I think you are starting from the wrong place if you think it will be like Texan chili [con carne]. Mole negro and soft cheeses are the main culinary exports of Oaxaca and they are fantastic. This is one of my two favorite culinary regions in Mexico!

Mole negro
First off, the famous mole negro using the regional pasilla de Oaxaca pepper (aka "chile negro" when dried). There are many recipes for that; find one that has ingredients you can pick up at your local Mexican supermarket or order online. You can cook meat (often chicken) in it or use it to make enchiladas enmoladas. They're soft, cheesy, and the rich, black sauce has a great pepper flavor but also a complex mixture of spices that lend subtle notes to the flavor like a fine wine. Every abuelita in Oaxaca has her own special variation on the recipe.

Traditional meal: nopales + meat + oaxaqueño cheese + guajillo sauce
Another personal favorite coming straight out of restaurants in Oaxaca is often called the Conquista Plate. As you can see, a thin steak over grilled cactus, Oaxaca cheese and chile guajillo sauce. The cactus is nopales; learn to love it's mild flavor, as it's in tons of authentic Mexican dishes. Guajillos are a fairly mild chili with a distinct, tart taste. They're also used all over Mexico so you should be able to find them pretty easily. Oaxaca is famous for cheese, so you can also easily find that in most Mexican markets.

Recipe for the sauce (use only guajillos and ancho). You can find your own instructions on grilling nopales and the steak or whatever meat you want to go with it. That red sauce can basically go on anything.

Chile verde: more like a SW "chili"
Although it's not from further south than Chihuahua and Sonora and has become a staple in New Mexican cuisine, chile verde is probably going to be the best marriage of rich Mexican sauces and a more traditional southwestern US "chili" where chunks of tough meat are stewed or braised in the sauce until tender. I've tested and approve of this recipe as a basic starting point. However, in The Food Lab, Kenji goes into detail about why it's better to let this dish braise in the oven. Here is his final recipe, which is amazing and pretty simple once you get through it a couple times (and usually provides leftovers for days). I do believe he is a bit misinformed (in the book, in particular) about how unique Hatch chilies are; the exact same chilies are widely available as "Anaheim peppers" in addition to other sub-cultivars of the classic "No.9 chile". But I digress.

More about chile verde and SW food
I collected about a dozen cookbooks when living in NM trying to find more chile verde recipes to try. Two more recent ones I highly recommend are New Mexico Cuisine: Recipes from the Land of Enchantment and Red or Green: New Mexico Cuisine. For authentic Oaxaqueño recipes, I have only read Oaxaca al Gusto: An Infinite Gastronomy but it's very good and sub-divides the region to give you a sampling of coastal seafood, cheese from the mountains, and about a thousand mole recipes!

Finally, I want to say I agree with your friend: Tex-Mex is a mistake and traditional Mexican food is where the good eats are at!

As someone with too many cookbooks for her own good, here are some of my favorites.

I am not a vegetarian, but Deborah Madison's Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone is the book that made me love vegetables. She doesn't approach vegetarian cooking in the way lots of people do, where you just substitute or omit meat from a dish, but creates recipes that center around and bring out the best from vegetables.

Gourmet Today is a huge book culled from the now-defunct Gourmet magazine. It's a good all-around resource with (as the title implies) a modern American bent to its recipes.

Steven Raichlen's How to Grill transformed me from a charcoal-shy indoors-only kind of cook into an aspiring grillmaster last summer. He lays the basics out in a very straightforward manner with lots of pictures and excellent recipes. It includes the basics of smoking as well.

I like reading cookbooks that blend recipes with a broader scope of information related to them, so I enjoy anything by Jennifer McLagan (I started with Odd Bits). She writes about ingredients that are less typical or even looked down upon, making the case that these are overlooked culinary treasures. Her chapter introductions include tidbits like history, cultural impact, and science behind the ingredients. The recipes are great but tend to be highly-involved.

For specific cuisines, a couple of my favorites are Bill Neal's Southern Cooking (the recipe for Shrimp & Grits is mind-blowingly good), The New Book of Middle Eastern Food, and Madame Wong's Long-Life Chinese Cookbook.

TL;DR: the first three are what I'd consider must-haves, the remainder are interesting and might broaden your culinary horizons.

