Ruhlman's book is great, as is Harold McGees's On Food & Cooking. [1] As a trained chef with a focus in baking and pastry, especially bread making, I'll offer any wisdom I have for anyone who is interested.
I was eating at one of the better known food trailers in Austin, TX (Odd Duck) and the guy sitting across from me had a Cooking for Engineers shirt on; I had known about the site previously, so I asked him about it... and found out that he was the site's creator. I'll vouch for him being incredibly passionate about food and science -- the following hour was one of the best chance-encounter dinner conversations I've ever had.
Also, his business card has the Cooking for Engineers Tiramisu recipe on the back. A good recipe and a unique touch.
I'd love to know what your go-to dishes are when you cook for yourself, especially when you're feeling lazy - I suspect a lot of us could really stand to add a couple of super simple but delicious dishes to our repertoire.
I loved the book, btw, one of the most interesting cooking books I've ever read!
If I ever do a second edition, I feel like I should add a bunch of recipes to the "cooking for one" section. There's a book out, something like "What we eat when we eat alone," that looks at just how different our diets our when eating solo.
Best metaphor I can give for easy, cooking-for-one meals: Flip books, as in those spiral-bound children's books where you can flip different sections of the page, you know, show this hair with those eyes and that nose and this mouth. Same thing for easy meals: a protein with a veggie with a grain/starch with some seasoning. Not all combos work, of course, but it's amazing at how much does.
Grains/starches take the longest to cook, so I've just taken to cooking an entire (small) bag of beans or lentils or whatever and storing it in a container in my fridge. This'll last half a week, easily. When it comes to cooking, I'll pan-cook a piece of fish, or maybe tofu; occasionally ground turkey or chicken, and when it's mostly done cooking, toss in a handful of beans/lentils to heat them up, along with a handful of pre-washed veggies (the bagged kind from Trader Joe's) and then some seasoning -- maybe cayenne pepper or curry powder or oregano.
Start to finish, it's ~5 to 10 minutes (I've had some practice, admittedly); during which time I wash any lingering dishes and clean up other stuff. You can cook a double or triple batch and stash the leftovers for taking to work for lunch.
Fast, easy, cheap, healthy... and delicious, too.
P.S. If you don't have a container of pre-cooked stuff, microwaves are great for yams/potatoes... ~4 to 5 minutes and you're good to go.
Cool site. This is great for learning a few meals and techniques, as well as building confidence. If you build a sequential set of recipes to follow, you can do something like the below:
The important part of learning cooking is to know how each dish is similar and the definition that makes a dish different. You don't learn each dish, you learn the dependencies. Once you can do this, anything you taste in a restaurant can be successfully recreated in the home, equipment dependent.
For learning cooking, I always recommend watching the old Julia Child shows and actually cooking the food. The thing missing is an easy to hard sequence and learning a few extra sauces.
I have forkforkspoon.com parked to be used in a future food idea. I should have done something like this, since I am an engineer and a 'chef', but I feel like I am waiting for something too perfect....someday never comes.
I feel compelled to recommend Cooks Illustrated to any culinary-minded engineers. It's not just good recipes, it's some of the best science writing done in any periodical.
Alton Brown is the reason I started caring about food preparation. Good Eats is unlike most food shows in that its primary motivation is teaching the audience about food and the hows and whys of its preparation. I find that most food shows are about demonstrating individual, usually either uninteresting or impractical, recipes, or stroking the ego of the presenter. Throwdown With Bobby Flay, I'm looking at you.
I'd definitely agree, especially if you're going to be doing much baking. Cooking and baking are all about physics and chemistry, and like any science, good measurements are crucial. (Baking's error tolerances are tighter, so that's why scales are especially useful there.)
It's a very easy recipe, and very practical if you live alone and need healthy foods that last for many days in the refrigerator. It can be eaten like smoked salmon is, for example in a sandwich with cream cheese, or with crackers.
http://www.amazon.com/Ratio-Simple-Behind-Everyday-Cooking/d...