While reading a post on the Amateur Gourmet about Weekend Brunch, I ended up reading about Tad’s Roasted Potatoes. In the preamble to the recipe, there was this from Amanda Hesser about her husband Tad Friend:
[He] is a good cook, but not the kind who sees time in the kitchen as a moment for free-association with ingredients. The notion of playing around with recipes in the spirit of experimentation is one that has never occurred to him. Tad is the type of cook who prefers to find a few recipes he likes and master them..
I chuckled and thought “that sounds like me” which got me thinking almost immediately ”but I want to create recipes too”.
Recipe Construction
I’ve been thinking about creating recipes since I started getting into cooking. Googling “creating recipes” doesn’t reveal much on the subject – inspiration, perspiration, investigation and even desperation can and do seem to play a role in the process. Like Tad, I’m usually interested in mastering a recipe so I can make it time and again and enjoy it with family and friends. I’m not one to just “play around” for the sake of creating a recipe. Or am I?
I recently picked up a 1997 copy of The Joy of Cooking and was wading through the recipes on salads over lunch. As I’m eating my hand-made garnished green salad I had one of those “Ah Ha” moments. I realized that I can and do create recipes. I created that salad that morning out of what was on hand in my fridge – a recipe for a salad:
- 2 cups chopped Romain (about 1/2 a stalk)
- 10 cherry tomatoes, sliced in half
- 1/4 of a cucumber sliced thin and the pieces quartered
- 1 scallion cut into 1/4″ pieces, white and green parts
- 1 carrot peeled and grated
- 8-10 seasoned croutons
- 1 left over piece of fried fish
Combine in a small traveling container, store in the fridge until lunch time and dress with 2-3 tbsp of balsamic vinaigrette just before eating.
Now I’m sure that other people have created that same salad before and the ingredient list is not unique, but I consulted no book or Internet site to make it. Likewise, my fish fry recipe is mine – another “seat of the pants” combination as was the one for Chicken Romano. The one for hash browns was the result of a problem solved.
Different Paths
In looking at “my” recent recipes each one started from a different creative point:
- Salad – I needed to fix a lunch and had left over fish and some fresh veggies
- Fried Fish – I wanted to explore frying and needed a simple example
- Chicken Romano – Can I make a passable chicken dish with what I have on hand
- Hash Browns – I wanted better texture
With the exception of the Chicken Romano, all the others are quite simple. In looking through the salad recipes in Joy, some of those are 3 ingredients! Avocado citrus salad for example has sliced avocado, grapefruit and oranges. That could be sliced up fresh at work for lunch. Recipes do not have to be complex to be good, they just have to be, well, good to eat!
In my day job I write software and people have asked me about how I do that. My usual reply is that its a “creative process” – sometimes it’s inspiration, some times perspiration, or a problem to solve or a “I bet I can do it this way” or “better”. I guess good cooking and recipe construction isn’t that different from writing good software.
