Friday, December 19, 2008

Cooking Without a Map

In the process of dumping a couple years of accumulated magazines, I have to page through some of them for tidbits worth saving: a page of photos, a neat diagram, a reference to a book, a sweater with great colors...but mostly it's recipes. When I find a recipe I want, I go to the magazine's website and copy the recipe to a notepad file. Later when I'm in the mood I copy those recipes to larger formatted documents. I have hundreds of pages of saved recipes, from avocado-sour cream dip to elaborate cakes and pastries. Recognizing that I'll never in a lifetime manage to plow through a tenth of these, lately I've been deleting like crazy, and, most importantly, not adding new recipes unless they sound both very different from all others (in a good way) and are brief and simple enough to entice lazy-ass me into trying them.

Some of my all-time favorite dishes come from saved magazine recipes. Cornmeal biscuits. Sweet potato biscuits. Brussels sprouts with pecans and roasted chestnuts. Raspberry jam brownies. But most days, I just decide what I'd like to eat for dinner, and shop accordingly. Sometimes there's leftovers I build a new meal around, not wanting to waste them. I've been known to buy ingredients for soup for dinner just because the LaBrea 3-cheese semolina bread was still warm when I passed it in D'Agostinos and I just had to buy it.

This article by chef Daniel Patterson says very concisely what I experience every day in my tiny kitchen. It's also what I experience teaching inexperienced gardeners about orchid growing. You come to understand that every vegetable and every fish is different, and you have to poke and prod and taste the food as it cooks to know when it's done or how to season it; a recipe gives a hint for doneness, but after that you judge for yourself; the seasoning that caught your eye reading the recipe may need adjusting to your own taste. Likewise, figuring out if a plant wants or needs repotting or just more water or food or light becomes second nature. Recipes, and gardening advice, are very good starting points, but after a while the process should become intuitive.

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