The Flow of Processes in My Kitchen

You may have read some of the recipes in this cookbook before you opened this page. On reading them, you may well have exclaimed "Home-made stock? Roux? Pesto? I don't have those things around! This recipe will take forever!" I know it may seem daunting or inconvenient. However, there is a way. Let me explain. This kind of cooking can be so rewarding, so satisfying.
A great part of the pleasure of cooking is making things yourself, better than those you can buy, thriftily, and without fuss or the performance anxiety that attends delivering several dishes simultaneously to a waiting group of friends. It is daunting to need to prepare several things from an ingredient list such as stock, roux and a sauce for the recipe you want to cook. If you make these things in advance and freeze them everything gets much simpler. By the way, I have found making a sauce at the same time as a main dish is not a good idea. Excepting sauces that can be made very quickly it is much better to make them the day before. I have seen many dinners turn out as disappointments because sauces were not prepared with loving care and with adequate time.
Some days I just make stock or other intermediate ingredients and then reward myself by going out for a meal. One day each year, at the end of summer, I harvest the basil which I have grown in pots and I make an enormous batch of pesto to freeze. When I roast a chicken I never fail to gather the fat and the juices that collect in the roasting pan. I never discard the carcass of the chicken; I either make stock of it that night, letting it simmer until the next morning, or I freeze the carcass in a large ziplock bag. I keep herbs and spices, stocks and roux in my freezer. It is so pleasant to have ingredients you need for a recipe you want to make, ready-made and as you like them, and you can congratulate yourself on your thrift and craft as you use them. Even if you have little space, you can tuck pint containers of stock and such in the back of the freezer compartment of your refrigerator. If you will undertake to do this, to make your own basics, starting with just one thing and then adding one more thing at a time, your cooking will improve more that you might think, you will serve a wider range of more ambitious dishes, and you will enjoy cooking so much more.