> and you’d be surprised how many condiments are soybean oil based (mustard, ranch, bbq sauce, salad dressings and marinades etc)

Not really, no. Soy, corn, wheat, sugar, and misc. refined starches are everywhere, in shelf-stable packaged foods. You can find mustard with made with no oil or other oils if you look, and proper BBQ sauce without soybean oil (by that I mean savory mustard/turmeric sauces, not that sugar syrup junk that Yankees, and even Carolinians, think is worth eating ;)), but your choices get really limited, really quick. Given all that goes into typical BBQ, I've come to treating it like cake, or ice cream, rather than as an every day food.

> I’ve genuinely tried exploring in the grocery store but so many things have allergens!

Don't buy those. In fact, try to minimize going into the isles, without specific items that you already know you want to buy from them, and stick mostly to the periphery.

Start mostly from actual ingredients, and you will have plenty of variety. Most people don't even realize that I'm a picky eater, thanks to autoimmune issues, including but not limited to allergies, because I'm the one going to the exotic restaurants, and bringing in weird food for lunch at work, or to the pot lucks. I have to mentally strike out most of any restaurant's menu, anywhere I go, or pass on most most of what other people are making. I can't eat a hamburger and not get sick, but my local Korean places make kimchi jigae with all stuff I can eat in it, and it's tasty AF.

With a full kitchen, if you can do some basic cooking, IMO, go to the library or a book store, and check out some big comprehensive cookbooks. It's nice to have something you can just grab and look through (I find Pinterest is great for this, on the modern high-tech side, but good cookbooks tend to have been tested on people, and have little things that your average [b|v]logger will miss). Or, start learning those basics, if that's where you're at. While I've been cooking since I could physically reach everything, I've known a couple people that went from 99% frozen food and take-out to being good cooks within just a couple years, so...

Three come to my mind that are excellent, which I've had for many years now, cherish, that have plenty of easily adjustable recipes, plenty of them that should be just fine, lots of text on process (which matters a lot, and is often overlooked), and with minimal fancy foods:

https://www.amazon.com/Justin-Wilsons-Homegrown-Louisiana-Cookin/dp/0026301253

https://www.amazon.com/Cocina-Familia-Authentic-Mexican-American-Kitchens/dp/0684855259

https://www.amazon.com/Original-Boston-Cooking-School-100th-Anniversary/dp/0883631962

Plenty of taste bias, there, but that's life.

I grew up along the Gulf Coast so I have a deep love for Cajun and Creole cookbooks. I also love the old Justin Wilson PBS episodes you can find on Youtube. I love buying used cookbooks, it's amazing the deals you can get.


Do you have any recommendations for books I should add to my collection? Here are the Cajun/Creole books I already have.

Southern Creole Style Cook for Love and Life - Diabetic/Hypoglycemic oriented cookbook. My mom found it at someone's home who had a bunch of stuff on their lawn to give away for free. It's a pretty good book spiral bound like a Junior League book.

Cajun Low-Carb by Jude Theriot

Paul Prudhomme Louisiana Kitchen

Prudhomme Family Cookbook

Patout's Cajun Home Cooking

Justin Wilson #2 Cookbook - Cookin Cajun

Cajun Creole Cooking - Terry Thompson

I don't have bound editions of these but they are ones I enjoy that are free to read online because they're so old.

The Picayune Creole Cookbook 1901

Cooking in old Créole days. La cuisine créole à l'usage des petits ménages


***

I also love historical cooking books: Food on the Frontier: Minnesota Cooking from 1850 to 1900 with Selected Recipes (Publications of the Minnesota Historical Society) is so interesting as is Buckeye Cookery & Practical Housekeeping: Tried and Approved, Compiled from Original Recipes and The Settlement Cook Book 1903

Restaurants can produce fancy foods because they:

• have access to good quality ingredients
  
• have the labor to do it
  
• have the volume to go through these ingredients without any waste
  
  Take for example a dish that's, for example, garnished with julienne chioggia beets, julienne fennel, and julienne parsnips. Let's take each point I raised so you understand the impracticality of doing this on a small scale:
  
  
• Your supermarket might not sell chioggia beets. Your best bet would be a farmer's market and even that's a 50-50 shot. They'll also be very expensive at the farmer's market, whereas chioggia beets are not expensive wholesale.
  
• Julienning a chioggia beet isn't hard but on top of all the other prep you'd be doing for a dish like this, why would you want to clean your work station three times to do three different prep process, and find a proper way to store it all until the rest of the dish is ready just for some silly garnish?
  
