Most recipes are written by people who already know how to cook.
They say "season to taste" and assume you know what taste. They say "cook until done" and assume you know what done looks like. They say "mix the dry ingredients" and assume you already know which ones those are.
Mine don't assume any of it. Here's exactly what that means.
One action per step
Not "chop the onion, heat the oil and add the garlic." Three things happen there, and if you're reading off a phone with wet hands you will lose one of them. Each step is one thing you do. Across the first book that comes out at just under seven steps a recipe — not because seven is a nice number, but because that's how many it actually takes.
Every ingredient by its name
Never "the dry ingredients." Never "mix everything." If it's the almond flour, the method says almond flour. You should be able to read one step, do it, and never scroll back up.
The preparation is written out
How thin. How fine. How hard to squeeze. "Grated zucchini" isn't an instruction — grated how, and then what? Wrung out in a towel with both hands until nothing more comes out, and then once more, because there is always more.
A doneness signal where it matters
Time gets you close. Your oven, your pan and your stove get you the rest of the way, and they aren't mine. So where a minute matters, I tell you what it should look like:
- Until the sides pull away from the paper.
- Until it stops steaming when you open it.
- A C, not an O.
- Until the edges go the color of a good crust.
The why, where people cut the corner
Boiling water, not warm — psyllium needs the heat to gel. Cold bowl, not room temperature. Blind-bake the base for ten minutes before anything goes on it.
Those sentences are the difference between a recipe that works in my kitchen and one that works in yours. They were missing from every recipe I ever failed at, and I failed at a lot of them.
And at the bottom of every page
Connie's note — usually the thing I got wrong the first four times.
Swap — what to use when your store doesn't have it, and what changes when you use it.
Why it's called the Q.B. Standard
There are over two hundred cards in my mother's tin and not one of them is finished. Every single one says q.b. — quanto basta. As much as is enough.
Nobody ever wrote down how much. That's the whole problem, and writing it down is the whole method.