The Homemade Pantry: 101 Foods You Can Stop Buying and Start Making: A Cookbook

Well written. Good recipes.

I LOVE this cookbook! So many fun things to make it's hard to decide what to do first. Makes basis pantry items that you never thought of making yourself look easy to do. I love that she gives you a heads up what may be a " tense moment" and gives you encouragement how you can get through them.

I bought The Homemade Pantry: 101 Foods You Can Stop Buying and Start Making by Alana Chernila on a whim. I think I saw it mentioned on someone's blog. When it arrived I quickly glanced through it, realized that I probably already had these recipes in other cookbooks and laid it aside, thinking I'd made a bad decision. About a week later, seeing it laying beside my chair, I picked it up and gave it closer look.I am so glad I did.I am now on page 200 of it. Yes, I am reading it like a novel. It's that good. Before each and every recipe is a page with a little story, a little introduction. They are all interesting and entertaining and relate in some way to the recipe.Before her recipe for yellow cake the story opens with this paragraph:"On days when I cannot follow rule #1 of sane parenting (never take more than one child to the supermarket at a time!), my girls and I inevitably spend 20 minutes in that zone between buckets of carnations and the "freshly baked muffins!" studying the Dora sheet cakes, the upright Disney princesses with their chiffon cake gowns, and the Thomas roll cakes. The miserable teenager in the fake chef's hat ignores us as the girls press their noses against the glass case. They can almost taste that hard blue frosting, and in their minds it is ambrosia. Birthdays are far off, but they try on the cakes for size, imaging their own names scripted in lovely red #5 gel."She then goes on to write a little more about the events actually leading up to the birthdays, and then concludes with the recipe, which she says is adapted from the 1-2-3-4 cake from Alice Waters. All that makes me love her even more. The story is cute and relatable and I love that for a lot of the recipes she notes that they adaptations from other recipes. Because really unless you're some crazy inventive new age chef, most recipes are riffs off of others.The other thing about this book is that it is amazing quality. The pictures are gorgeous and the pages are heavy paper. It is probably one of the nicest quality cookbooks that I own.Allright, so I've covered the cute stories and the quality of the book, what about the contents?Amazing. This book covers everything. Everything.The chapters are called aisles (cute!):Aisle 1 dairyAisle 2 cereals and snacksAisle 3 canned fruits, vegetables, and beansAisle 4 condiments, spices and spreadsAisle 5 soupsAisle 6 baking needs and mixesAisle 7 frozen foodsAisle 8 pasta and sauceAisle 9 breads and crackersAisle 10 drinksAisle 11 candy and sweet treatsEverything from how to make ricotta cheese, maple popcorn, beef jerky, ketchup, pancake mix, beef stew, ice cream, pasta - dough and sauce, syrups, teas...really the list goes on an on. I hate to even list anything because I can not do it justice.I have made her hummus, and it was fantastic. What I especially loved about it was that it used a whole pound of chickpeas and gives directions for freezing. If you are going to go through the steps of making hummus, you might as well make enough to last. So, now I have all these lovely single serving jars of hummus in my freezer, perfect for lunch! Not all of the recipes make such large amounts, but the ones that you might want to make in big batches all do. The instant oatmeal (which is just genius) makes 12 to 15 servings and gives storage options for pantry, fridge and freezer.It is the most complete basic pantry cookbook that I have. And even calling it a basic pantry cookbook is a misnomer, because how many basic pantry cookbooks have rhubarb ginger syrup for soda or the recipe for coffee liqueur?I can not say enough good things about this cookbook!

