Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Sam Zien is an eleven-time Emmy Award winner and for the past four years has been the host of the television series Sam the Cooking Guy. His latest show, Just Cook This! with Sam the Cooking Guy, premiered on the Discovery Health Channel in September 2007 and now airs on Fit TV. His Web site is thecookingguy.com.

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no complicated techniques. no fancy ingredients. just great food anyone can make.
 
It's a well-known fact that people have to eat . . . and sometimes that means cooking. But great food doesn't have to be a total pain. In awesome recipes & kitchen shortcuts, Sam the Cooking Guy shows you how to prepare fast, delicious meals using simple methods and stuff you probably already have in the kitchen. No fancy techniques or foo-foo ingredients here. Just simple and delicious food served with a big side of humor and fun.

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Sam the Cooking Guy

John Wiley & Sons

Chapter One

This is not a completely normal cookbook, and there are definitely a few things you should know before getting started. Here they are:

1. This book is about using what you have. And, of course, you can't make a recipe unless you have the ingredients, but that's not what I mean. I mean using the things that you'd normally have in your cupboard, pantry, fridge or wherever to make great-tasting and easy junk (see #2). At no point should you ever look at a recipe and wonder what something is and where the hell you'd get it. I'll leave craziness like that to the other cookbook people.

2. When I say junk, I don't really mean "junk." I mean "stuff."

3. Not everything in this book will be in a traditional "recipe" format. A lot of it will be in a nontraditional "suggestion" format. So if you see something that looks like advice rather than a recipe, take the advice and do whatever it says.

4. Before you cook anything, read the recipe all the way through first. And that advice goes for this book or anyone else's (especially anyone else's). You just never know what will pop up in the instructions that you aren't prepared for. Oh, sure, you might have all the ingredients, but then you get to a line that says:

"Pour everything into a 19th-century clay baguette pan that's been rubbed with succotash oil and stored in an underground cellar at 47F for 3 weeks."

You think I'm kidding? Ever watched the Food Network?

5. Don't freak about not having an ingredient. Recipes should be viewed as a guide, that's it. Substitute, change, switch, add more, add less-just do whatever the hell you need to do to make it. Just because I say onion rings on the Pulled Chicken Sandwich are amazing (and they are), if you hate onions, swap them for something else. Cookbooks should be as much about inspiration as they are about recipes. Make them your own.

6. Okay, this one's really important: When a recipe says oil, unless I specify exactly what type of oil, I don't care what you use. I'm not being mean here, I'm just saying that pretty much whatever you pick will work. That is assuming your selection is not a flavored one like garlic oil, sesame oil, thyme oil, etc. Everything else-vegetable, canola, peanut, regular olive oil-will be fine. My goal is to get you more comfortable in the kitchen, and that comes from you having the freedom to do what you want and not feel handcuffed. Hey, I realize this pretty much goes against every cookbook ever written, and I don't care.

7. Quality ingredients are always important, and using good stuff is the way to go. But (and this is the part that will forever prevent me from winning a James Beard Foundation cookbook award), there's a time for all things. I only mean that if you're serving a simple piece of seared tuna with pretty much nothing else, you should buy a good piece of tuna. But let's say instead you're making the Cap'n Crunch(r) Seared Tuna on page 71 (which, in addition to having been coated with a children's cereal, is also accompanied by a mix of mayo, mustard, and hot Asian chili sauce). Spending $100 on a pound of tuna would be moronic. In this case, you can certainly use the fresh tuna your everyday supermarket has. In fact I keep blocks of tuna in my freezer specifically for this recipe and it always comes out fantastic. Look, I can't say this strongly enough: Don't not make something because you think you need to spend a ton on it. I'd rather you make your own version of it than not make it at all.

That's it.

Open it, scope it, and cook something.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Sam the Cooking Guyby Sam Zien Copyright © 2010 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Excerpted by permission.
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