

Though I’m an enormous fan of my Raytek MiniTemp infrared thermometer (note this style only measures surface temperatures, not internal temperatures) and my ThermoWorks ThermaPen, I happily used inexpensive dial thermometers for years with great results. One of the things I made sure to do is calibrate regularly. My method was rather standard, filling a glass with ice, adding cold water, and placing the thermometer in the ice water to get a reading. Ideally it should read 32˚F and if not the nut under the display head adjusts the reading when turned.

Dial thermometer adjustment

It wasn’t until I recently saw a post about calibrating thermometers on ThermaPen.com that I realized I didn’t have the process quite right. There are a few subtle details that are rather important when setting up a water bath for calibration. Here’s what I learned.

Fill a glass with ice

Calibration ice bath

Add just enough cold water to fill in the gaps between the ice and keep the water level 1/2”  below the surface of the ice. Check to be sure the ice isn’t floating up off the bottom of the glass. If it is, you have too much water. This picture is a bit deceptive; the ice is sitting on the bottom of the glass, but the glass has an inch-thick bottom.

Give the ice water a stir and let it sit for 1 minute.

Right where it should be

Insert the thermometer probe 2” below the surface and gently stir. This will give you an accurate reading. If you have a dial thermometer you can then turn the nut to adjust the needle to read 32˚F if it doesn’t already. ThemoWorks has a nice video demo of this water bath calibration technique.

To get an accurate reading when checking food for doneness with a probe thermometer it’s important to insert the probe deep enough into the food for the temperature to register. The sensor on some probes can be ½” to 1” from the tip, depending on the manufacturer. One of the reasons I like my ThermaPen is that the sensor is in the very tip of the probe, plus it registers temperatures at lightning fast speed.

In addition to thinking about where the probe will sense the temperature, it’s important to consider where to take a reading in the food. Generally inserting the thermometer at a slight angle into the thickest part of a piece of meat or the center of a casserole is the best approach.  If the item is thin, inserting the probe into the side at an angle nearly parallel with the surface will allow the probe enough contact to register the temperature. Be careful to avoid hitting bone or cartilage with the probe because you won’t get an accurate reading of the temperature of the meat.

If you want to make a great investment and buy an outstandingly high-quality instant read thermometer I can’t say enough good things about the ThermaPen, but if you aren’t ready for that level of commitment consider an inexpensive dial thermometer, after all you now know the proper technique for making an ice bath for calibration.

If you are cooking a turkey tomorrow, it’s ready to come out of the oven when the thickest part of the thigh registers 165˚F. Be sure to check both thighs before pulling the bird out of the oven. This doesn’t mean it’s done though, there’s still the critical rest period. Don’t skip it. Let the cooked turkey rest for 20-30 minutes before carving. You can tent the turkey with foil if you like, but be sure to poke a few holes in the foil so steam can escape and the skin stays crispy. I found a nice run-down of cooking temperatureson the Thermapen site that might be a handy reference.

If you’re staring at tomorrow with no plans and no prepped turkey, pick up a whole chicken or turkey breast to roast. Below is a recipe link for a Basic Roast Chicken from Rouxbe Online Cooking School, it’s a perfect stand-in for turkey. I’ve also included a few other recipes on our site that might round out your menu. Note, the recipes on Rouxbe are free to access, but by using our affiliate link you can access all the content, including the entire cooking school curriculum, on their site free for 14 days! If you like what you see and end up buying a membership, you help us raise money for Share Our Strength.

Recipe Links

• Basic Roast Chicken
• Cornbread Stuffing Baked in a Squash
• Roasted Brussels Sprouts and Pearl Onions
• Veggie Cheesy Torte
• Spiced Cranberry Sauce

Have a wonderful Thanksgiving!

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I find it amusing to be excited about a lifetime of school. What school could I possibly want to go to for the rest of my life? Cooking school, more specifically Rouxbe’s online cooking school. To have such a wealth of knowledge and expert video instruction at my fingertips 24/7 is almost like having a secret cooking super power.

If you have been toying with the idea of becoming a lifetime Rouxbe member, you need to make your move! Rouxbe is discontinuing the lifetime membership offer after tomorrow, but you can get in on it before it’s gone and save $50!

