Sunday, March 28, 2010

An article in the Boston Globe last spring cited “Cooking 101: Three recipes every college student — in fact, everybody — should know”: Chocolate chip cookies, quick tomato sauce, and Caesar salad. I’d like to extend this list to include it, not only as cooking class options for in home cooking Personal Chef Service, but also to try to train my eldest son, who will, in fact, be a college student sooner than I like to admit (and he’s useless at the stove).

A couple of years ago, I did a crash course of 10 Go-To Recipes for a client. She feeds a teenage boy, a preschool girl, and a meat-loving, vegetable-hating husband. We tried to hide veggies wherever we could. Her “necessities” were:
  1. Turkey dinner (with mashed potatoes and gravy)
  2. Chicken (or turkey) pot pie (made with the leftover turkey from the first lesson)
  3. Chili
  4. Beef stew
  5. Baked haddock
  6. Fettucine Alfredo with shrimp (or chicken or whatever)
  7. Chicken (or shrimp or pork or whatever) stir fry
  8. Macaroni and cheese
  9. Healthier chicken fingers and fries
  10. Steak au jus
  11. Spaghetti and meatballs
I forget how it happened that she got the 11th lesson, but it was so satisfying to me when she raved about having been able to make chili or beef stew or a Thanksgiving turkey for her family.

Another client was a newly engaged woman. She and her fiancée try to eat healthy, and she was interested in being able to recreate things they typically order out. She wanted:
  1. Chicken breasts stuffed with asiago and asparagus
  2. Chicken pot pie (everyone seems to love this one)
  3. Barbecue chicken in the crockpot (she wanted more crockpot recipes in her arsenal)
  4. Penne a la vodka
  5. Wild rice salad
  6. Beef stroganoff (their guilty pleasure)

So, what would you include in your list of must-know recipes?

What are your basic go-to recipes, the ones you can remember the ingredients to, so you can pick them up when you’re running through the grocery store at 5:30 pm, without a list?

What was the first thing you felt you had to learn to cook?

6 comments:

  1. I'll have to come back with my list of go-to recipes, but I cannot stop laughing that spaghetti and jar sauce was one of the first things I learned to cook at Grandma Morrow's house... through trial and error. Remember? She told me, "put the water in the pot, bring it to a boil, put the spaghetti in, put the sauce in." And that is just what I did. AND we ate it. YUCK!

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  2. She always was a great cook ;-)

    I don't remember that, but I remember she told Bridget to cook frozen vegetables in a 1 cup of salted water, but Bridget heard 1 cup of salt and water and they were the saltiest veggies ever -- we did NOT eat those.

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  3. I think I did the same thing at Grandmas:) I also remember making frozen vegetables for Mom with a 1/2 cup of salt (and) 1/2 cup of water and we ate those too:(

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  4. Manny 4 made tacos with seasoning from scatch, last WEEK. I was impressed:)

    Therese used ravioli, meatballs and sauce from the freezer, but it was awesome Baked Ravioli Parmigiana. She also made gravy last night. We had leftover Roast beef dinner, but no pie crust or potatoes for Shepherds pie. She used the extra gravy and made an old Canadian favorite of ours, Poutine french fries: topped with gravy and cheddar cheese;) It made the leftovers into a unique meal!

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  5. I'd love the recipes for these two,
    Chicken breasts stuffed with asiago and asparagus

    Barbecue chicken in the crockpot

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  6. A friend of the Moriarty's is living off-campus this year and she sent me a message explaining that she is putting together a cookbook for herself and some friends also living off-campus and asking for some easy recipes. I thought of this post and am going to send her some recipes, and of course, a link to the website.:)

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