• If you're garnishing a dish with julienne chioggia beets and julienne fennel you've only used 90% of the beet and 90% of the fennel.... and unless you can buy single parsnips instead of by the bag (good luck with that) then you're probably only using 95% of what you've bought. Kind of a waste if you're just cooking for yourself, which is probably the case seeing as this subreddit appeals mostly to bachelors in their mid-twenties. You're talking about spending $6 or more just so you can garnish your dish and you'll just end up tossing the rest of the food.
  
  If I still haven't dissuaded you I recommend The Chefs' Collaborative Cookbook, not in its ability to teach you the basics but because it is a contemporary American cookbook with lots of unique and professional recipes http://www.amazon.com/The-Chefs-Collaborative-Cookbook-Sustainable/dp/1600854184 It has a lot of fancy and artistic recipes. Some of the recipes are very easy, simple and delicious! Other recipes will give you a good idea of all the labor that goes into restaurant food, and if you're sane, you'll say, "this isn't worth the time." If you're insane and still think it's worth it, you should consider a job in the culinary industry so you can actually make these dishes you're interested in! :)

"white anglo saxon protestant"

I guess one stereotype is that they like mayonnaise on everything. There's a really funny book on amazon "The Wasp Cookbook". I read it a while ago, and it manages to be really pretty funny ... there's loads of jokes riffing on the stereotypes though.

Beyond their love of bland food, WASPs are the stereotypical rich Yankees ... they have Ivy League educations ... went to private prep-schools .... own at least one sailboat ... and only shop at Brook's Brother's for clothes ... of course with the tie to match their Ivy League's school colors. Likewise despite the fact all the suits and stuff are fashionable again, they will manage to buy the most unfashionable/uncool/unhip stuff brook's brother's has to offer.

this is the classic uniform: http://oxfordclothbuttondown.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/BB-and-talbott1.jpg

They tend to come from old money though. So while they can often be snobby, they rarely are the sort that flashes money or spends money frivolously for status. They're more than comfortable with their status and tend to prefer not to advertise it ... they'll be more than happy to tell you about their ivy league education though.

What's more? Every president that wasn't murdered to death is a white-anglo-saxon-protestant. Even Obama signed up for the protestant club, even though he wasn't able to meet the whole white skin requirement. I guess JFK's Catholicism at the time was probably a bigger deal than Obama's skin color today ... at least that's what I've been told.

This I think is why Bernie never stood a chance with the democrats ... even if he managed to swing the popular vote by a large margin I'd bet money the delegates would have still done everything in their power to install Hillary. Given what a compelling candidate he is, it really does illustrate how fearful the powerful still are of "outsiders". I really don't even think it's that they have a problem with him being Jewish, it's more the fact that it means he's not protestant.

Sorry for rambling a bit there ... though if you're an American I really feel like you should know what a WASP is ... given how powerful and influential they have been as a group both historically ... and today.

I haven't. I've got a bunch of science-y cookbooks.

Edit: Here is the best book I've found. It's a really heavy read, though: On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen

My other favorite, go to book is America's Test Kitchen Best American Classics. I also do recipe testing for ATK - regular recipes and gluten free.

Oh, and don't forget Michael Ruhlman's Ratio:The Simple Codes Behind The Craft of Everyday Cooking. This is the most amazing book. It's short and to the point as well. You begin to understand how a simple tweak to a recipe can create an entirely different dish.


I love how a great Mindcrack thread became a cooking thread. My 2 favorite things in life.

• Taste of Home Best Loved - A great down-to-earth cookbook with homestyle meals that mom and grandma used to make.
  
• The Silver Spoon - Originally in Italian, hundreds of awesome, authentic Italian dishes using a massive array of ingredients.
  
• Gourmet Magazine Cookbook - I got my copy at a brick and mortar bookstore many years ago, and it may be out of print now. But it is full of elevated dishes that are easily obtainable at home.
  
• Dinner for Two - For years it was just my wife and I. This was the perfect little cookbook for us. Additionally, ATK has a similar cookbook. This isn't the one we have, but one like it. It's basically their recipes scaled down for two people.
  
• Bocuse Gastronomique - It's like an awesome cooking class on paper from the master himself.
  
• Bocuse - An awesome collection of recipes from Paul Bocuse.
  
• ATK Cookbook. I probably cook more from here than any other. I used to buy the new version every year with the newest recipes, but now I have the online subscription.
  
• The Flavor Bible that someone else linked.
  
  
  I could keep going but I should stop. So many great ones out there.

