This blog celebrates the joy and spontaneity of food. Food is one of the most important things in all our lives: it nourishes us, makes us healthy or sick, fills us with happiness or makes us sad, often brings us together with friends and loved ones, and can equally nurture or degrade the environment.
Since food is so important, it deserves lots of attention from us – more attention than it usually gets. Everyone can, and should, eat delicious, healthy food, and the best way to do that is usually by cooking it yourself. Hands-Free Cooking is my exploration of food and cooking.
About Jo
I am not much of a recipe-follower. I will sit down and read a cookbook like a novel, but rarely follow recipes step by step. I am more likely to use them for guidance or inspiration; I take the recipe for a starting point, and I improvise. I take risks when I cook, and sometimes I make mistakes, but usually the risks lead to tasty results. That’s the philosophy behind how I share recipes in this blog, too.
I learned to cook in a co-op in college; we had vegetarian meals, local-organic ingredients, and improvisation imposed by necessity. When you’re cooking dinner for 100 people, one of your helper cooks is out with the flu, and who-the-hell-used-up-that-broccoli, you learn how to improvise pretty fast. That cooking style comes in handy, whether I’m getting home from work late, hungry, and to tired for anything complicated, or I have a vision of what I really want to eat, but can’t find a recipe that looks quite right.
I love to cook and eat. My tastes run the gamut from expensive cheeses and organic vegetables to chocolate chip cookies and pancakes. I am open (but not aggressive) about my vegetarianism, and I believe that well-prepared vegetarian food can hold its own against meat – but shouldn’t pretend to be meat. I sometimes like to spend all day in the kitchen, preparing an elaborate meal, but I also love finding shortcuts and almost-as-good alternatives to the “right” way to do things.