What is the Pantry Cookbook?

The Pantry Cookbook: how to cook nutritious meals from scratch, on a budget, when time is short.

This 160-page cookbook will be available in printed form this December at amazon.com, and is now available for free in .PDF format here.  Would you like to use the Pantry Cookbook as a fundraiser?  Click here.

The American diet is all too often a mishmash of pre-made, mass-produced foods which are expensive, high in calories, and low in nutrients. The popular alternative, gourmet cooking, makes all home cooking appear to take long, and involve expensive, intimidating ingredients.

But home cooking doesn't have to be this way. In the Pantry Cookbook, you will learn fundamental recipes and cooking techniques that allow you to whip up nutritious, cheap meals, from scratch, in a minimum of time. This is a user-friendly textbook for beginning cooks, a reference for those who wish to rely less on canned soup and instant side-dishes, and a resource for those who already know how to cook a few things but wish to have a more solid foundation of cooking skills.

The Pantry Cookbook has over 130 recipes, including basics like hard-boiled eggs, baked chicken, boiled beans, boiled grain, and sautéed vegetables; classics like beef stew, borscht, and pulled pork; and “Quick Recipes” that can be put together in thirty minutes on a weeknight using ingredients prepared on a weekend. Additional features include shopping lists and menus for a week's worth of meals, an extensive list of substitutions, boxed lunch suggestions, kitchen safety information, money-saving tips, spice mix recipes, ideas for feeding toddlers and other picky eaters, and a complete Thanksgiving menu.

The Pantry Cookbook is also a fund raising tool! Instead of a standard copyright, the Pantry Cookbook is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribute which allows non-profit organizations to publish, sell, and collect royalties on the book, so long as the profits are used to support programs that address hunger or nutrition issues.  For more information, contact Michelle Clay at pantrycookbook@hotmail.com .