Hip Girl’s Guide to the Kitchen
With the Hip Girl's Guide to the Kitchen you can become a confident cook—even if the drawer with the take-out menus is the only part of your kitchen you currently use! Kate Payne shows you how to master basic cooking techniques—boiling, baking, and sautéing—and simplifies the process of fancy ones, like jamming and preserving, dehydrating, braising, roasting, infusing, and pickling. With this straightforward and fun guide, you can stock up your kitchen with the ingredients, tools, and appliances you’ll actually use. You’ll also learn how to decode recipes and alter them to make them gluten-free, dairy-free, or vegan.
The Hip Girl’s Guide to the Kitchen includes advice and instructions on how to make both classic meals and foods that are typically bought, such as yogurt; ice cream; flavored salt; oil and vinegar infusions; kimchi; aioli; jam; granola; bread; and fruit leather—even liqueurs, iced teas, and vegetable juices. With fun line drawings, sidebars full of tips and tricks, and lists of resources, Kate Payne sets you up for success and shows you how to unlock your inner kitchen prowess.
The cyber sphere is boiling over with tantalizing food porn: photographs of enviable appetizers, exotic dinners, and pristine cakes and cookies; however, it is one thing to collect, and another to execute. The Hip Girl’s Guide to the Kitchen is for those who dream of impressing their friends with a Pinterest-worthy dinner party, but who may lack the know-how (and the cash) to turning their hoard of recipes into reality.
Divided into three sections: Stocking Up, Feeding Yourself, and Feeding Others, The Hip Girl’s Guide to the Kitchen is brimming with helpful tips, all with budget in mind. From what you need, where to get it, and how to prolong the use of both your tools and ingredients, Kate shows how rewarding and easy it can be to turn your kitchen into a homemade and healthy haven. Revealing both the health and environmental benefits of cooking and baking with fresh, whole ingredients, Kate challenges readers to ditch the take-out menus, providing advice on basic cooking methods (boiling, baking, and sautéing), and more advanced techniques like jamming, fermenting, pickling, and infusing for those who are really ready to reassess their relationship with the grocery store. Each chapter ends with Kate’s tried-and-true recipes for everything from granola to yogurt, homemade bread to mayonnaise.
At the heart of The Hip Girl’s Guide to the Kitchen is the important role that food plays in our well-being and our relationships with others. Kate’s enthusiasm and passion is contagious; she inspires her readers to take charge of their nutrition in mastering basic meals and reducing waste, and she provides creative ways to share the fruits and the labor with fun, food-making parties.
Watch the book trailer
I wrote this book because I did not grow up learning how to be smart and savvy in the kitchen. As I interviewed community members and researched for this book, yes, I learned things about how to cook, but more importantly I learned things about myself that I still carry with me today.
Hip Girl’s Guide to the Kitchen book trailer video by Jo Ann Santangelo
Praise for Hip Girl’s Guide to the Kitchen
“I love, love, love, love The Hip Girl’s Guide to the Kitchen! Every parent should give their teenager a copy - and get a second one for themselves.
I swear, author Kate Payne is some kind of genius. Perhaps this seems like high praise for what is just a beginner’s introduction to cooking, but every page is filled with a massive amount of truly helpful information. Every time I open this book, I’m staggered by some nugget of information that had never before occurred to me, and I’m kind of a kitchen genius myself.
Some basic recipes are provided, but mostly this is all about setting up a new kitchen and understanding how to use it, all in a hip-girl fashion. This means understanding modern food craft, paying attention to what’s happening in biotech agriculture, and being nutritionally healthy, and all the while bearing in mind that age-old household goal: save money by being savvy.”