Cooking

Restaurant standards, a mile above sea level.

I cook most nights, almost entirely plants, and I hold what comes out of my kitchen to the standard of somewhere I would happily pay to eat. These are the recipes that earned a place in the rotation.

86 recipes published so far. More get added as they prove themselves.

From the kitchen

Two plated dishes with a chili glaze and herbs A grain bowl with greens and a glass of wine Produce and flowers spread across the kitchen island A plated dinner with green beans and tomatoes A tray of fire-roasted eggplant, peppers, and onions Jars of the first salsa verde of the season A herbed loaf on a sheet pan, dogs asleep in the background A chopped salad topped with triangles of feta A burger on a sesame bun A flatbread sandwich with sliced avocado A sheet pan of tofu and broccoli A bowl of pasta with shaved cheese A pan of eggplant stew on the stove A tray of rolled bites ready for the oven Cabbage noodles under a mushroom bolognese A tray of mini tart canapes

The house rules

01

Restaurant standard, at home

The gap between eating out and eating in has closed. The test for anything I make is whether it could be served somewhere good. That means composition and intent, not assembled calories.

02

Plants, on purpose

Whole food and plant-based, using Michael Greger's Daily Dozen as the operational checklist rather than a rulebook. Beans three times a day is a constraint that makes cooking more interesting, not less.

03

Luxury is precision, not excess

Selectivity over restriction. Stop at excellent instead of at full. A restaurant has to offer something I could not or would not make at home to be worth the trip.

The knowledge about what to eat has been settled for years. What was missing was the layer between knowing and doing it consistently: the planning, the inventory, the ordering, the timing, the hundred small decisions that make a week of good food happen. That layer is what I built, and it is the same thing I build at work.

Which is why this section sits next to the one about the company. Same problem, different kitchen.

Open source

The system is open source

The meal-planning layer behind this kitchen is a public template called Cooking with Claude: 40+ tested recipes, inventory tracking, shopping lists, a complete Thanksgiving run with an hour-by-hour timeline, and an MCP server, all in markdown a Claude Code session can operate. Fork it and make it yours.

dmorrill/cooking-with-claude on github → the post that introduced it →

Everything here is tested at 5,280 feet

Water boils at about 202°F in Denver instead of 212°F, so beans take longer, bread rises faster, and anything simmered needs more time and a lid. Where altitude changes a recipe, the recipe says so.

Technique

Appetizers

Soups

Cold Tomato-Strawberry Gazpacho

A bright, strawberry-forward chilled gazpacho. Blend, balance, chill. Great use for berries about to turn.

~1.5 quarts (4 starters / 2 light meals) · Easy

Salads

Mains

Sides

Breads

Grandma Morrill's Cinnamon Rolls

Kevin's grandmother made cinnamon rolls. Nobody has her recipe card. I baked version one, he tasted it, and he remembered the thing...

6 rolls · Overnight, plus about 2 hours in the morning · Hard

Breakfast

Sauces

Desserts

Apple Pie

8 · About 1.5 hours active, plus 2 hours cooling · Medium

Cocktails

Writing

I write about food too

Cooking with an AI sous chef, culinary wanderlust, and what happens when you point a systems habit at dinner.

Read the food writing