August 1 ist the Swiss national day. Fireworks and explosions! Happily, it is raining. đ
@vesto recently asked whether we âuse a base recipe to start out with and start tweakingâ or âimagine a dish that might be neat and just jump in/start experimentingâ.
I think itâs hard to start from nothing. After all, Iâm standing in my kitchen and want to cook something, so I start with the ingredients I have at hand and the ingredients I have at hand are based on vague notions of existing recipes. It is extremely rare for me to get a book with a recipe and shop for the ingredients.
When you buy groceries, do you meal plan, or do you buy staples and improvise? â 2021-03-14 How to eat
I always start with something I know and one thing leads to the next. Say Iâm looking at spaghetti. I know I need a sauce. This can be onion and wine or water based, e.g. tomato sauce, or oil based, e.g. pesto, garlic. And I know some avenues I donât like, e.g. eggs and carbonara. Then Iâll look at what I have, e.g. what do I have in the fridge? Zucchini, aubergines, red beet or carrots? Perhaps Iâll find carrots. Sounds like tomato sauce with carrots!
Iâll try to remember interesting combos I had elsewhere, like that carrot and ginger soup, so maybe spaghetti with onions, tomato, carrot and ginger.
As for spices, Iâll look at my collection. Ginger can be hot, so maybe more chili. Spaghetti could use oregano but may that doesnât fit with chili. A typical curry of mine would start with onions, cumin and fennel seeds. Then, once there is a bit of water in there, cilantro seeds, maybe some garam masala for depth?
Thatâs how things develop.
Thus, something like pasta and veggies with a bit of tomato sauce is basically a pattern that allows endless variation.
pasta and veggies with a bit of tomato sauce
Discovering new patterns that you can vary endlessly is much harder, of course.
Sometimes Iâm stuck at local maxima. When I make apricot dumplings, there is exactly one alternative: use prunes instead of apricot. But I donât vary anything else.
So looking back at what I just wrote I guess there are two approaches: recipes that are âperfectâ where I donât vary anything and âpatternsâ that vary endlessly.
The âperfectâ recipes were written down a long time ago, sometimes handed down from my grandparents. They appear in old ring binders with my handwriting when I was ten, or my momâs handwriting. I might recognize the cookies that my grandmother used to make. Sometimes itâs recipes I know I copied from somewhere because I remember my aunt making something like it. I didnât get her recipe but I found something that reproduced the results. Most of these are cakes and cookies.
âPatternsâ can vary infinitely, like veggies with tomato sauce and pasta. There is no point in writing down all the variations because every time I make it, the ingredients differ and itâs always good. It doesnât actually matter whether itâs carrots or zucchini, wether I use chilli or oregano, itâs always tasty.
Which is also why my food wiki isnât taking off. There are basically a handful of âperfectâ recipes and there seems to be no need for me to add anything else. Hm.
â#Cooking
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This Is the first article Iâve read on gemini. I love trying to cook with no recipe, just a pile of ingredients, and a can do attitude
â Diakanos 2023-08-01 23:47 UTC
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This is the way! đ
â Alex 2023-08-02 09:20 UTC