How-To-Cook-With-Vesna.com is a cooking instruction site that helps you think like a cook.
Plenty of sites tell you what to cook. How To Cook With Vesna teaches you how to cook.
At How To Cook With Vesna, you'll find great recipes and down-to-earth, lively explanations of how they work. You'll find out how and why to use whole foods, sustainable ingredients and heirloom recipes. Learn both traditional cooking techniques and offbeat approaches.
"The best food," says the site's author, food writer and home cook Vesna Vuynovich Kovach, "is made from scratch with great ingredients in a happy kitchen."
Website features
Recipes
Some of the most popular recipes at How To Cook With Vesna include:
Ethnic cuisines
How To Cook With Vesna also features ethnic cuisines. So far, the two dedicated sections are for Jamaican and Serbian cookery. Indian, Mexican and Thai are slated to be added next. Popular Jamaican and Serbian recipes include:
- Homemade Jamaican ginger beer recipe
- Serbian Christmas or Slava kolach recipe
- Serbian koljivo recipe/zhito recipe
Cooking skills
Think you can't cook? According to How To Cook With Vesna, it's more likely you simply have subpar equipment. Sections on selecting and maintaining the best cutting boards, knives, and pots and pans tell you how to make better food at your very next meal.
Food and nutrition philosophy
How To Cook With Vesna takes the view that the best food is made from good, whole ingredients, preferably those with a long history of use by the human race. That means eggs, meat, fish, nuts, olive oil fruits and vegetables -- and even bacon, butter and lard. It also means avoiding margarine, industrial vegetable oils such as soy and canola, high fructose corn syrup and MSG. And it means going easy on sugar and all the cereal grains, especially wheat.
What that adds up to is a site with plenty of whole food, low-carb recipes, but a good selection of homemade baked goods as well. "If you restrict carbs, as I do," says Vesna, "then the carbs you do eat should be of the very highest quality -- and deliciousness."
Influences
Vesna cites the following as some of the primary influences on her approach to food and cooking.
- Michael Pollan, writer of Botany of Desire and The Omnivore's Dilemma
- Dr. Robert C. Atkins, influential low-carb cardiologist
- Sally Fallon and the Weston A. Price Foundation
- Anthony Bourdain, writer of Kitchen Confidential and host of the Travel Channel's No Reservations
- Harold McGee, writer of On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen.
- Jared Diamond, writer of Guns, Germs and Steel.
- Elaine Morgan, writer of The Aquatic Ape: Theory of Human Evolution.
- M.F.K. Fisher, writer of With Bold Knife and Fork.
