SHOP IT! MISE IT! MAKE IT!

A detailed guide to sourcing recipes, shopping for ingredients, and preparing to cook for novice home chefs.

The experience of growing up with a mother who relied upon what LeJeune calls the “B-A-R-F” method—boil, assemble, reheat, fry—made the author determined to make delicious, well-crafted meals for her own kids. But, as a working mom, she totally understands why people feel like they don’t have time to cook. As an IT professional, she excels at turning complex projects into simple systems, and with this book, she describes how she does just that in the kitchen. The process begins with a color-coded key for marking up recipes. For example, she uses a black pen to draw a circle or a box around all the ingredients and a yellow highlighter to mark these ingredients as they appear in the recipe instructions. After introducing the first step in her system, LeJeune launches into cranky commentary about kids who won’t learn to cook and the young adults who rely on Instant Pots. This feels unnecessary; she does have a point, though, when she suggests that no beginner is going to learn how to cook a meal from a three-minute video. Her list of favorite sources for great recipes is useful, and her suggestions of sources to avoid is interesting (she is no fan of The Joy of Cooking). When she circles back to the system that is the basic premise of this book, she describes her approach to shopping for food and preparing to cook. The annotated recipes she’s collected streamline the weekly trip to the grocery store; they help ensure she knows how much she needs of every ingredient and the precise nature of each ingredient—for example, if she simply adds “spinach” to her list, it could be fresh or frozen. The mise in the title refers to mise en place, the French technique of having all ingredients prepped and portioned before cooking begins. Anyone who has ever watched a cooking demo has an idea of what this looks like, but LeJeune ends her book by providing extremely detailed, step-by-step examples of how she “mises it” as she prepares several dishes, including Butter Chicken and Apple Pie.

Removes much of the guesswork and stress—and the possibility of unpleasant surprises—from cooking.