The Laughingmaus Manifesto for a WYHIWYN Kitchen

  1. First things first: I think of cooking as a form of play and I encourage you to try that perspective on for size yourself.

  2. Laughingmaus recipes use mainly “primary ingredients” and by that I mean we hold back on foods manufactured for us by corporations. Your grandma’s grandma didn’t have HotPockets™. Let’s StP (Shop the Perimeter) of the grocery store and save oodles of money. Oodles. I mean it.

  3. Measurements for herbs and spices are not precise here. More = more and less = less. Leave something out entirely and you won’t taste it at all. Within some sort of reason, quantities of pepper or thyme will not break any recipe and if you don’t like turmeric in the first place and decide to leave it out, well that might even make your recipe better. ;-)

  4. Nutrition is not hard and is worth thinking about.

  5. Laughingmaus refuses to be afraid of using semicolons; sometimes, maybe even often, inappropriately.1 Secretly, I am working for a strong comeback of the inappropriate semicolon. In the kitchen as in life one often finds that to do something wrong is to figure out how to do it right.

  6. And, also that the rules don’t always apply.

  7. I’m encouraging you to go to the farmer’s markets and buy regional and seasonal. Because quality, quality, freshness and quality. Get started and experience for yourself how great it feels to know that a significant part of your grocery budget, the money you worked hard at your job to earn, goes directly into the pockets of the nice person from whom you bought your eggs and your kohlrabi. In this way we are closing a much-too-wide-open circle and I promise that over time you will find this immensely satisfying.

  8. Leftovers are an ingredient.

  9. One more time: Leftovers are your secret ingredient to a one-of-a-kind dinner.

  10. I’m going to talk a lot about thrift in the form of wyhiwyn (what you have is what you need). Because usually, it is. Or it could be if you took a slightly different approach to the problem of what you need to make dinner.

  11. Home kitchens are not restaurant kitchens and everything we see happening on TV in restaurant-type kitchens is not everything that is happening. You can count on Laughingmaus to respect your food budget. I wouldn’t think of suggesting that you peel the entire first layer of onion into the garbage. That is yummy onion and belongs in your dinner. Or in your stockpot, which is where it winds up in restaurant kitchens, but nobody talks about that.

Footnotes

  1. Turns out a clever woman named, Cecelia Watson has written a clever book titled Semicolon: The Past, Present, and Future of a Misunderstood Mark. In this interview she said, “Also, I found that the humanists and their attitude towards punctuation marks in general resonated with me when I was thinking about, “Well, how would we use them now?” The idea that they were planning, they were experimenting, they were creative, they made up new things to suit their purposes — and they didn’t live by all the super strict rules. That I thought struck me as where I wanted to end up.” That, my friends, is the Laughingmaus way of thinking! ↩