Cooking without recipes - Food resilience guide - Véronique Bouchard

~ Collaborative products with Véronique Bouchard ~

An anti-cookbook that reinvents the ways we prepare and consume our food.

Year after year, cookbooks top the best-selling charts. Yet, it seems that people have never cooked so little, as if we're consuming the idea of ​​a recipe rather than executing it! What if we decided to learn to cook differently?

In an era of climate change, growing social inequality, resource depletion, and pandemic risks, we must explore new ways of producing, consuming, and cooking food. This book offers an approach to unleashing the culinary creator in each of us, adapting our diets to greater seasonality and food availability.

Far from any culinary dogma, Cuisiner sans recette is a sort of anti-traditional cookbook that offers advice and techniques to develop good reflexes in the kitchen and promote our food autonomy. A first theoretical section sets out the main principles that guide the approach in order to take the recipe out of ready-to-think and ready-to-eat models and (re)discover the virtues of seasonality, local, and organic. A second theoretical section aims to recall the fundamentals of food, the basic principles to respect in the kitchen and to present some culinary techniques. On the menu, the basics of nutrition and healthy eating (nutrients), the seasonality and territoriality of food, the principles of short-term preservation (organizing the fridge and pantry to avoid food waste) and long-term preservation (freezing, canning, lacto-fermentation, dehydration), meal organization and planning, kitchen layout, etc. A third practical section finally presents certain culinary themes and variations around thirty typical dishes, always with the aim of adapting to the seasons and the regions.

Far from being just another cookbook, Cook Without a Recipe could well be your last cookbook! The one that will encourage you to change your eating habits, provide you with the basics to adapt your diet in all circumstances, and prioritize a diet that guarantees your health as well as that of workers, rural populations, and the environment. The ideal tool to develop your confidence, your autonomy, and your culinary creativity, and contribute to building a new, more ecological, supportive, resilient, and nourishing food culture!