Cooking at Home : Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying about Recipes

One of the most fun and exciting cookbooks in a long time. It's so inconsistent. E.g. David Chang professes he wants the vegetables chapter to become the lenghtiest in the book, but then proceeds to spend the first almost 300 pages just on meat and fish. Chang and Krishna also say the book has no recipes, or at least no measurements, but then can't help sneaking some precise measurements in here and there anyway. But it doesn't matter. You get the point. And the point is: Cooking at home should be effortless, improvisational, delicious and with lots of "sandbaggery" as David Chang calls it, when you just wing it, use whatever you have and care less about the "right way" to make an emulsion, cook a potato or even prepare seemingly traditional dishes. It's all mixed together and the cultural influences are so many! I've learned a lot about South-East Asian cuisine, or at least gotten a ton of inspiration to learn more, from reading this book. As a 95% vegetarian, eating only meat occasionally for special occasions, I wish the vegetables, mushrooms, grains, legumes and so on took up the better half of the book, but it's fine. At the end of the day, this book has a few very simple, but actually quite ingenious principles, it hammers in again and again. For one, you can actually use a microwave to cook almost anything you would normally use the stove or oven for. Second principle, many if not most of the culinary rules you've picked up on over the years originated in a highly specific cultural context which is the French regimented haut cuisine restaurant (they don't say this in the book, but almost, and David Chang definitely is tired of French cooking). But what that means is home cooks have gotten this weird idea that they need to somehow do a half-assed version of Michelin-quality dishes on a daily basis. That's insane. No, there actually is no point in peeling all that produce. Except if you want a silky-smooth pommes puré. Which you want occasionally (like once a year when you also dress up and everything is a bit more extraordinary?). But not on a daily basis. So yes, "stop the peeling madness". HAHA. It's so wonderful how all these ideas I've had are just shattered by reading this fun book that almost reads like it was transcribed small-talk between Krishna and Chang (Priya Krishna is a gifted writer by the way and her own book Indian-ish has the same down-to-earth fun but also concise tone). For gods sake, the images throughout the book are like low-quality mobile phone photos. HAHA! Not even kitsch or instagram-like "lo-fi", just bad quality and out of focus. But it's fitting and underscores their cooking ethic very well. There are details I didn't like or would have seen done differently (if I awkwardly imagine myself being the editor, which is the nature of a review I guess?), but it would defeat the point. There's a lot of great parts and bits in the book, really great, but they all serve to drive home a STYLE or an approach you can bring with you to the kitchen. For me it worked, so I can't say much negative about this book. Great shit!