New cookbook offers advice on avoiding a cooking rut

Like many creative people, cookbook author Rebecca Katz has been putting her extra time during the pandemic to use, tackling a project that has been at the back of her mind for several years.

The author of six cookbooks including the award-winning “The Cancer-Fighting Kitchen” (Ten Speed Press, 2009/2017), Katz has created her own niche at the intersection of healthy food and high flavor.

“Building up flavor has always been, in my mind, the most important part of a nutrient-dense and nourishing diet,” she said. “If it tastes good, it’s good. If it doesn’t, you won’t eat it.”

A renegade at heart, Katz wanted to reinvent the modern cookbook. She enlisted a colleague at Healing Kitchens, a company that creates online courses and works with the health care industry, to help her remake the traditional format with templates instead of recipes and videos and graphics instead of photos.

The goal was to help people strengthen their skills, learn to improvise and escape from their daily cooking ruts.

“You are always going to have the same veggies and proteins,” Katz explained. “The idea was, how can you strengthen your culinary muscle by switching things up, using herbs and spices and different techniques of how to cook something?”

The result is a self-published eBook and hardcover cookbook, “The Power of Yum,: Simple, Healthy, Fresh & Flavorful” (Healing Kitchens, 2020) by Rebecca Katz and Jen Yasis. The colorful 100-page book serves as a reference guide for upping your cooking game during the pandemic and beyond.

“Our target audience was a general, everyday audience,” Katz said. “What we have found is that a lot of young people are attracted to the book — people in their 20s and early 30s — because it’s much more graphic, and it’s accessible.”

‘Flavorprints’

The book introduces Katz’s concept of creating “yum” through a series of “Global Flavorprints” — blends she curated of seasonings, herbs, spices and aromatics — to battle what she calls “taste-bud fatigue.”

The spice and herb combinations include flavors drawn from Mediterranean, Middle Eastern, Moroccan, Latin, Indian and Japanese/Asian cooking styles, and they can be deployed throughout all kinds of cooking techniques.

“Even seasoned cooks tend to do a sheet-pan chicken the exact same way, with olive oil and garlic,” she said. “This is an invitation to learn how to improvise, so you become much more flexible in the kitchen. It’s like going to yoga, only for the kitchen.”

The challenge for the authors was to simplify the “Flavorprints” as much as possible. They asked each other what herbs and spices they use every day, then they met in the middle to create the “essence of Yum,” reducing the ingredients down to the essentials.

“People are not necessarily used to working with herbs and spices, so it’s like learning a new language,“ Katz said. “Keeping it simple gets people indoctrinated and makes it part of their everyday life.”

With the use of global spices exploding right now, sourcing them has become a lot easier for home cooks. Now even mainstream spice companies are packing them into smaller jars, Katz said, so cooks can purchase small amounts that stay fresh. And smaller companies like Whole Spice of Petaluma and Savory Spice Shop of Sonoma and Santa Rosa have always operated this way.

The book also offers a key lesson on using FASS (fat, acid, salt and sweet), which enables cooks to balance dishes by adding extra virgin olive oil, lemon juice, sea salt or maple syrup.

“It’s the key to good cooking,” Katz said. “By understanding how fat, acid, salt and sweet balance each other out, you can rescue anything.”

A visual cookbook

Although Katz believes traditional cookbooks aren’t going away, she wanted to create a new format that would incorporate the visual nature of modern life, such as with Instagram to YouTube. With the eBook and hardback book, readers can link to quick videos that demonstrate various techniques.

“They are what we call process videos,” she said. “Cooking is very visual, and sometimes it really helps to see something.”

The book also is packed with whimsical illustrations by Yasis that explain techniques such as knife cuts for sheet-pan cooking, the steps of stir-fry cooking and how to compose an interesting salad as a main course.

“In a traditional cookbook, you may have variations, but they would be separate recipes,” Katz said. “This is almost like giving someone a cheat sheet.”

The heart of the cookbook is a series of chapters on essential techniques, starting with how to amp up flavor with dressings and dollops made from fresh herbs and spices.

“If you can whip up a dollop and drizzle it on a roasted chicken from the store, you are half the way home,” she said. “And making your own dressing ups your game. ... Make it ahead of time, and you have your stash.”

Also, by using a drizzle made from herbs, you are halfway to eating your greens every day.

“People don’t realize that herbs are actually eating green,” Katz said. “They think it’s just eating kale and spinach. But chop up some mint, parsley and basil, razz it up with lemon and olive oil, and you’ve got more green, more yum and more nutrition on your plate.”

Basic techniques

Other essential cooking techniques deconstructed by the authors include the sheet-pan method, stir-fry, sauté, salads, soup and eggs.

The key to sheet-pan cooking, Katz said, is knowing the timing of each ingredient and how to cut the veggies so everything cooks at the same time. Afterward, you can boost the flavor with a sprinkling of lemon zest or fresh herbs.

“Stir-fry is an important technique to learn because it opens up your culinary world,” she said. “It’s inexpensive, it’s fast and you prepare everything in advance. ... It’s a great way to clean out your refrigerator.”

By learning how to sauté, you also can get more vegetables into your diet, whether you are making a mirepoix for a soup or simply frying greens.

The old paradigm of simply steaming veggies is so last century, Katz said.

“I’m sorry, but greens need oil and broccoli needs fat,“ she said. “With soups and stews, you’re adding the fat at the beginning, and that base layer of flavor is really important.”

With salads, it’s key to start thinking outside of drab iceberg and grated carrot and look at how to jazz it up with citrusy dressings, extras like Parmesan cheese, crunch from seeds and nuts, proteins like chicken or hard-boiled eggs, fixings like roasted vegetables and a base of greens augmented by grains or beans.

“There’s all sorts of things you can do to make a salad into a meal,” she said. “If you prep up a bunch of stuff ... it’s the great assembly. You can just throw things together quickly.”

Katz kept the chapter on soups simple after taking a deep dive into the subject in her last cookbook, “Clean Soups” (Ten Speed Press, 2016).

“Now I give the template ... heat the pot, sauté the aromatics, add spices, deglaze and reduce, add the main ingredients, taste and garnish.”

In the eggs chapter, Katz includes templates for veggie and salmon scrambles, frittata, egg salad and the Japanese savory pancake known as okonomiyaki.

“Low and slow is the secret to making eggs,” she said. “Heat your pan, add eggs, turn heat to low and then take your spatula and cook them slow so they retain their moisture.”

The chapter on beans, grains and noodles includes cooking tips for each of these staples that can add plant-based protein, fiber and other nutrients to your plate.

The final chapter delves into kitchen “Odds & Ends,” such as how to organize your fridge and keep a running inventory of what ingredients you have.

“I started my career helping people with what I called ‘pantry rehabilitation’ and ‘refrigerator resuscitation,’” she said. “To eat in a healthier manner, you have to see what you have. ... Otherwise you take a look, slam the door and pick up the phone for pizza.”

During the pandemic, Katz has spent about 80% of her time working in her painting studio at her Sausalito home. Although constrained from giving in-person cooking lessons, she is more eager than ever to help people eat a healthier, more flavorful diet.

“We knew, more and more, that people were in the kitchens,” she said. “All the more reason to have a handy tool and deliver wonderful, yummy food that is going to boost your immune system.”

To order a copy of “The Power of Yum” ($25 for eBook, $30 for hardcover) go to rebeccakatz.com

Staff Writer Diane Peterson can be reached at 707-521-5287 or diane.peterson@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @dianepete56