Anna Cooks

Introduction

I don’t cook the way I bake. It’s true. Baking focuses on respecting precision and technique to achieve a successful outcome. Cooking asks you to trust your instincts more, to be looser with measurements, to season as you go and to taste and taste again. With baking, once you relinquish a tray of scooped cookies, a cake batter or an assembled pie to the oven, there is nothing more you can do to affect the outcome—it is literally out of your hands. You cannot (and should not) taste an unbaked cake or pie and determine how it will turn out after it comes out of the oven. But with cooking, many recipes involve returning to your dish repeatedly throughout its creation, allowing you to tweak, fiddle and customize your recipe as you cook to ensure you reach a delicious meal at the end. And that is how I cook.

Anna Cooks is a collection of recipes based on the way I truly cook at home. All meals in a day are represented: breakfast, lunch, dinner and even snacks and desserts. My recipes follow the natural availability of seasonal ingredients and are a combination of quick recipes for when you are pressed for time and more involved dishes for when you are hosting friends or you want to spend a little extra time in the kitchen.

We are a two-chef household and you’ll see mention of my husband, Michael, throughout this book. He is a talented chef and culinary professor, and so many of our conversations revolve around food. We share mealtime responsibilities, supporting each other and taking the lead in the kitchen if the other is busy. In addition to creating recipes for our work, we love to cook for each other and our family and friends, and we love trying to recreate dishes from our travels. It’s taken years of cooking for ourselves and others to accept that not every dish we make is a success, but we thrive on positive self-critique to improve what we make—whether it’s a meal for a quiet Tuesday dinner at home or a recipe we’re developing to share with you.

So this book is a melding of my two worlds: recipe creation and our personal mealtimes. I have taken a good look at the way I cook at home and have committedly documented, tested and replicated these favourites consistently so that you can do the same in your own kitchen.

You’ll read about my Don’t Let That Stop You! approach to cooking and the notes I’ve added to every recipe to set you up for success. I hope that these notes illuminate how you can tailor these recipes to your own tastes, tools and time so they become part of your regular mealtime repertoire. After a while, you may not have to refer to the recipe page. Nothing will stop you at that point—you’ve made the recipe your own. These recipes are personal to me, and my wish is that they become personal to you too.

Armed with an exciting selection of brand-new recipes and some guiding tips, you will be all set to have some fun in the kitchen making delicious meals. I wish you as much joy and fulfillment in cooking these recipes as I feel in creating them for my family and sharing them with you.