Look for recipes written to be followed precisely.

And my hope is that this form of cooking with empathy, if enough people adopt it, can lead to greater unity and understanding even beyond the kitchen.

Home cooks often tweak dishes, but hewing tightly to instructions can help us better understand others and their cuisines and cultures.

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IngredientsMakes one 8″-diameter loafNonstick vegetable oil spray2 cups all-purpose flour, plus more for dusting5 Tbsp. sugar, divided1½ tsp. baking powder1 tsp. Diamond Crystal or ½ tsp. Morton kosher salt¾ tsp. baking soda3 Tbsp. chilled unsalted butter, cut into pieces1 cup buttermilk⅔ cup raisinsStep 1Place a rack in middle of oven; preheat to 375°. Coat an 8″-diameter cake pan or cast-iron skillet with nonstick vegetable oil spray. Whisk 2 cups all-purpose flour, 4 Tbsp. sugar, 1½ tsp. baking powder, 1 tsp. Diamond Crystal or ½ tsp. Morton kosher salt, and ¾ tsp. baking soda in a large bowl to combine. Add 3 Tbsp. chilled unsalted butter, cut into pieces, to dry ingredients and rub in with your fingers until mixture resembles coarse meal. Make a well in the center and pour in 1 cup buttermilk. Gradually mix dry ingredients into buttermilk just until incorporated and a shaggy dough comes together. Mix in ⅔ cup raisins.Step 2Using lightly floured hands, form dough into a ball and transfer to prepared pan. Gently press dough to flatten slightly (dough will not reach edges of pan). Sprinkle with remaining 1 Tbsp. sugar.Step 3Bake bread until golden brown and a tester inserted into the center comes out clean, 40–45 minutes. Transfer pan to a wire rack and let bread cool in pan 10 minutes. Turn bread out onto rack. Serve warm or let cool completely.

Red Fife Soda Bread with Seeds & Fruit Ingredients 4 C Red Fife flour (or Renan, Hard Red, Marquis) – or Spelt! Yum! 1 3/4 tsp baking soda 1 ½ tsp kosher salt ¼ C sugar ¾ C currants 3 Tbsp Sunflower seeds 3 Tbsp Pumpkin seeds 3 Tbsp Flax seeds 4 Tbsp butter, melted and slightly cooled 2 C Buttermilk, plus additional for brushing *optional 2 Tbsp additional mixed seeds for sprinkling Method Preheat oven to 375 degrees and line a sheet pan with parchment. In a large mixing bowl, whisk together flour, baking soda, salt, sugar, currants and seeds. Combine melted butter and buttermilk. Pour buttermilk mixture over dry ingredients and stir just until everything comes together. Turn out onto a floured work surface. Lightly knead to bring dough together. Form a slightly flattened ball, about 8 inches wide. Place on prepared sheet pan. Brush top and sides with buttermilk. Sprinkle with mixed seeds if desired. Using a sharp knife, cut a deep X into the top of the bread. Bake until nicely browned and bread sounds hollow when tapped on the bottom, approximately 40–50 minutes. Enjoy with good salted butter!

Edison-Rye Soda Bread Ingredients 1 ½ C Edison flour (or Sonora, Hard White, Wit Wolkoring, Chiddam Blanc de Mars) 2 ½ C Rye flour 1 ¾ tsp baking soda 1 ½ tsp kosher salt 2 C + 2 tbsp Buttermilk Method Preheat oven to 375 degrees and line sheet pan with parchment. In a large mixing bowl, whisk together flours, baking soda and salt. Pour buttermilk over dry ingredients and stir just until everything comes together. Turn out onto a floured work surface. Lightly knead to bring dough together. Form a slightly flattened ball, about 8 inches wide. Place on prepared sheet pan. Brush top and sides with buttermilk. Sprinkle with mixed seeds if desired. Using a sharp knife, cut a deep X into the top of the bread. Bake until nicely browned and sounds hollow when tapped on the bottom, approximately 40–50 minutes.

William Mather’s 1699 Young Man’s Companion also has one (the London book would inspire the very first arithmetic book to be printed in the colonies in 1705, by Franklin’s old boss Andrew Bradford). In Mather’s book, though, the recipe was short, misleading, and ineffective. It includes an entry for “Terms provoked,” a heading also found under comparable medical books with abortifacient concoctions (where the “term,” or period, needs “provoking”). Unfortunately for Mather’s readers, however, he prescribes “stinking Arach,” or goosefoot, which is an emmenagogue (an agent to stimulate or regulate menstruation) but not a reliable abortifacient. He also makes the even more dubious suggestion to “take a draught of White wine” under a full moon.

Jacobean gentleman Henry Peacham wrote in his treatise ‘The Gentleman’s Exercise’ (1612; left) ‘The making of ordinary Lamp blacke. Take a torch or linke, and hold it under the bottome of a latten basen, and as it groweth to be furd and blacke within, strike it with a feather into some shell or other, and grinde it with gumme water.”

How to Cold Brew: Using a standard 8 Cup French Press Add 4 Oz of coarse ground coffee to the bottom of the French Press. Pour 3 cups of cold or room temp water over the grounds gently. Gently stir to get all of the grounds wet. Let sit for 14-16 hours at room temperature. Press and strain into covered jar or vessel for storing your cold brew in your refrigerator. You now have a cold brew concentrate:  Mix 1 part coffee with 1 part water when serving.

The Recipe I came up with a basic recipe for one cup of cold brew, which is as follows: Ingredients: 20 grams of coffee to 250 grams of water Measure out 20 grams of coffee. Grind to a medium-to-coarse setting. I chose the 24 setting on my Baratza Encore. Put 20 grams of ground coffee into your container. I chose a so-called "chilly bottle." A flask, a mason jar, or a cold brew coffee bottle would work fine too. Pour 250 grams of water into your container. Agitate the bottle to make sure grounds are incorporated into the water. I did this by moving the bottle around a bit (although not shaking the bottle). Put your container in the fridge. Wait 13 hours. You can experiment with the timing but 14 hours worked well for me. Take your coffee out and serve over ice in a glass.

Hyperaware of how annoying it is when you want a recipe and have to read a 20-paragraph story about someone's great gran (and feeling bad you don't care), I have provided a skip link if you don't care about my back story to this post.

Do you like collard greens? If so, what’s your favorite way of preparing them? Please let us know in the comments.

I really have no idea how you came up with this solution but that reflects a major problem with many npm packages, i.e. 90 percent of the library documentation should be pulled from the Git issues or SO answers.

to fix it. And when you’ve finished, this is what it should look and taste like, this is what to eat it with. But above all, take joy in what you do

Most modern cookbook authors claim to meet the conditions for a ‘good recipe’ as described by Elisabeth Luard:42A good recipe is one that first encourages the reader to cook, and then delivers what it promises. A well-written recipe takes you by the hand and says, don’t worry, it’ll all be okay, this is what you’re looking for, this is what happens when you chop or slice or apply heat, and if it goes wrong, this is how

At least one, somewhat successful, cookbook has been published claiming to teach cooking without recipes.40

recipe is simply ‘a statement of the ingredients and procedure required for making something’.2 There is no guarantee implied or stated that the cook will understand either the statement of ingredients or the procedure.