The Commonsense Kitchen

Book excerpt: A compendium of over five hundred simple, hearty recipes to spark culinary imaginations, plus lessons on important skills in the kitchen and home. The Commonsense Kitchen is a cookbook that is at once so useful and so spirited you can imagine it becoming a kitchen staple. And it’s from an unusual source—one of the toughest colleges to get into in the United States, Deep Springs is an organic farm, school, and working cattle ranch in the high desert of the Sierra Nevada. This general cookbook has more than five hundred recipes for delicious, honest staples and sassy regional specialties such as Red Chile Enchiladas and Mama Nell’s Kentucky Bourbon Balls. What’s more, this book features amazing food as well as lessons in life skills, from the proper way to wash dishes to how to make homemade soap. The Commonsense Kitchen is equally at home on the shelf of an urban foodie or a rural home cook. “Written by a former chef at, and graduate of, Deep Springs College in California, a men-only two-year college on a working ranch where students partake in hard physical labor along with academics, and learn a good deal about food, from farming to butchering to butter making, this hefty volume is refreshing in its straightforwardness. . . . The instructions are clear—with a good glossary of culinary terms—and the recipes for the most part are simple and appealing. They include the expected manly, hearty fare, such as biscuits and gravy for breakfast, chicken and dumplings, and steak fried in beef tallow. But there are many more entries along the lines of an asparagus mushroom frittata and fennel, blood orange, and toasted almond salad, which celebrate fresh flavors and seasonal ingredients.” —Publishers Weekly “If any of this year’s cookbooks is headed for dog-eared longevity, complete with tomato-sauce splatters and flour-dustings, it’s Tom Hudgens’ The Commonsense Kitchen. ...As appropriate for beginning cooks as it is for those with more experience, this one will stick around your kitchen for years.” —Denver Post, Best Cookbooks of 2010