For $249 you’ll lock in endless access to their stellar content. The offer ends Wednesday Sept. 15^th, so there’s no time to waste.  

I’ll share a Rouxbe technique video on how to butterfly a chicken as a little reminder of what great content they provide.

Don’t wait or the offer will be gone.

TableFare is an affiliate site to Rouxbe and if you buy a membership to Rouxbe by following our link we donate our commission to Share our Strength.

A crispy layer of bread crumbs adds an element of comfort food to this wonderfully simple vegetable casserole. Pre-baking the eggplant makes it creamy and soft, a beautiful contrast to the zucchini which retain a nice snappy bite.

This dish is inspired by my participation in Share Our Strength’s Operation Frontline program, which is a free six week cooking and nutrition class geared to help low income people prepare and eat healthy meals on a very tight budget. This is a national program implemented by different organizations in every community. In Seattle, I volunteer through Solid Ground.

Can cooking on a budget be delicious? Absolutely! One of the things I focus on in the classes I help teach is developing good cooking technique to draw the best flavor out of the ingredients. It’s hard to beat simple ingredients that are well cooked.

It should be no surprise that my enthusiasm for the value of proper cooking technique comes from my experience with Rouxbe online cooking school. The concept of focusing on skills and technique rather than learning how to make a specific recipe really changed the way I cook, so this is how I approach the Operation Frontline classes.

We made this casserole with a simple polenta the first week of class and talked about how to use a chef’s knife and different cutting techniques. I have shared a video demo from Rouxbe of cutting with a chef’s knife in a past post, so this time I’ll share the video demo of how to cut an onion which we practiced in the class this week.

I love recipes that allow for creative license and the ratatouille gratin is very flexible giving you plenty of room to be creative. You can skip the mushrooms, use a mix of zucchini and yellow squash, double the Swiss chard, add in other veggies, or change the spices without any dire consequences. There are, however, a few key steps that will help to make the recipe successful.  

• Slicing the eggplant and squash evenly is important so the pieces cook in the same amount of time. If the eggplant is too squirrely to make nice slices, trim a small slice off the middle of one side so it will sit securely on the cutting board.
• Give the onions enough time to sweat down over a medium-low heat to develop their flavor. If you hear a lot of sizzling in the pan and they are beginning to brown, turn the heat down.
• Taste the onion mixture before assembling the gratin to be sure it has enough seasoning. It should have a deep rich flavor and be on the strong side because it will be tempered by the eggplant and zucchini.

In class we served this over a plain polenta, but here’s a more decadent version from Rouxbe if you feel like indulging. Please take advantage of the free 14-day Rouxbe membership to explore their site. Just click on any of the Rouxbe links from our site to access it. If you love it and want to purchase a membership, you will be helping us raise money for Share Our Strength. We are donating 100% of the commissions we make from membership sign-ups to Share Our Strength.

Recipe Links

• Ratatouille Gratin
• Soft Polenta  from Rouxbe

It’s a Tuesdays with Dorie triple treat. The last three recipes all rolled into one delicious post. First up is Tart Noire. It’s as sexy and decadent as it sounds.

This tart is understated, elegant, and proof that very simple components, when done right, can be sensational. Like any dish, the simpler it is the more imperative quality ingredients become. This dessert is worth splurging on exquisite dark chocolate.

One of the best ways to elevate a lovely chocolate ganache is to pair it with a rich buttery crust. The contrast between the smooth creaminess of the chocolate ganache and perfectly crispy tart shell adds as much to the pleasure of eating this as the flavor does.

Some time ago I had a hot lava-type chocolate cake with caraway at Jerry Traunfeld’s restaurant Poppy. His pastry Chef, Dana Cree, is known for creating fantastic and unusual flavor combinations with her desserts and I ordered this one out of pure curiosity. It was so fantastic the flavor combination has been on my mind ever since.  This seemed like a perfect opportunity to play with it, so I added ½ teaspoon of whole caraway seeds to the crust. It turned out to be a little too subtle, but the chocolate caraway combination was as good as I remember.  I liked the effect of the whole seeds releasing their flavor only when bitten into, but I think some ground caraway would make the presence of the spice more noticeable. One of the notable features of Chef Cree’s creation was that it wasn’t overly sweet, so I used a fairly dark chocolate for my tart.

