Elizabeth’s Divinely Simple Cooking

I cook from scratch every night. If you are thinking of the recipes in magazines with their complicated lists of ingredients and multiple steps, you might think this to be daunting. But my meals are very simple, often a variation of the same theme, yet never quite the same twice. I like things that can be thrown together very quickly and left to cook while I tend to the children.

I use mostly fresh produce, with a moderate dose of olive and/or canola oil, salt, and pepper. (I keep an oil dispenser handy in which I make a mixture of about 20% olive oil to 80% canola oil.)

My method of choice for cooking meats and fish is baking, because once it is dressed you can basically ignore it until you smell that it is almost done. I love to use glass Pyrex baking dishes for this. For fish and thinly cut chicken, I cover the dish with aluminum foil to keep the meat from drying out.

I like to steam my vegetables in the microwave, in a glass corningware dish.

On the side, I usually make pasta, rice, or potatoes.