-Brie Baker with all the ingredients to get started (Brie cheese, fruit, nuts, honey)

-Butter Bell with a loaf of locally made bread

-Mariposa Napkin Box with Weights and Cocktail Napkins

-Cocktail Shaker Set with Bitters, Stirrers, and a nice bottle of liquor

-Cool coffee table book (esp. if it matches a gift set mentioned above (The Art of Mixology or Magnolia Table) or it's hostess-themed, such as Kate Spade's All In Good Taste or Emily Post's Manners for Today)

-Guest Book for house/bathroom/guest room (and this is always fun because you can be the first one to sign it and everyone at the housewarming party can sign it/write a message). Look around Etsy for these...I'm not crazy about the ones on Amazon.

Hope this helps! Happy housewarming to your friend!

Adapted from multiple sources including:
David Lebovitz/Robicelli's A Love Story With Cupcakes
Pickles, Pigs, & Whiskey by John Currence

For the Cake

• 3/4 cup (75g) Dutch-process cocoa powder
  
• 2/3 cup (160ml) very hot coffee
  
• 2/3 cup (160ml) buttermilk
  
• 1/2 cup (125ml) vegetable oil (such as canola or grapeseed)
  
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
  
• 1 large egg
  
• 1 large egg yolk
  
• 1/2 teaspoon kosher or sea salt
  
• 1 1/3 cup (190g) all-purpose flour
  
• 1 3/4 cups (350g) sugar
  
• 3/4 teaspoon baking powder
  
• 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
  
  For the PB Filling
  
• 1 1/2 cup heavy cream
  
• 3/4 cup confectioners sugar
  
• 2 1/4 teaspoon vanilla
  
• 3 cups creamy peanut butter
  
  For the Ganache
  
• 3/4 cup heavy cream
  
• 6 ounces dark chocolate chopped
  
• pinch of coarse salt
  
  For the Pretzel-Peanut Topping
  
• 3/4 cup (110g) roasted peanuts
  
• 1 1/2 cups (90g) broken up large pretzels
  
  For the Cake
  
  

1. Preheat the oven to 350ºF. Butter and flour the bottoms and sides of two 8 or 9 inch round cakepans. NOTE: I used 6 inch cake ring to stamp out the cakes from a quarter sheet pan. I had enough batter left over to make 6 cupcakes.
   
   
2. Mix the cocoa powder and hot coffee together in a medium bowl, stirring until it’s a thick paste. In a separate bowl, stir together the buttermilk, oil, vanilla, egg, egg yolk, and salt. Gradually stir the buttermilk mixture into the cocoa, mixing until smooth.
   
   
3. Sift together the flour, sugar, baking powder, and baking soda.
   
   
4. Stir the dry ingredients into the cocoa mixture just until combined. Divide the batter between the two cake pans.
   
   
5. Bake for 30 to 35 minutes, until the centers lightly spring back when you touch them. Let cool completely.
   
   
6. Invert onto baking sheets and cool in freezer while making mousse and ganache.
   
   
   For the Mousse
   
   
7. Whisk the heavy cream, confectioners sugar, and vanilla on high speed in a stand mixer fitted with the whisk attachment until stiff peaks form. Transfer to a bowl and set aside.
   
   
8. In the same stand mixing bowl, beat the peanut butter until smooth. Gently fold in the whipped cream one third at a time.
   
   For the Ganache
   
   
9. Chop the chocolate into fine pieces.
   
   
10. Warm the cream in a small saucepan until almost boiling.
    
    
11. Remove from heat and pour over chopped chocolate. Let sit 2 minutes, then stir until smooth. If it’s too thick to drizzle, add a touch more cream to thin it out.
    
    For the Topping
    
    Mix peanuts and pretzels together.
    
    To Assemble
    
    Place 1 layer of cake on serving dish. Spread PB mousse evenly over top. Place the 2nd layer of cake on top of the first, bottom side down. Frost the remainder of the cake with the mousse. Freeze the cake while making ganache.
    
    Prep the ganache.
    
    Once ready, remove the cake from the freezer. Pour Ganache on top.
    
    Decorate with pretzels and peanuts.
    

For the tiny treats themed week, I made mini French silk pies. To make these, I used my favorite pie crust recipe and an America’s Test Kitchen recipe for French silk pie for as a reference for the filling. I think these pies are a great candidate for a tiny treat because the filling is extremely decadent. To make 12 pies, I used a half batch of my pie crust (enough for one 9-inch pie) and a third batch of the filling. Even after making only a ⅓ batch of the full filling amount, I found that I had quite a bit leftover. In the future, I may prepare double the crusts for the amount of filling because I would not want to scale the filling recipe down any further.