Ganache and tart shells aren’t difficult to make. If you’d like to see it done before attempting it, take advantage of our 14 day trial offer  to Rouxbe. Here are two great recipes on Rouxbe that have a video demonstration of how to make ganache and how to make a tart shell; Chocolate Ganache Cake, Fresh Berry Tart.   A link to Dorie Greenspan’s Tart Noire recipe is at the end of this post. Her tart shell recipe uses a food processor which makes it a snap to make, and the Rouxbe demo shows the technique for a hand-mixed crust. Here is a video overview of the Chocolate Ganache Cake recipe to tempt you with delicious. At the end of the video you can click through for the free trail offer to be able to see the entire demo which includes how to make ganache.

Dorie Greenspan includes 14 different brownie recipes in Baking: From My Home To Yours, and I must admit this wasn’t one of my favorites. The distinguishing element is a mix in of York Peppermint Patties. When it comes to drug-store candy, I actually like York Peppermint Patties, but they made the brownies too sweet. The texture of the brownies was also an issue, heavy and a bit greasy, but it improved after sitting for a day. Now don’t let my lack of love for this recipe mislead you, we ate every last one of them. Of the brownies we have made so far, my favorite has been the Tribute-to Katherine-Hepburn Brownies. By my count we still have seven more brownie recipes to bake.

The Lots-of-Ways-Banana Cake rounds out this triple-treat post. The most exciting thing for me about this recipe is I emptied 3 containers of frozen things in making it, bananas, coconut milk, and coconut buttercream. I freeze leftover bits of whatever is left over and always get a thrill when I manage to use up the odds and ends, but truth be told I’m most happy about freeing up the freezer container so I can fill it with something else.

Brown sugar and nutmeg really add a nice flavor to this cake. Dorie provides a list of options to take this cake in a variety of directions. I went with two layers frosted with creamcheese coconut buttercream because I had the perfect amount of it on hand in the freezer. Though I really liked the flavor, the texture was a bit heavy for a layer cake. I think it would have been better baked as a loaf cake and frosted. It seems silly that the shape would make a difference, but it comes down to expectations. I expect a layer cake to be light and delicate and expect a loaf cake to be dense and hearty, the kind of cake you could eat out of hand with a nice cup of coffee.

Thank you to my fellow Tuesday with Dorie bakers who selected the recipes: Dharmagirl of Bliss: towards a delicious life picked Tart Noire, Karen of  Welcome to Our Crazy Blessed Life selected the Brrrr-ownies, and Kimberly of Only Creative Opportunities chose Lots of Ways Banana Cake.

Recipe links

• Tart Noire
• Brrrr-ownies
• Lots of Ways Banana Cake

Over 350 baking bloggers are baking our way thorough Dorie Greenspan’s book, Baking: From My Home to Yours. 135 recipes completed 86 to go!

 It’s been a cold wet June in Seattle. The other morning I couldn’t seem to chase the chill out of my bones and wanted something warm for lunch. The fresh flavor and vibrant green color of this spinach soup delivered a little taste of spring and warmed me right up.

This soup was only partly inspired by my chilled bones the other factor was the abundance of spinach growing in my garden. My little garden was producing faster than we could consume. 

This being a spur of the moment endeavor, the ingredient list comes from what I had on hand at the time.  In an effort to keep my spinach plants in check, I have made this a few times now and settled in on a recipe I consider a keeper. The mild and sweet flavor of the spinach is accented with a lovely bite of heat from fresh ginger and black pepper, and then rounded out with a touch of cream and comforting aroma of nutmeg. Besides tasting great my favorite thing about this soup is it can be made in about 20 minutes and costs next to nothing, especially if you happen to grow the spinach.

As much as I enjoy cooking and consider it to be a relaxing part of my day, I still like to be speedy and efficient about it. Nothing has improved my speed and efficiency more than developing my knife skills. This practice exercise using a bench scraper from Rouxbe Online Cooking School, made such a difference for me.

Cutting up an onion is the most difficult part of making this soup. If you get the hang of using the rolling technique demonstrated above, you’ll be able to knock this soup out in nothing flat.

The herbs are a flexible element. I added a handful of chervil in one batch because it too was getting a little out of control in the garden. I have also used a mix of chervil, parsley and fennel with excellent results. A mix of any mild herbs you might happen to have on hand will work just fine. Next time I’ll try using cilantro.