I like to read some of a book before I buy it and cookbooks are no different. I first read the sample available on Amazon and then found my library had an ebook version of it I could borrow. I actually am reading the book like a novel and I am enjoying it so much. I got to the chapter on frozen foods and I went to the Amazon Kindle store and purchased the book, returned the library copy. I always read reviews prior to most any purchase and reviews of books are helpful but I always take 1 star reviews and 5 star reviews with a dose of scepticism. Sometimes people give 1 or 5 stars out of laziness, I liked it, 5 stars, or I didn't like it, 1 star. For me, a 3 or 4 star review of a book is good and solid but I chose to give this one a 5 star review because of some of the 1 star reviews I saw. I thought some of the 1 star reviews were mean and petty! I want to judge the book on the usefulness of it and if you truly did not find it useful, OK, give it 1 star but to give 1 star based on a swear word or 2? You can't watch TV or a movie or read almost any fiction book that doesn't contain profanity these days. It has made its way into every day causal conversation and I can't believe the people who said they were offended by the mild use of a few swear words. I can see marking it down for a mistake in a recipe (like the one where it called for tablespoons of salt rather than teaspoons) but some mistakes are not going to be caught by the spell checker and if the proof reader was not also making the recipes, they probably would not have caught it. I really like the book, I am excited to try my hand at making mozzarella. In fact, I am going to make the pasta, into ravioli, make the ricotta, the mozzarella, the sauce from scratch, and the bread to go with the meal. I have made ricotta before, and paneer (fresh Indian cheese), I make bread all the time, I have made pasta once many years ago, and I used to make pasta sauce from fresh tomatoes when I was younger so some will be new and some will be just going back to the way I used to cook when my kids were little and I had more time. I can't wait to make some of the snacks and crackers with my granddaughters! I very much enjoy the book and am excited to try the recipes. I am a vegetarian so some of the recipes I will have to adapt to fit my needs but I have a granddaughter with allergies to artificial food coloring and being able to make some snacks she couldn't otherwise have is a huge plus for me.

Recipes are wonderful, and Alana Chernila is a great storyteller as well!

I am a cookbook junkie - I have lots of them. Some get lots of use and others are more for perusing. I’ve had The Homemade Pantry since 2016, and it’s a high mileage book, in several ways. It is well-bound, with a sturdy cover and pages. Recipes are illustrated in color. There are lots of pictures of her family, which I consider a plus. The little girls (who ALWAYS have clean hands and feet in the pictures) are precious. Even if they were dirty, they would still be precious, and the reviewer who says otherwise has a serious problem. The most specialized piece of equipment required is a food processor, which I don’t have and really haven’t needed.I use this cookbook frequently. It has pride of place next to both of my More With Less cookbooks (the original and the recent edition). All three have basic -and delicious - recipes that will feed you and your family well and for far less money than buying boxed stuff (can’t really call it food) or eating out.While I love all the recipes I’ve tried (and tweaked, which the author encourages you to do), my favorites are the waffle recipe (best waffles ever!) and the toaster pastries on the cover, which was my reason for buying the book in the first place! I won’t buy the boxed ones and my daughter really wanted to try them. Yummy!I also enjoy her stories, some of which are laugh-out-loud funny. I enjoy the warmth and love that exudes from them. I highly recommend this book!

I bought this book as I like making things from scratch and having a coconut allergy can make it hard to buy certain things.There are a good number of ideas in it including basic things like ketchup and more complex things like cheese and marshmallows. The instructions for each are clear and easy to understand, and most come with pictures so you know what it is supposed to look like in the end.It is, however, a very american book, so a lot of the stuff needs translating if you don't have a set of cup measurements to hand.Some of the stuff in it is cheaper to just buy, but for people with allergies or if you've run out of something and can't get to the shops, it seems to be a great book to have to hand.Overall, good value for money, and I am looking forward to trying out some of the things in it.

lovely book and some brilliant recipe ideas plus a lot of information i never would have thought of or be possible.i am pleased i bought the book :)

A combination of very basic recipes, all using highly complicated methods. The author also expects you to use a number of specialist tools that would cost a lot of money to stock your kitchen with (and take up a lot of space!). This book is also very American

A very timely book in the face of the 1% induced poverty. A good present for a nouveau pauvre mother. More useful for an American audience than European one where many of the suggestions inside are known and practised anyway.

This book was really interesting to me for the purpose of yogurt making. The book arrived but all of the yogurt making sections of the book were missing. There is a serious misprint in this book. The pages go as follows pages 1-16No pages 17-3233-48Again! 33-4849-287I feel bad that this publisher is not doing write by the author, and putting misprints out into the world for sale.