Seven kitchen rules for these guides
Every guide on The Home Range was written to the rules below. They are here so you can see the limits as well as the care. Rules last changed 2026-10-26.
1. Technique comes from teaching kitchens
How searing, roasting, braising, steaming and measuring work is explained from the Iowa State University food-preparation lab manual written for its FSHN 1150 food preparation course, and from Mississippi State University Extension. The name for browning chemistry, the Maillard reaction, is taken from the National Library of Medicine's subject headings. Knife and stovetop fire safety follow OSHA and the US Fire Administration. Recipe blogs, cookware makers, forums and video channels are never the basis for a statement.
2. A printed temperature needs a safety agency behind it
A temperature or a safety time appears as a number only when the USDA Food Safety and Inspection Service or the FDA prints it in a document the guide names. The teaching sources do mention oven settings and browning temperatures; those are left out and replaced with what to watch, hear and smell for. Each Celsius figure is worked out from the Fahrenheit one and rounded to a single decimal place.
The short version
No FSIS or FDA figure, no number on the page.
3. Myths stay out, even popular ones
A claim nobody cited can back up is dropped, however often cooks repeat it. Searing, for example, is never said to lock moisture in.
4. Own words, labelled examples
Sources are restated in the site's own sentences rather than quoted. The joins between facts, the explanations of why, and any arithmetic are the site's own work, not the sources'. Cooking terms are defined where they first come up. Any worked example carries an "Example" label, and the cook in it is imaginary.
5. Say how far the checking went
Each cited document is listed in research/sources.json with the handful of figures or phrases the site relies on. On 2026-10-26 a script (npm run sources) fetched each of the 19 pages a single time and searched the text for those 70 items; all pages loaded and all 70 were present. That is the whole of the machine check. It confirms the wording exists in the source. It does not compare a guide's reasoning with the source, and no person has done that comparison yet. Every guide shows that 2026-10-26 date as its "last reviewed against sources" date.
6. Be open that a machine wrote it
The guides were written by an AI model working from the cited documents. No human editor, professional cook or food-safety specialist has reviewed them. Its line drawings were coded for the site and depict nothing real: no product, no person, no actual kitchen. More on how the site came together is on the about page.
7. Stay unattached
The site belongs to no cookware brand, appliance maker, shop or agency, and it has nothing to do with the Cook'n recipe software. Equipment is described by kind, never by maker, and nothing is recommended for purchase. Sources appear by title only, with no clickable links out. If links arrive later they will serve the reader, and any paid one will say so.
If a figure has moved since
The 19 documents were fetched and searched on 2026-10-26, one time, and that pass is the only one there has been. Nothing is set up to repeat it, and nobody watches the agencies for revisions, so FSIS or the FDA may have changed a temperature or a holding time since that date. Their current document is the one to cook by, so pull it up before you trust any number here. With no inbox for readers either, a slip on these pages could go unnoticed. Any correction that does get made to a page will carry its date on that page.