Spontaneous Spinach Soup served steaming hot with a grilled cheese sandwich is a lunch that will make you happy even if it’s rainy and cold in June. If you happen to be enjoying sunny warm weather, serve it chilled; it would make a nice starter for your next dinner party.

Update: I made this again using cliantro and it was wonderful.

Recipe Link

• Spontaneous Spinach Soup

If you found the Rouxbe video helpful and would  like to check out their online cooking school content for free for 14 days, be our guest!

Click here to get your FREE
14-day membership to Rouxbe!

I grew up in a food family. Cooking and talking about food was an integral part of every day. Phone conversations with my parents quickly turn to what we have been eating and cooking. The recap of a recent trip they took to Tahoe, for example, was a riveting 15 minute discussion about a leek tart they’d had at a restaurant, oh yes, and the skiing was good.

My kitchen skills are basically self-taught with a few weekend or evening classes thrown in here and there over the years. I’ve always done fairly well following recipes, but have certainly had my share of spectacular disasters, excuse me, “learning experiences.” Though rather competent at producing a dish with the aid of instructions, I was utterly baffled by the knowlege that chefs make up their own recipes. How do they do this? I figured it was their special talent and that’s why they are chefs.

My secret dream has always been to one day have enough spare time and money to go to culinary school for the fun of it. Schools like the Culinary Institute of America do offer week-long boot camps for obsessed hobbyists like me, and I read Martha Rose Shulmans’s  book, Culinary Boot Camp: Five Days of Basic Training at The Culinary Institute of America, with great envy.  That is, until I got to the part about them having to create a meal themselves, inventing the recipes. That struck me as terrifying, would I really be able to do that?

Then I discovered www.Rouxbe.com, an online cooking school with the curriculum of a professional culinary program. It wasn’t long after working through my first few lessons that it started to click; cooking techniques are independent tools applicable to any food, and recipes are just ingredients and flavors layered over these core techniques. Having been an avid cook for 20+ years, I knew ingredients, flavor combinations, and had experience making countless recipes, but for the first time I was seeing cooking approached from a technique perspective rather than a recipe and it was exhilarating. It was as though a secret code had just been unlocked. All of the sudden I understood how it’s possible to just go in the kitchen and cook; to create a fabulous dish without a recipe.

One of the first videos to really change what I was doing in the kitchen was this one on using a chef’s knife. I knew about the tucked finger technique, but I never really mastered it until I watched this.

Once I learned how to properly heat a pan, food didn’t stick. Once I learned how to properly control the heat on my pan, I could actually make a pan sauce because the highly coveted “brown bits” were brown rather than black. Once I learned how to pan sear a piece of meat, I could cook any piece of meat, with any flavors and any additions. Who needs a recipe?

Rouxbe has had a profound impact on my cooking skills and I am ecstatic to be able to share this magnificent resource with you now that we are an official Rouxbe affiliate site. Not only will you see Rouxbe videos tucked into my posts here and there to illustrate this or that, but I get to offer you a free 14-day premium membership! The text versions of their recipes are available for free, but you need a membership to access the video demos and cooking school content, so take advantage of the 14-day free trail to explore all the content on their site. If you get as much out of it as I did, you will be like me and  buy a membership without hesitation.

Click here to get your FREE
14-day membership to Rouxbe!

Rouxbe donates 10% of every premium membership purchased to hunger relief agencies. In that spirit, TableFare will donate 100% of our Rouxbe affiliate commissions to Share Our Strength (Please use any Rouxbe link on our site so we get credit for your purchase). This organization does outstanding work to end child hunger in the US. I am an enthusiastic volunteer in their Operation Frontline program helping to teach six-week cooking and nutrition classes to low income families in Seattle. I hope you love the Rouxbe site and will become a member and help us raise some money for Share Our Strength! Also, I encourage you to volunteer for Operation Frontline in your community.

I’d like to introduce you to one of the founders of Rouxbe and let him tell you about the inspiration behind their unique approach.

Please visit Rouxbe and enjoy your complementary 14 day premium membership! I’d love to hear about what you are learning, so come back and leave a comment once you have a chance to poke around their site.

Visit our Rouxbe affliate page for more information.