Recipes or Guidelines?

 

Have you ever watched Good Eats? Host Alton Brown explains the science behind various cooking techniques and breaks down the reasons for performing particular steps in cooking. 

Have you ever watched Chopped or Beat Bobby Flay? Cooks are asked to highlight a particular ingredient(s) or create a specific dish and the meals are compared and judged.

Have you ever planned on cooking dinner, with a particular recipe in mind, only to find you are missing an ingredient?

What do you do? Do you scrap the entire idea of cooking? Switch to a completely different meal? Order pizza? Many times, I try to work through and around it.

Also, when I see a recipe, I often consider it a list of suggestions. Frequently, I have to adjust ingredients to find a combination of gluten-free and dairy-free, or simply omit items I know my family is unwilling to eat. (Took 30 years to find out my son doesn't care for baked potatoes - ah, but that's a story for another day.)

If I wrote you a list of ingredients, I bet you could figure out a way to make a spectacular dish. And maybe it would or wouldn't match the end result I had in mind. Have you ever cooked this way? Or do you need to know the details and measure precisely?  I understand the need for this behavior with baking and maybe that's part of the reason why I chose not to bake very much but for cooking - ah, I go by instinct.

So, this weekend, I will probably create one dish out of ingredients on hand and see what I come up with - fingers crossed it's delicious and leaves me feeling Fed Well.