In the kitchen with cookbook author and food blogger Serena Wolf
If you’ve seen Serena Wolf’s blog, you know her food looks picture-perfect and must taste divine.
A lot of us are finding ourselves in the kitchen these days, whipping up meals with limited ingredients because we are too scared to go to the store. An influx of time spent inside makes for an ideal time to start cooking!
But, let’s face it- recipes are intimidating. The beautiful photos paired along with them are even more intimidating. If we’re missing an ingredient, we ditch the recipe, and if our meal doesn’t look like the picture, we think we’ve failed...right? Wrong! Serena Wolf to the rescue.
Lucky for you (and for me), Serena shared some tips, tricks, and reassurances that can help and inspire you in the kitchen.
Let’s start with the basics- If you are building a pantry from scratch, Serena suggests you stock your kitchen with necessities that can elevate any dish. A great oil, like olive oil or avocado oil. A vinegar to add acidity to dishes or to create simple salad dressings, such as balsamic vinegar, rice vinegar, or apple cider vinegar. Then there’s the spices- salt, pepper, chili powder, and cumin will get you very far. Even the most basic of chefs should grab a sharp cooking knife, a cutting board, and a good 12-inch, non-stick skillet. Those necessities will get you going!
Don’t worry about the look.
“I want to take the pressure out of it by just stressing that the overall aesthetic of your food, while it’s lovely if you make something Instagram worthy, it’s not the end-all-be-all and it doesn’t really matter,” she said. “I’ve made some really delicious beige foods and things that looked like slop. It is what it is.”
Be kind to yourself in the kitchen, let go of the pressure, and have fun! The pictures you see on blogs are meant to look perfect! Yours doesn’t have to.
Read through the entire recipe first & Prep ingredients before you start cooking.
Picture this...you read step one of the recipe. It says to saute onions. You’ve sauteed those onions to a beautiful golden brown. Satisfied, you head to step two. It says to add in the chopped zucchini...but you haven’t chopped any zucchini! Your beautiful onions are going to burn. Reading all of the steps first and forming a game-plan in your mind can help you relax in the kitchen, and will make your overall experience more enjoyable. Chop the onions AND the zucchini before you even start cooking! After you’ve read through your recipe, prep everything you need beforehand. This process makes cooking easy and stress-free.
Spring Vegetable Soup
With farro and chicken sausage.
If you’re missing an ingredient on a recipe- don’t give up!
“These days you have to be able to be a little bit more flexible and make substitutions, and that can be really scary if you’re a new cook,” she said. “I totally get that fear. Just because when I was learning to cook, you think that everything that’s in a recipe is gospel and you can’t really mess with it. But you absolutely can.”
An expert tip Serena shared is to check the weight of ingredients when thinking creatively to replace them. If you’re making turkey tacos and don’t have the necessary pound of ground meat, consider a can of beans! A can of beans is about 15 ounces, which is about a pound, and would make a great replacement. You don’t have to follow every recipe down to the last detail. Getting creative with your substitutions can help you make dishes with your own special flair.
“Have a template and use a recipe as a roadmap,” she said.
Sheet Pan Chicken Thighs
with Cauliflower, Sweet Potato and Pomegranate.
Clean as you go and have a trash bowl.
“I think the thing that sucks when you’re new to the kitchen is the cleanup that comes with cooking,” she said.
One of the most useful things she learned in culinary school was to keep a trash bowl in your cooking station. Throwing scraps in the bowl as we cook helps limit clutter, saves trips to the garbage can, and overall makes clean-up easier. If you compost, use this as a compost bowl! If you have simmer time or oven time, use it to clean your kitchen. Cleaning as you go relieves us of that post-meal clean-up that our full-bellied bodies never truly want to partake in.
Find a dish you love & are comfortable making...and mix it up!
Having staple pantry recipes that you are comfortable cooking and enjoy eating can take the stress out of cooking. Plus, when you already know the basic template of your recipe, you can tweak it and mix up the flavors as you please. Serena often makes fried rice, and not just with traditional Asian flavors. Italian fried rice and Mediterranean fried rice are some of the flavor combinations she has played with.
Italian fried rice
A take on the classic recipe!
“Experimentation is the best way to learn,” Serena said, adding that she and every chef she knows have kitchen failures sometimes. “I fail all the time, and I think that’s something that we probably don’t talk about enough but it’s also how some of the best recipes are born. You make something terrible and then it’s like ‘Oh, this would actually be delicious if I did x,y, and z.’”
Recently, as seen in this Instagram post, Serena made a loaf of awful banana bread. Check out the comments and know that you’re not alone in this new kitchen journey.
For more great recipes, check our Serena’s books; The Dude Diet, and The Dude Diet Dinnertime.