I am a lover and collector of cookbooks. The irony is not lost on me that I have literally boxes of cookbooks, but I don’t use them too often. Given that I’ve been baking and cooking since I was eight, you would think I would have mastered most of the cooking basics in these books. But I still have a few recipes I really need to master.
Pot roast – Every time I make pot roast, it ends up tough. Blame it on me not eating beef for years.
Steak – Same as the pot roast, I just can’t cook beef!
Omelets – I’m a pro at turning omelets into scrambled eggs. They start out well. They don’t end well.
Marinara sauce – My current marinara “recipe” is opening a jar. I would like to start a garden wherever we move next, and a good tomato sauce recipe is necessary when you have fresh tomatoes.
Biscuits – Any Southern cook worth their salt has a go-to for classic, fluffy biscuits. I’m still looking for my favorite one.
Do you have any good recipes for these? What recipes are you trying to perfect?
also have a growing cookbook collection yet I don’t cook nearly as much as I should.
Pot roast for me means all day in the crock pot on low with lots of liquids in there. Can’t help you with omelets, because I do the same. And I was actually just thinking about how much I’d like my own marinara sauce.
I have a great cookbook collection too, but rarely ever use it because I find almost all our recipes online.
As for a trick my husband uses for marinara sauce, my husband usually uses a jarred sauce as his base. He’ll start by cooking vegetables (onion, mushrooms, or whatever else you want to add), then add a jarred sauce plus normal tomato sauce and whatever spices he wants to add. This way it still is homemade, but you use someone else works to generate a lot of the flavor.