Welcome to Cookshare, my free site for you to rest and digest the pleasures of simple cooking. I created Renewal Cooking School over 30 years ago to share meal-making skills. Each post will have a recipe shared from these classes for you to explore. Over time I will expand recipes in each of a variety of niches: soups, salads, grains, desserts and more. It will not be hard to evolve your own home meals. Practice one dish a week and in just a few months-time you will have a rich source of plain, tasty food.

The main focus is on learning the unwritten style of cooking I came to call “home meals” that were a fixture in pre-industrial living. Home meals are mostly locally sourced, either fresh or home preserved, and designed to be satisfying, dependable food. All the goodness was inherent in these whole vegetables, fruits and pastured meats. There is little packaging and no coupon clipping involved here.

Meals needed to be no-fuss, so rich and heavy that you couldn’t continue to do your chores. In other words, digestible and fulfilling.

Home meals are innately easy to prepare, and have a balance that pleases the senses: color, texture, temperature, and taste. These are the fundamentals in any cooking. In other words, you probably wouldn’t serve up a meal featuring dishes that were all white colored, soft, sweet and cold. See, you already know there is inherent sensual balance to a meal.

I am an avid endorser of Michael Pollan, the journalist and author of some of the best reasons to get to a more pre-industrial diet. His television programs and books set a clear reason to adopt foods that are less refined and more plant based. Pollan’s equation from “In the Defense of Food” is uncomplicated and clear: Eat food, not too much, mostly plants.

My time with you will not be spent providing this defense of food. I  plan to spend our time sharing recipes that will make this happen. If you have a special diet, vegan, paleo, etc. you probably have ways to substitute ingredients.

For over a quarter century I developed a trove of home meal based recipes to guide you into simpler meal making. I am excited to share! Another useful technique is to cook for additional “invisible” members of your clan. These will be leftovers, or I prefer to call them “planned-overs.” We leave nothing, it will be part of another dish or serving.

The term “cookshare,” is coined to emphasize cooking and sharing.

I held cooking bees in my classes where a group gathers to make big batches of home meal dishes to be shared. One share is eaten at the end of the bee and the rest stored in containers to share back at home.

With the emergence of sharing economies, like Uber and Airbnb, there can be an application to expand home meals: where moms can cook for moms, so that an outside working mom can provide home meals to her family from a mom who cooks at home for added income.

Or just prepare and share home meal dishes, chock full of goodness.

Continue to check back in to see my latest Cookshare posts featuring wholesome home meals to share.