Clever kitchen: introducing

I love to loiter in the kitchen: chopping, mixing, mashing, shelling, whisking, weighing, tossing, sifting, squeezing, pitting, grating, heating, and all the other little tasks you bustle about with until you finally hear the happy exhale of a steaming pot when you sink your nose into the fragrant vapours of hot food, , or watch the contented breathing of a swollen pie when you peer into the gaping maw of a blazing oven.

A couple of years ago, I started collecting recipes. My collection is still very small, as I make sure to put each recipe through several rounds of tweaking and testing before I note it down in my minuscule carnet de recettes. Once in a while, I bring something to work, but despite ample praise, don’t feel comfortable sharing my recipes with others. Especially not on my blog, though I secretly long to. To start with, there’s such an overwhelming amount of stellar food blogs out there that I would be embarrassed to confuse recipe searchers with my amateurish attempts at palatable presentation of effortless recipes. (This is not to discourage any recreational food bloggers out there! If you love what you’re doing, keep doing it as best you can.) Furthermore, my recipes aren’t easily navigable for the uninitiated: they’re variable and improvisational, involving a dozen possible options and often lacking precise quantities – and hence, practically unrepeatable in another kitchen. (Not even in my own, sometimes, mind you.)

However, because I do love to loiter in the kitchen and because preparing food does account for a substantial portion of my free time, I’d still like to share some form of my kitchen wisdom with the visitors of my blogger kingdom. What I’m thinking of doing is sprinkling this blog with some tips and tricks that I keep discovering in the process of my many culinary experiments. I’m hoping they’ll help make your cooking easier and your dishes more flavourful, whether you love to cook or consider making a sandwich a chore. And because I reckon you’re still not quite sure what to expect, let me just tell you that you will find out exactly in the next (and technically the first) instalment of clever kitchen! I’m planning to post it... in just enough time for you to stock your pantry and starch your apron.