----

Mini French Silk Pies

Makes 12 mini pies

For the crust:

Recipe modified from The Two Bite Club; text here is halved

Ingredients

• 1¼ cups all purpose flour
  
• ½ teaspoon salt
  
• ½ tablespoon sugar
  
• 6 tablespoons cold butter, cut into pieces
  
• 2 tablespoons chilled shortening
  
• 1½ tablespoons white vinegar
  
• ¼ cup very cold water
  
  

  Directions
  

1. In a food processor pulse together the flour, salt and sugar.
   
2. Add the butter and shortening and pulse 8-10 times or until the butter is in pea-size pieces and the mixture resembles coarse crumbs. Combine the vinegar and cold water and drizzle into the crumb mixture while pulsing until the mixture just forms a dough.
   
3. Remove the dough from the food processor and wrap in plastic wrap, pressing into disks. (Handle the dough as little as possible during this step.) Chill the dough for at least one hour.
   
4. Preheat the oven to 350°.
   
5. Remove the pie crust from the refrigerator and roll out very thinly on a floured surface.
   
6. Cut the dough into circles approximately 2¾ inches (70mm) in diameter and press into a mini muffin tin. Cover with plastic wrap and refrigerate for 15 minutes.
   
7. Dock the bottom of the crusts and bake for 8-10 minutes. If the costs puff too much, gently press down the sides and bottom with a rounded tool (like a measuring spoon or melon baller) while they are still hot. Allow to cool completely before filling.
   
   

   For the filling:
   

   Recipe from The America’s Test Kitchen Menu Cookbook: Kitchen-Tested Menus for Foolproof Dinner Parties; recipe here is approximately ⅓ of original
   
   

   Ingredients
   

• ⅓ cup heavy cream, chilled
  
• 1 large egg
  
• ¼ cup (1¾ ounces) sugar
  
• 2 teaspoons water
  
• 2⅔ ounces bittersweet chocolate, melted and cooled
  
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
  
• 2 tablespoons unsalted butter, cut into ½-inch pieces and softened
  
  

  Directions
  

1. Using electric hand-held mixer, whip cream on medium-low speed until foamy, about 1 minute. Increase speed to high and whip until stiff peaks form, 1 to 3 minutes. Cover and refrigerate.
   
2. Combine egg, sugar, and water in large heatproof bowl set over medium saucepan filled with ½ inch barely simmering water (don’t let bowl touch water). Using electric hand-held mixer, beat mixture on medium speed until thickened and registers 160 degrees, 7 to 10 minutes. Remove bowl from heat and continue to beat mixture until fluffy and cooled to room temperature, about 8 minutes.
   
3. Beat in chocolate and vanilla until incorporated. Beat in butter, a few pieces at a time, until well combined. Using spatula, fold in whipped cream until no streaks remain. Scrape filling into cooled pie crusts and refrigerate until set, at least 3 hours and up to 24 hours. Serve.

Man it sounds like you have what I have. It's pretty far out there, but this guy is who helped me: book. You'll be skeptical, I was too and didn't read it for a while after my mom got it for me, but just read at least 100 pages. Make sure you take several different antivirals, like thyme tea, licorice root extract, cats claw, and lobelia (especially if your skin is on fire) in addition to the other stuff he recommends. He has a bunch of helpful supplement recommendations in terms of good brands with no additives on his site. Lmk if you ever have any questions, here to help.

Everything you need to know you'll learn at the invisible school, sooner or later.

There are lots of authors I've learned from, but none wrote books specifically about the invisible school.

So if you like, I would be more than happy to recommend a few books. Have you read these?

https://www.amazon.com/Thousand-Faces-Collected-Joseph-Campbell/dp/1577315936

https://www.amazon.com/Comparing-Religions-Jeffrey-J-Kripal/dp/1405184582

https://www.amazon.com/Wonders-Sky-Unexplained-Objects-Antiquity/dp/1585428205

Honestly, Joanna Gaines’ new cook book, Magnolia Table , is absolutely perfect for go-to basics. I highly recommend it!

There's a book with recipes of low cal versions of comfort food. I've only tried one recipe so far, but it was pretty good.

If you're looking for recipes and snack ideas I've loved this book!

