Not a recipe this time

[walton_eats]

Tim wandered into the kitchen while I was doing some prep for tonight's dinner. I'm making Chicken Cacciatore, and I was breaking down a whole chicken. I rarely buy chicken parts. I learned to break down a whole chicken when the elder women of the family deemed it safe for me to handle the knife, and I'm very fast and very good at it. So I wait for whole chickens to go on sale ($.69/lb this week), then buy six or seven and keep them in the freezer. *Much* cheaper than buying chicken parts, with the added bonus that the necks, backs and wings go in the freezer bag for stock, the giblets get cooked and fed to my very happy cats, and the fat and some of the skin goes in the freezer bag for schmaltz.

I've gotten into the habit of buying meat, fish and poultry in its cheapest form, usually on sale, then cutting or chopping or grinding for whatever I need, freezing in portions.

Anyway, Tim watched for a minute and we started chatting about what kinds of kitchen skills people can learn in order to save money.

In a household supported mainly by self-employment while raising four kids, we've lived through some *very* lean times. My mother and my grandmothers taught me how to cook from scratch, how to shop, how to eat seasonally. They also taught me how to gut, clean and filet a fish; break down a chicken; make a stock; bake bread; can fruit and vegetables and make jam and jelly; make a roux. They taught me a-thousand-and-one ways to use beans, lentils and grains. They taught me me to be fearless in the kitchen, to dare to succeed, and to cook with love.

So I'm curious. What skills do you consider essential to *your* cooking?

Comments

a ramble...

[cassidyrose.livejournal.com]

My family didn't cook all that much and I didn't really learn much at all about cooking from my parents (except, perhaps, what not to do). I learned some things from my maternal grandmother, but looking back she used a lot of pre-made stuff (sauces, scary canned hams, etc). At least I learned how to make Dump Cake (http://allrecipes.com/Recipe/Dump-Cake-I/Detail.aspx) from her :) My uncle is a trained chef, but he wasn't around much so I didn't learn much from him--though I do have some great old cookbooks from him. My relationship to cooking and food versus most of my family's can be summed up by something my sister said once. She was visiting me and catzen and I told her we had plenty of food in the pantry and fridge should she want anything. She took a peek and responded: "You don't have food, you have ingredients!"> So, there you go.

That said, I have always been incredibly interested in cooking and enjoy few things more than reading cookbooks. I still have my old children's cookbooks from when I was first interested in cooking. Anyhow, I am basically self-taught. When I moved out of my parents house and became a vegetarian (happened at the same time) I started to really teach myself how to cook many basics from scratch. Learning to make good soup was very exciting to me. Over the past eleven years I have branched out quite a bit from those first soups and over the past year, when I had to ditch dairy, I had to get more creative.

In terms of what skills I consider essential to my cooking: making a wide variety of soups from scratch, cooking dried beans, growing and using fresh herbs, the ability to make a great dinner out of not much, making my own vinaigrettes, making my own pasta and enchilada sauces, the ability to read through a recipe and understand how it will or won't work for me, the ability to successfully pair dishes and make complete meals, the skill to make a really great green salad incorporating seasonal fruits, the understanding of when some things should be just left as is (e.g., fresh tomatoes), an intrinsic sense of "how much and how long", and probably most important of all is the drive to always find new things to cook and the willingness to try cooking them.