• Cure Clock: 3 weeks remaining
• Cure Takers: 831
• New Flickr Group: 2009 Kitchen Cure
• Submit your photos directly to The Kitchn
By now your kitchen is clean, well-stocked and ready to be used. Today begins the second half of the Kitchen Cure when you'll start using your kitchen to cook. For the next three weeks you'll hone your skills and use your improved space to learn to cook with what you have, with what's available to you. The goal is to cook more by feel and less with recipes. This week you'll make sure you have the basics like roasting, salad dressings, and knife skills down, and you'll take on learning one new skill.
First our usual note on participation: Do your best, and pace yourself, but march forward. The Kitchen Cure never gets too hard. Many assignments can be on-going through the Cure. Document your progress with photos and discussion on the forum, this way you'll stay in touch with the community and the group will help keep you going. Losing steam? Ask for help!
Week Four Assignments
1. Polish Up Cooking Basics: Begin with these two skills - how to set up your cooking projects, and how to use your knife. These are the two things my first two weeks of culinary school covered. If you don't know these two things already, learn them this week. Mise en Place doesn't take as much practice as honing knife skills, although if you're not used to doing it, it might actually take the week of practice before you change your ways:
• Mise en Place
• Knife Skills
• Roast a Chicken or for vegetarians, roast a vegetable using the technique in our Roasted Sweet Potato Sticks recipe. • Braise Meat OR Vegetables • Make Fresh Pasta • Make Soup From Almost Anything • Make a Basic Vinaigrette • Build Flavor with These 8 Techniques
2. Learn a New Skill: Choose one from above that you do not already know, or tell us a technique you want to learn that is not already on The Kitchn, and we'll try to post it this week. Leave a comment starting with "NEW TECHNIQUE REQUEST!"
3. Buy or Cut Fresh Flowers: I'm going to start encouraging you to keep fresh flowers in your kitchen. Every week. Also, if you have a windowbox, it should be tended each week: watering and using your kitchen herbs once they're big enough. Here's some info on how to plant a windowbox.
4. Stay in touch! We have an exciting community of over 800 people currently signed up for the Kitchen Cure. Smart people. Fun people! And you can meet them all if you get active on our Cure Discussion Page. Also, don't forget to check in every day with the Kitchen Cure Page where all the Cure-related posts live in one neat little package. While assignments are posted once a week on Mondays, related posts are going up every day and there is a lot of conversation to be had in those posts comment threads as well.
Reminders about photographs:
• If you'd like your progress to be showcased, please take "before" and "after shots" and submit them directly to The Kitchn. Make sure to explain what's going on in each image.
• We also have a 2009 Kitchen Cure Flickr Group. If you post your photos to this group, please include captions so we understand what's going on in each image.
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I'm comfortable with the roasting of chickens, but not the carving. Also, I've never made stock before, though I've been meaning to do it for a long time. I think that's my project for the week.
I inadvertently accomplished this week's task by making a soup from scratch last night. After my farmer's market trip had my kitchen counters bulging with mushrooms, favas, snap peas and shell peas, endives, asparagus, sweet onions, leeks, chard, etc. I decided to make minestrone soup for the first time. It was delicious. I think I would like to try my hand at braising some veggies.
I have all my basic skills down, but I always want to get faster and more efficient in the kitchen. My knives need sharpening, so that will definitely be a task for me this week. Also, I'm catching up on beautification and need to KEEP my kitchen clean!
Last summer, or maybe the summer before?, Mark Bittman published huge lists of nearly-instant, no-recipe summer meals and appetizers (not season-specific). I've got the print outs and I think my big project will be to develop my own repetoire of nearly-instant fresh food my family likes.
annaholl, I'm about to post a How To Carve Chicken piece, and for stock, follow the links in this post. Good luck!
Show us how to use a stone to sharpen knives please!
Just thought of a new one for me: homemade yogurt. I've never tried making it. My 3 year old eats plain yogurt with honey drizzled on top twice a day if she can get it, and I think she would love a yogurt-making project on the weekend. Anything that results in goop makes a child happy, and edible goop is even better. Considering how much we spend on commercial yogurt this could be a win on the cash front, too.
I've made yogurt for the first time- it was awesome the first time, and ... sweet? the second time. I'm not sure what happened, so I'm going to bake with it (didn't taste like yogurt, more like the milkfat I had in Mongolia).
This weekend I'm going to roast a chicken for the first time. Roasts have always intimidated me for some reason.
Fresh flowers don't work for us- my husband has a problem with growing flowers just to cut them and let them wilt inside. It's a herb box for us!
New Kitchen Technique, Please!!! I have tried multiple times and cannot get a good choux pastry down. I often host baby/wedding showers, and I would LOVE to do one of those awesome cream puff towers for an event like that. But, the stinkin' choux won't make friends with me :)
homeforthebetter,
This request came a little late in the week but I'll try to get this going this week. Thanks for the suggestion!