I like to cook. It is my retreat from life. I shrink back and center my thoughts in my taste buds. It simplifies things and it makes me happy. It may not come as a surprise, though, when I tell you that I approach cooking a little differently than most people.
Let me explain.
When most people cook, they fix in their minds something that they have cooked or eaten before and have decided that they would like to make again. To do that, they will turn to a recipe - a step by step instruction list for re-creating a particular dish. I find this rather restrictive. That would mean that I am limited to things for which I have the instructions. What if I don't have the instructions for what I want to make? What if I've never actually had what I want to make? When I cook, I rarely have an already experienced end result in mind. Instead, I have an idea of the flavors and textures I would like in my dinner and I put ingredients together to create that.
This means that there aren't really neat labels for the foods I make. When I was growing up, we liked to eat spaghetti. When somebody requested spaghetti, everybody knew exactly what that meant - there was (and still is) only one way to make spaghetti at my family's house. When I make spaghetti now, it's not that I'm working towards any particular model of spaghetti, I've just decided that a certain blend of flavors and textures sounds good to me and the result fits under the heading of "spaghetti-like foods."
It helps that I have a very well established connection between my taste buds and my brain - or more precisely, between my taste buds and my memory. I can recall flavors very easily. I can also combine those flavors in my mind to create new and exciting possibilities. I can quite literally read a recipe and taste on my mind's tongue the final product. This can be quite helpful when I'm trying to find something that sounds good to make. It can also be a burden. Have you noticed that things you buy from the store have recipes on them? Most of those recipes don't really taste that great. How do I know? I've read and sampled them. Here's the million dollar piece of advice for the day: never make a recipe off of the mayonaise jar. Every time I accidently read a recipe for casserole off the rear of my Best Foods I gag.
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2 comments:
Hooray for another blog entry! I have been quite lonely for your unique brand of thinking. For my own part, I like the comfort of remembering a favorite taste sensation and knowing that--with a little care--I can reproduce the exact flavor again someday. Some things are just so delicious that it would be a tragedy not to be able to experience them over and over again. On the other hand, sometimes, even when people are following a recipe they forget to add the sugar to the pumpkin pie (no names are to be mentioned so as to protect the not-so-innocent...).
PS Your father is going to gag when he reads the part about the mayo... I wish I could watch him read it!
Here is a recipe for you to experience.
Take one Joseph. Roll him in a doghouse with Rocky. Sprinkly generously with some cinnamon. How did that taste?
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