DIY Condiments, Toppings and Snacks? Off the Shelf Shows You How

Until March 7, Off the Shelf: Homemade Alternatives to the Condiments, Toppings and Snacks You Love is available exclusively as part of the Art of Healing Extreme Health Library bundle. What I like best about the book is that it's not intimidating.
Kris Bordessa Off the Shelf
Image: Kris Bordessa

If you're like my family, you've probably got cabinets and a refrigerator door full of little jars, cans, bottles and boxes. It's not the stuff you make meals out of, just the things you throw on top or grab for a snack. But have you ever stopped to think what goes into those processed seasonings and flavorings? Or consider that, before our food came from factories, mayonnaise was something you made yourself, not a foreign substance from a jar?

GeekMom's Kris Bordessa, guru of DIY, and the force behind the Attainable Sustainable blog and Facebook page, has written an ebook that tells you how to make fresh, healthy versions of foods you probably never thought of making yourself.

Off the Shelf: Homemade Alternatives to the Condiments, Toppings and Snacks You Love is only 44 pages long, but it includes a good selection of recipes that will start you on the road to making your own sauces and spreads.

What I like best about the book is that it's not intimidating. As in Attainable Sustainable, Kris helps the reader take baby steps towards substituting homemade for storebought. There's some explanation of why you don't want to eat genetically modified ingredients, but this isn't a political tract, it's a beginner's cookbook.

I wanted to test out one recipe for this review, but I skipped the yummy-sounding mustard (it takes a few days to ferment) and ketchup (it's not fresh tomato season here in upstate New York) and went for the no-box chocolate pudding. All it took was ingredients I already had on hand: milk, cocoa, corn starch, sugar.

My teen and I made this together – as we observed the change from liquid to "non-Newtonian fluid" as my son called it, I felt like we were doing science instead of cooking. The pudding came out nice and chocolate-y and smooth, although once it had cooled it had a little more bounce than boxed chocolate pudding.

But now that we've gotten our feet wet, we might get ambitious and try a more complicated recipe from another cookbook. And perhaps substitute some dark cocoa and raw sugar. The nice thing about Off the Shelf is that its bare-bones recipes are something you can whip up on a whim. And once you've tried it, you'll have the confidence to keep tinkering until you get it just the way you like it.

A pdf copy of the book was provided for review purposes.