Ward Street Bistro

Kitchen Basics

The past month I've had a lot of fun building a Ward Street Bistro store with my favorite kitchen items and items top-rated by Consumer Reports, Cook's Illustrated, and Fine Cooking. I purposely decided to keep the number of items in the store small--a collection of versatile items that can serve as a backbone of a well-equipped kitchen. As you can see, our kitchen is cozy and compact; we don't have room for much in the way of specialized equipment. So what you'll find in the store reflects how we equipped our kitchen, with multi-functional basics that allow us to tackle almost any kitchen task.

I've organized the store into six task areas:

• Cutting & Chopping
• Measuring, Mixing & Blending
• Stove & Countertop Cooking
• Oven Roasting & Braising
• Baking
• Food Storage
  

When you purchase something in the store, I receive a small percentage of the sales price. But because this blog is a labor of love (rather than profit), I'll be donating any store proceeds to two charities that my mother was particularly fond of: The Salvation Army and Little Brothers - Friends of the Elderly. (The same applies, by the way, to any advertising revenues.)

So I hope you'll take a look around the store. And I'd love to get any feedback on what's there.

Weekly Meal Planning

Through our 25 years together, my husband Drake and I have been avid meal-planners. For us, that means we start the week with an idea of what will have for dinner each night, using Sunday as time to get a running start on "food for the week." I hadn't given our system much thought until a year or so ago, when I read an article in the New York Times written by a working mom who uses a remarkably similar system.  She had "drawn a line in the sand," unwilling to surrender home-cooked meals for her family.

Given current times, it seems more people are cooking at home. I'm completely sold on the advantages of home cooking from a cost, health, and pure food enjoyment perspective.

For this post, I'll take you on a quick tour of our meal-planning routine--and share some great resources for developing your own meal-planning process...

Organizing recipes with Evernote

There are countless ways to organize your recipes online and off. I want to share with you a method that automatically syncs my recipes between a website, my home Mac, my work PC and my iPhone. And best of all, I'm doing this all with a single tool: a free version of a program called Evernote.

The reason I'm so thrilled with this system is that it lets me plan meals where ever I happen to be: at home, at work, out and about. If I see something at the market that catches my eye - a seasonal goodie or an item on special - I can easily type in the ingredient and pull up recipe options on my iPhone. But even if you don't have an iPhone, Evernote has the advantage of giving you both online and off-line access to your recipes.

I'd like to step you through my system, step-by-step...