The Homemade Pantry: 101 Foods You Can Stop Buying and Start Making: A Cookbook

I can not say enough good things about this cookbook!
I bought The Homemade Pantry: 101 Foods You Can Stop Buying and Start Making by Alana Chernila on a whim. I think I saw it mentioned on someone’s blog. When it arrived I quickly glanced through it, realized that I probably already had these recipes in other cookbooks and laid it aside, thinking I’d made a bad decision. About a week later, seeing it laying beside my chair, I picked it up and gave it closer look.I am so glad I did.I am now on page 200 of it. Yes, I am reading it like a novel. It’s that good. Before each and every recipe is a page with a little story, a little introduction. They are all interesting and entertaining and relate in some way to the recipe.Before her recipe for yellow cake the story opens with this paragraph:”On days when I cannot follow rule #1 of sane parenting (never take more than one child to the supermarket at a time!), my girls and I inevitably spend 20 minutes in that zone between buckets of carnations and the “freshly baked muffins!” studying the Dora sheet cakes, the upright Disney princesses with their chiffon cake gowns, and the Thomas roll cakes. The miserable teenager in the fake chef’s hat ignores us as the girls press their noses against the glass case. They can almost taste that hard blue frosting, and in their minds it is ambrosia. Birthdays are far off, but they try on the cakes for size, imaging their own names scripted in lovely red #5 gel.”She then goes on to write a little more about the events actually leading up to the birthdays, and then concludes with the recipe, which she says is adapted from the 1-2-3-4 cake from Alice Waters. All that makes me love her even more. The story is cute and relatable and I love that for a lot of the recipes she notes that they adaptations from other recipes. Because really unless you’re some crazy inventive new age chef, most recipes are riffs off of others.The other thing about this book is that it is amazing quality. The pictures are gorgeous and the pages are heavy paper. It is probably one of the nicest quality cookbooks that I own.Allright, so I’ve covered the cute stories and the quality of the book, what about the contents?Amazing. This book covers everything. Everything.The chapters are called aisles (cute!):Aisle 1 dairyAisle 2 cereals and snacksAisle 3 canned fruits, vegetables, and beansAisle 4 condiments, spices and spreadsAisle 5 soupsAisle 6 baking needs and mixesAisle 7 frozen foodsAisle 8 pasta and sauceAisle 9 breads and crackersAisle 10 drinksAisle 11 candy and sweet treatsEverything from how to make ricotta cheese, maple popcorn, beef jerky, ketchup, pancake mix, beef stew, ice cream, pasta – dough and sauce, syrups, teas…really the list goes on an on. I hate to even list anything because I can not do it justice.I have made her hummus, and it was fantastic. What I especially loved about it was that it used a whole pound of chickpeas and gives directions for freezing. If you are going to go through the steps of making hummus, you might as well make enough to last. So, now I have all these lovely single serving jars of hummus in my freezer, perfect for lunch! Not all of the recipes make such large amounts, but the ones that you might want to make in big batches all do. The instant oatmeal (which is just genius) makes 12 to 15 servings and gives storage options for pantry, fridge and freezer.It is the most complete basic pantry cookbook that I have. And even calling it a basic pantry cookbook is a misnomer, because how many basic pantry cookbooks have rhubarb ginger syrup for soda or the recipe for coffee liqueur?I can not say enough good things about this cookbook!

Quant book with stories and recipes
I like to read some of a book before I buy it and cookbooks are no different. I first read the sample available on Amazon and then found my library had an ebook version of it I could borrow. I actually am reading the book like a novel and I am enjoying it so much. I got to the chapter on frozen foods and I went to the Amazon Kindle store and purchased the book, returned the library copy. I always read reviews prior to most any purchase and reviews of books are helpful but I always take 1 star reviews and 5 star reviews with a dose of scepticism. Sometimes people give 1 or 5 stars out of laziness, I liked it, 5 stars, or I didn’t like it, 1 star. For me, a 3 or 4 star review of a book is good and solid but I chose to give this one a 5 star review because of some of the 1 star reviews I saw. I thought some of the 1 star reviews were mean and petty! I want to judge the book on the usefulness of it and if you truly did not find it useful, OK, give it 1 star but to give 1 star based on a swear word or 2? You can’t watch TV or a movie or read almost any fiction book that doesn’t contain profanity these days. It has made its way into every day causal conversation and I can’t believe the people who said they were offended by the mild use of a few swear words. I can see marking it down for a mistake in a recipe (like the one where it called for tablespoons of salt rather than teaspoons) but some mistakes are not going to be caught by the spell checker and if the proof reader was not also making the recipes, they probably would not have caught it. I really like the book, I am excited to try my hand at making mozzarella. In fact, I am going to make the pasta, into ravioli, make the ricotta, the mozzarella, the sauce from scratch, and the bread to go with the meal. I have made ricotta before, and paneer (fresh Indian cheese), I make bread all the time, I have made pasta once many years ago, and I used to make pasta sauce from fresh tomatoes when I was younger so some will be new and some will be just going back to the way I used to cook when my kids were little and I had more time. I can’t wait to make some of the snacks and crackers with my granddaughters! I very much enjoy the book and am excited to try the recipes. I am a vegetarian so some of the recipes I will have to adapt to fit my needs but I have a granddaughter with allergies to artificial food coloring and being able to make some snacks she couldn’t otherwise have is a huge plus for me.

Rispetto al titolo, il libro è decisamente deludente. In gran parte contiene ricette di piatti elaborati e non ricette di ingredienti base. Inoltre risente molto della mentalità culinaria americana. Non adatto al pubblico italiano e decisamente sconsigliato a chi ha già cominciato a muovere i primi passi verso l’autoproduzione.

I love this cookbook.It is such a back to tbe basics cookbook.I learned how to make marshmallows — what!!!I learnes how to make sundried/roasted tomatoes for freezing and for stock — I was obsessed and would buy bushels of tomatoes to process.Its the kind of book that explains how our pantry items are made anf how easy it is to make them…who knew you could make saltine crackers … i thought buying was the only option.I bought this as a gift for several people I love thos cookbook so much.

I gave this book 5 stars because it was a warm, family, comfort food book. The author took you into her home and her life and shared her personal real food recipes and stories to go with them. I am tired of books that are all about healthy food that is boring or all about unhealthy food with ridiculus amounts of fat and sugar. This book meets these two extremes in the middle. The recipes inspire you to make foods from scratch, I was excited to make my own yogurt, homemade instant oatmeal and even brown sugar certainly different than your usual same old cookbooks. I will be looking forward to any new books this author and cook writes. I would definitely recommend this book to beginning cooks and older ones like myself who thought there was nothing ever new out there in cookbooks to interest me.