Today is the start of The Newbie Cook! I hope you’re as excited as I am! Cooking and feeding others what I’ve made is my very favorite thing to do and I hope I can help you love it too.

If you watch too much of the Food Network (I know I do!), cooking can seem like something that can only be accomplished by highly-trained chefs with culinary degrees using fancy equipment and with the very freshest ingredients. Let me be very, very clear about this: THIS IS A MYTH!  Anyone can make tasty food and you don’t have to have years of experience or a kitchen full of expensive appliances, gadgets and ingredients.

In fact, I’m going to spill a few secrets right now that you can use to make things easier in the kitchen.

Not everything has to be “fresh”! Here are a few of my favorite non-strictly-fresh ingredients:

• Frozen vegetables – Nothing beats vegetables fresh from the farm in the summer. They’re inexpensive, fabulously delicious and, by all means, eat heartily when they’re in season. But when they go out of season, the prices rise and they don’t taste as good as they did just a few short weeks earlier. Enter frozen veggies! They’re generally of excellent quality and prices remain constant all year round. Heck, they even go on incredible sales from time to time, so, if freezer space allows, stock up when those babies go on sale for 79¢ a bag!
• Dried herbs – Similar deal with herbs, except they’re pricey even in the summer! Dried herbs last about a year before they start to lose flavor, so write the date of purchase on the bottom of the bottle with a marker.
• Dried onions – One of my very favorite pantry ingredients is dried minced onions. A tablespoon of those can dress up a batch of mac and cheese, scalloped potatoes or green beans. I use them for two reasons: they taste pretty good and I really, really hate chopping onions. I’ve never had any go bad, but I use them at a pretty good clip.
• Minced garlic in a jar – Whatever I said about chopping onions goes double for mincing garlic. You get to use fresh-tasting garlic in your dish and your hands won’t smell – win/win!
• Canned fruit (especially pineapple) and dried fruit (emphasis on cranberries, apricots & mangoes) – A world of wonderful things can be made with canned or dried fruit and a few pantry staples…more on those in a future post.

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There is nothing wrong with the store brand! A lot of the store brand items you see at your local supermarket were processed and packaged in the same facilities as the name brand ones. I’ll admit I have brand loyalty for a few select things (Skippy peanut butter, Heinz ketchup), but for the most part the store brands taste just the same as the name brands. Try a few out and decide for yourself.

Prepackaged foods can be your friends! Lots of them are very tasty and pretty cost effective. Here are a few I use all the time:

• Stuffing mix – This is one of my pantry staples. Dress it up with a small can of mushrooms, a palmful of dried onions and a palmful of dried cranberries and use chicken broth (and the juice from the can of mushrooms, be sure to measure it) instead of water. Try not to spend more than a dollar a box on these. (The usually go on a HUGE sale right after Thanksgiving and essentially last forever on the shelf.)
• Boxed macaroni and cheese – Everyone loves mac and cheese; anyone who says otherwise is not to be trusted. It can also be the base of about a thousand other dishes.
• Flavored rice and noodle packs – Same thing as mac and cheese, but with more flavors. They also be used make some pretty tasty “homemade” soup…really. Don’t spend more than a dollar a pack on these.
• Rotisserie chicken – The single biggest bang for your buck in the supermarket is a rotisserie chicken. I’m not kidding. You can’t buy and roast a chicken yourself for what they charge for a rotisserie chicken. If you have access to a warehouse store membership (Sam’s Club, Costco, etc.), buy a couple of them there. The chickens are huge and less than $5. Eat some tonight and save the rest for use in something else tomorrow.
• Canned spaghetti sauce – The second biggest bargain in the store is canned spaghetti sauce. I can think of 10 different ways to use it without even trying. It’ll probably be on the bottom shelf of the Italian foods aisle and is generally a buck a can.

Not all your pans, kitchen appliances & gadgets need to be new! I have many wonderful items in my kitchen that I inherited from relatives, bought at garage sales or junk stores. I also inherited a lot of crap. The trick is being able to tell the difference. I can help you with that.

Not all your new stuff needs to come from a pricey kitchen store! In fact, exactly precisely NONE of it needs to come from a foo-foo store. There are a few things you should probably splurge on and other things you don’t need to spend much on, but you can buy remarkably well-made things in the most unlikely of places. The next time your Great Aunt Tilly drags you to TJ Maxx for heaven-knows-what, stroll past the kitchen gadget aisle…you may be surprised at what you find.

So there you go. I’m excited and I hope you are, too. If I can help just one of you gain more confidence in the kitchen and maybe even fall in love with cooking, I will have succeeded. Let’s start this journey!