Why we wrote this cookbook


This cookbook is the brainchild of Jim. He proposed the idea of a graduate student cookbook en route to Boston. We thought it would be a good idea to write down all our favorite recipes and tricks for making good food quickly. If you spend less time in the kitchen, you can spend more time in lab getting closer and closer to your degree. Then again, there are times when you just want to kick back, take off from lab early and make enough dishes to feed an army of your starving graduate student friends.

We decided we were more in the mood for writing than shopping this year, so we wrote this cookbook to give as a Christmas present. It satisfied our desire to communicate something of ourselves to the people on our Christmas list, which does not happen very often in this age of consumerism. A lot of effort does go into fighting through the crowds at the mall to get to (or even find, or even think of) that special gift. But this cookbook was born of the more conspicuously creative energy found in quilts and homemade Christmas cookies.

We also figured that by writing this book we could give our friends the recipes to the foods we served (and they ostensibly enjoyed) at our dinner parties. They are now all in one neat place for us and carefully typeset instead of sprawled between Jim's little metal recipe book, Joanna's recipe file, and Genevieve's index card collection.

Since we do throw a lot of dinner parties, we wanted to give you the top eleven list of never-fail tricks that will make any graduate student dinner party a success:

11. Just barely get back from shopping at the time you claimed dinner would be ready.

10. Make an appetizer, so the guests don't gnaw at the furniture while they are waiting for you to finish cooking.

9. Beforehand, get together with your housemates and make a mix tape. Include fake "overheard" conversations.

8. Don't make everything the same color. For example, a dinner of tomato juice, cold strawberry soup, beet salad, steak tartar, and cherry jello would be bad.

7. Let your pet pig walk around during dinner, to provide that medieval feel.

6. Use the recipes that the book opens to automatically. There's a reason why all that food is stuck on there.

5. Since you'll still be running around the kitchen madly when the guests arrive, make each new guest answer the doorbell the next time it rings.

4. Start doing the dishes before people start to leave so they feel sorry for you and help.

3. Give back the dishes people bring over, but not the ones you really like.

2. If you invite a lot of people, borrow plates. You don't want your guests eating out of Tupperware.

1. When they ask what to bring, just say wine.

How to use this cookbook

There are five sections to this cookbook which roughly tell when you should serve which dish. They are pretty self-explanatory, so we won't bother to tell you, for example, what the dishes in the Breakfasts section are like. The majority of the dishes are in the Main Dishes section and are arranged according to the type of meat, or lack thereof, in the dish. There is a rather large Italian foods section (ˆ la Genevieve) which is plunked somewhere in the middle.< p> Each recipe has a key which tells the preparation and cooking times, the number of servings the dish supposedly feeds, and the approximate cost. This cost is actually the cost to us meaning that we tend to shop for spices in bulk (at the Co-op or Lori's). We figure that spices are between 5 and 15 times cheaper if you buy them in bulk rather than in the supermarket in small bottles. If you happen to have a bread maker, you'll be happy to learn that yeast is infinitely cheaper when bought in bulk. Often, Asian food stores are also cheaper than grocery stores for Asian type foods. Coconut milk, for example, can cost $2.00 at the supermarket, but only $0.85 at an Asian grocery store.

Just in case you are reading a quote by a famous graduate student and don't know what, exactly, they did that made them so famous, you can just click on the name to go to famous graduate students and find out. Here we have meticulously written out just exactly what each person did who was kind enough to write something about our cookbook.

Lastly, we wanted to point out that there are several quick recipes you should explore when you are in a hurry and have to return to lab after dinner. They are chicken with horseradish, any of the five quick pasta sauces, cheese tostadas with salsa, pesto (if you happen to have basil lying around), chicken with balsamic vinegar, lemon chicken, five spice beef with broccoli, filet of sole with olives, and lemon scallops grilled in foil.


Enjoy!

Genevieve, Joanna, and Jim
December, 1994