Tamar Adler's Essential Ingredients for Magical Cooking

We sure like Tamar Adler here in The Kitchn! We've featured her wonderful method for cooking fresh produce ahead of time and watched her cook her way through her farmer's market purchases in a video to promote her book An Everlasting Meal. Today I am delighted to share with you this 10 minute TED video from Ms. Adler on the magic of cooking with everyday ingredients.

Ms. Adler argues that while rock star chefs like Gordon Ramsay and Rachel Ray seem to know it all, it's really the everyday cooks (like me and you) that have the magic touch. She shares her theory that we are all clever cooks and offers examples of simple cooking and everyday ingredients to encourage that notion.

I appreciate how Ms. Adler encourages cooks to trust their own instincts and to discover what is already at hand. With a handful of basic ingredients and a few not very flashy techniques, she proves that we all can eat well (very, very well) without having to buy the latest chef-labled implement or specialty ingredient. Thank you, Tamar!

(Image: TED)

Comments (5)

LOVE her. I bought The Everlasting Meal last week and read it in one sitting over the weekend. I am trying to do more intuitive vs. recipe cooking, and it really helped me think about how I want to cook and how I can cook, especially during the week. The idea of cooking components of meals and combining them in different ways or with other things you have on hand is something I've already started putting into practice.

Tamar Adler kind of looks like Virginia Woolf.

I haven't watched the video yet but I have to also share my LOVE for Tamar and her book, The Everlasting Meal. Her writing is so original and often unexpectedly moving. And PRACTICAL!?! I love her. Love.

Thanks for introducing her. I'm going to look up more about her, including her books.

one thing in her TED talk that really annoys me is her two kitchen anecdotes.
No good kitchen throws out a duck carcass, even if the breasts are the only meat from it that gets to the plate. They make stock. I've been in many kitchens that were making duck stock every day. Same goes for the vegetable scraps. Every edible vegetable scrap was saved.
Her generalizations annoy me.

I'm no defender of rachel ray or gordon ramsy, but they're only famous because of ratings.