Eat, Drink, and Weigh Less: A Flexible and Delicious Way to Shrink Your Waist Without Going Hungry https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00CKUEVT4/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_i_8XbeBbK6EYVHB

This is pretty good:
http://www.amazon.com/Now-Eat-This-Americas-Favorite/dp/0345520904

Also, not a cookbook, but I do like some of the recipes here
http://leanbodylifestyle.blogspot.com/

I have this Justin Wilson book and it’s a lot of fun. He’s probably not the finest cook to ever call himself Cajun (whole lotta margarine in the recipes), but it’s interesting to flip through and can be bought used for cheap. Look up his PBS show on YouTube, too!

I’ll give you three, just in case you’ve read the one I was gonna give you.

Good luck.

https://www.amazon.com/Comparing-Religions-Jeffrey-J-Kripal/dp/1405184582

https://www.amazon.com/Western-Esotericism-Guide-Perplexed-Guides/dp/1441136460

https://www.amazon.com/Shakespeare-Goddess-Complete-Birrell-Hughes/dp/B002C3UTM2

Holy crap, I shoulda searched Amazon first! America's First Cuisines

(Edit: this book sounds very readable from the reviews. I'm a bit regretful that it covers only "the Aztecs, the Maya, and the Inca". I'm sure the cuisine(s) of e.g. the Pacific Coast, the Great Lakes, etc, were quite different -- the nice post by Reedstilt gives an idea.)

If you had the fortitude to read for longer periods of time maybe you wouldn't have to feign knowledge. Here's a nice introduction to advaita if you're interested. https://www.amazon.com/Spiritual-Teaching-Ramana-Maharshi/dp/1590301390

That's nice that you're in this together! Since I've started eating healthier my boyfriend has jumped on the bandwagon with me :)

People have suggested

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00CKUEVT4/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_i_8XbeBbK6EYVHB

and

https://www.amazon.com/Eat-Right-Life-Common-Eating/dp/0615378412/ref=pd_bxgy_121_img_2?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_i=0615378412&pd_rd_r=AWMQ1VZTGR88Y9WKSBGB&pd_rd_w=J8MZ2&pd_rd_wg=bSt3K&psc=1&refRID=AWMQ1VZTGR88Y9WKSBGB

and to watch this video for more information on starvation mode:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1a8zuTfZhK0&list=PLp4G6oBUcv8w7mOuaiouhArVD2J4JMW5Z&index=10

America's First Cuisines was my source in favor of the wild maize theory. It was published in 1991, and says "At the moment, some people think that the ancestor of maize was maize. This hypothesis has been with us a long time, although for it while it was submerged under a sea of other scenarios, and it seems to be surfacing again.", and then mentions 80,000 year old maize pollen being found under the Belles Artes concert hall in Mexico City, and teosinte not being good eats.

Doing a bit of googling, I found this paper from 2001, which suggests that the debate has been more or less settled via genetic evidence in favor of an origin from teosinte.

this book: http://www.amazon.com/Spiritual-Teaching-Ramana-Maharshi/dp/1590301390/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1323705001&sr=8-1

regarding Ramana Maharshi...this is a fantastic introduction to his self-enquiry from the Advaita Vedanta school of thought.

>I have trouble with the timing, and with selecting dishes that have distinct and complementary flavor. I don't know how do you choose the dishes that go well together and don't compete for the same resources and attention in the preparation process.

America's Test Kitchen has a very good cookbook that addresses this directly called Menu Cookbook. It's about $23 on amazon (link provided)

You could do a lot worse than V8 for a meal supplement.

For me, I get my sodium from sea, kosher, and finishing salts. If you haven't had a steak with any of the numerous flavors of finishing salts, you're missing out! I learned about finishing salts from the wonderful book Pickles, Pigs & Whiskey.

For me, I ate my fair share of cured meats, so I was careful of additional sodium. I had no way of accurately measuring, so I monitored my water cravings. This subjective measurement did me well. . . I think.

Need audio book for the following: (Paying $2 each)

https://www.amazon.com/Medical-Medium-Liver-Rescue-Gallstones/dp/B07JDSJYSP/ref=tmm_aud_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1550116743&sr=8-5

https://www.amazon.com/Medical-Medium-Anthony-William-ebook/dp/B012EI538Y/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1550116743&sr=8-3&keywords=healing+medium

https://www.amazon.com/Medical-Thyroid-Healing-Anthony-William-ebook/dp/B0746P1LGV/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1550116743&sr=8-2&keywords=healing+medium