Welcome to my little corner of the Internet (who? Read the About Us page). Looking for how to navigate this website to make your life easier? Check out tips on how to get the most out of this website.
Why Garlic Delight
You probably found us because:
- You work hard during the day and the last thing you want to do is cook a 2-hour dinner at night.
- You’re a busy overachiever with an active social life, a pet, or family members to take care of.
- You want to eat healthier, save time and money while enjoying your food. Unfortunately, cooking just feels like a chore.
Alex and I launched Garlic Delight to solve our problem of always being too tired to cook after a long day of work. We were tired of gaining weight from eating restaurant meals and frozen foods (fish sticks and chicken nuggets). We were tired of spending too much money on unhealthy and mediocre takeout.
Garlic Delight teaches you how to cook quick meals with simple ingredients and easy-to-master techniques so you can cook dinner on busy weeknights.
I focus a lot on the 80/20 rule (the Pareto principle) to get results without using too much mental energy because being too tired to do anything is the first battle to win.
Let’s learn more about how you can get the most out of Garlic Delight.
How to use Garlic Delight
Here’s my cooking philosophy:
- Ingredients: Choose high-quality ingredients because you need to do less work to make them taste amazing.
- Understand your ingredients — how they taste, work with other ingredients, and how to store them — so you can speed up the prep work and increase your chances of success.
- For example, burning crushed garlic and ruining your stir fry isn’t your fault. It’s a simple lack of understanding of how ingredients work.
- Techniques: Learning easy-to-master techniques allows you to produce a reliable and delicious result every time.
- You will know why it’s important to cook aromatics in hot oil first.
- Or why you should brown and sear the meat first to maximize flavor.
- A technique-focused approach allows you to tweak recipes on the fly to match what you’ve got in your fridge and to understand how to fix a recipe when you made a mistake…or more likely, your recipe author made an error.
- Recipes: Recipes are for inspiration, not for following dogmatically.
- Recipe writers make mistakes all the time. We’re human. Knowing how your ingredients and techniques work allows you to still produce a successful dish.
- Recipes should be a template so you can substitute with whatever ingredients you’re craving or have in the fridge. Plus, with the numerous diets — keto, paleo, vegan, low-carb, carnivore, etc. — you need to know how to modify recipes easily.
RELATED: Learn how to navigate around Garlic Delight to make your life easier.
Where else you can find my writing
I love spreading my message of how easy cooking can be once you know the essential skills to succeed as a home cook. Even The New York Times wrote about my dive into food blogging.
You can find my writing and approach to cooking in the following publications:
- The Spruce Eats: Anna Rider – The Spruce Eats profile — 15 Chinese Beef Recipes That Are so Much Better Than Takeout, Taiwanese Beef Noodle Soup
- Forbes: How To Make Any Recipe Vegan
- NBC News: How to save time and money on Thanksgiving prep, according to Martha Stewart and other pros
- The Kitchn: Chinese Entertaining Tips
- Macheesmo: Homemade Trial series — Homemade Trials: Gravy!, Homemade Chocolate Cake Vs. Store-bought
- All Recipes: 8 Rude Things You Do at the Farmers’ Market, According to the Vendors Themselves
- Insider: Chefs share 13 ways to make instant ramen even better
- Greatist/Chowhound: 8 Delicious Ways to Upgrade Your PB&J
- Cheapism: Dishes & Recipes You Should Leave to the Pros
Plus many other food and non-food outlets.
Tell us about your challenges
Now that you know about our cooking challenges, tell me about yourself. Send me an email at anna@garlicdelight.com to let me know what you’re struggling with. What kind of cooking articles and recipes would help you succeed in the kitchen?
FI Friends
Side note: If you found me because you’re into personal finance and we met at Fincon or an FI community meetup, you’ll love our approach to cooking because it follows the same value-first optimization of personal finances. I (used to) co-host the FI Seekers (Facebook group and Meetup group) and NoCo Mustachian groups. Join one of the meetups if you ever want to hang out in real life.
If you have no idea what FI is, but you love the idea of cooking for pleasure and relaxation, stick around.
READ NEXT: Check out the 1-2-3 Steps and start learning about ingredients.