12 recipes
Breakfast
A breakfast burrito is three small jobs, crisp potatoes, browned sausage and soft eggs, timed to land in a warm tortilla together. It teaches you to run two pans at once and to roll a burrito that holds, and it freezes well, so one batch can cover the week.
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Salads
Raw broccoli, crisp bacon, a sweet-tart creamy dressing and a handful of crunch. It teaches you how to make a raw vegetable a pleasure to eat: cut it small and give the dressing time to soften it.
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Salads
A Cobb is a chopped salad laid out in rows, so every forkful can be a little different. It's a good way to practice several small jobs, each done well, that come together on one platter: chicken poached gently enough to stay juicy cold, bacon rendered crisp, eggs cooked just firm, and a vinaigrette you taste and set yourself.
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Salads
A creamy, tangy slaw that stays crunchy instead of sitting in a puddle. The lesson here is salting: pulling the water out of a vegetable before it ever meets the dressing.
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Breakfast
Homemade granola lets you decide the sweetness, the salt and the size of the clusters. The secret to big, crunchy clumps is simple: press the mix flat, bake it low, and leave it alone while it cools.
View recipe · 12 servings
Salads
This is the creamy, tangy, crunchy scoop that sits next to the burgers. It also teaches the trick every cold salad needs: seasoning food that will be eaten cold, when salt and acid go quiet.
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Soups
Minestrone is a vegetable soup built on timing. The slow base goes in first, the hard vegetables next, and the soft vegetables, beans and pasta last, so everything is done at the same moment. Learn that order once and you can make it from whatever is in your crisper drawer.
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Breakfast
Stir this together at night and breakfast is waiting when you open the refrigerator. The oats never see heat: cold milk and yogurt soften them slowly while you sleep. Your whole job is the ratio and the seasoning, so the jars come out creamy and spoonable, neither pasty nor soupy.
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Salads
The creamy, mustardy potato salad of cookouts and potlucks. It teaches two habits that make any potato salad better: season the potatoes while they're warm, and taste again once the salad is cold, because chilling mutes salt.
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Pies
A crisp, buttery shell holding a barely set custard studded with bacon. Most of the time is the dough chilling and the quiche baking and resting, so it's a good weekend project that also works a day ahead. It teaches flaky pastry, blind baking so the bottom stays crisp, and baking a custard low so it stays silky.
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Soups
A smooth, golden soup that shows what the oven can do for a vegetable. Roasting the squash browns its sugars and deepens its flavor, and then the rest is balance: salt and a little acid so the sweetness tastes bright instead of flat. It also teaches you to blend hot soup safely and set its thickness at the end.
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Salads
Crisp green beans, creamy kidney beans and nutty chickpeas in a sweet-sour dressing that gets better as it sits. It teaches blanching and shocking, and why canned beans need real time in a dressing.
View recipe · 4 servings