Take a few handfuls of parsley, one of mint, one of coriander/cilantro, one of basil, one of oreganum, and chop them all fine. Mince a few cloves of garlic, the zest of 1 lemon, and a 1-inch piece of ginger, then pound together with 1-2 tbs poudre douce (spice mixture with pepper, cubebs, cardamom, nutmeg, cloves, cinnamon and sugar). Mix that with a few tbs apple cider vinegar and enough olive oil to make a vinaigrette, dress the chopped herbs with it. Meanwhile, soak a few cut-up slices of white bread in verjuice, and crumble this in with the leaves, mixing everything up. Then thin down with verjuice, beat to emulsify, until a nice thick runny, pourable consistency. Omit the coriander if people are sensitive to it, and use any combo of herbs that taste good.
The end result is a little like a cross between gremolata and chimichurri only (I find) a little sweeter because of the verjuice not vinegar for most of it. Note - this is not at all like Mexican salsa verde.
Originally, this was used for fish, but it also goes very nicely with grilled meats or a roast leg of lamb (up the mint content in that case). You can even use it on pasta, like pesto.
Ironically, not soaking beans has made my beans much softer.
Used to be, I thought you had to soak beans overnight in order to get them to cook. So I’d buy beans, planning on cooking them with an overnight soak, and they’d sit in my pantry for a year or more before I finally got organized enough to soak them overnight. By that point they’d have dried out completely, and no matter how long I cooked them, they’d never soften. So I’d always buy canned beans.
Eventually I read an article by someone (Mark Bittman, maybe?) who said not to bother soaking black beans, just cook them with salt and onion for two hours. I ran out, bought some beans, cooked them that way, and they were delicious, far better than canned.
Since then, I’ve pretty much stopped buying canned beans. Cooking them is way easier, and because I or my wife cooks them so often, the beans are fresh and delicious.
I’m not sure how easy it is to get hold of, BTW. We have a local brand and I know it’s available in the UK, Oz and NZ (and the Middle East & Iran) Outside California, though, not sure where you’d get it. Maybe Middle Eastern speciality grocers?
I am the cook of the house and have been doing all the cooking when I am home since I was 21, I am 62. I have plenty of recipes but they are all in my head, I have zero interest in how anyone else ever makes anything. I have no cookbooks in my house at all. BUT, people that use recipes they read or borrow every single time are still cooks in my eye.
I’m inclined to go with the majority of posters on the thread, to the effect that it’s a mixture – not 100% the one or the other, for most people. Oddly enough, my brother and I – both quite keen cooks – were recently talking about this issue. We agreed that I tend to be a rather slavish recipe-follower – even to the point that, when I’m cooking for him-and-me, though I know that there could be a potential modification to the recipe concerned, which would be to the taste of both of us; I’m liable to boringly take the “as prescribed” route. He’s at the other extreme – very much a “seat-of-the-pants” cook, tending to be scornful of precise recipes. We concurred that much more of the time than not, his creations succeed; but just occasionally, they’re a bit disastrous, in situation where if he’d been more faithfully following a pre-set recipe, they’d have worked better. One comes to feel, pretty much “as long as it’s broad”.
I’m definitely a recipe person - I bake a LOT more than I cook, and I learned to make baked goods before savory meals, so that probably has something to do with it. I’ve never really understood the whole “I just throw things together” method - I guess that for me, food preparation is more a science than an art (although in the end it’s both, of course). I even use a measuring spoon to make Ovaltine.
Baking is a science and an art and you have to follow instruction and measure amounts or you are headed toward something that just isn’t right…
Cooking a casserole, stew, roast, or other savory meal allows a lot more room for guessing and personal touches. Then it is down to moisture levels and cooking times, not so hard.
I don’t get the whole “you can’t wing it when baking” thing. Bread, ok, fine, I follow the recipe. But carrot cake, zucchini bread, coconut-oatmeal cookies? I fake it all the time, and the final product is delicious. Substitute applesauce for oil? Of course! Cut down the sugar routinely? Yes! Use more zucchini than the recipe calls for? Nearly always! Just bake it a little longer.
It’s mostly about the bread. Yeast or powder risen you have to do things right, the measurements are important, the timing is important. I can wing some biscuits but they come out much better if I follow the recipe. Now if I baked more often I wouldn’t have to look at the written recipe as often, but I would still be following it from memory.
I disagree. I’ve eaten food made by people who follow recipes, and I’ve eaten food made by truly inspired cooks and I’ll take the inspired cook’s food any day. My mom was one of the really good cooks. She cooked by feel–did it taste right, look right, etc. I have never known a non-recipe-following cook to “throw ingredients together” in the way you describe. My mom’s summer vegetable soup was a little different each time, but it was always far from horrifying. My best friend, on the other hand, is a recipe follower. Everything I have tasted that she has made has been good, but not as good as my mom’s. That’s only two examples of many I could give.
I’m no where near the cook my mom was, but I have difficulty following recipes in the same way I don’t follow craft project instructions to the letter, either. Too much of a rebel, and too fond of doing things my own way.
The difference is in truly understanding a dish. My meat loaves are better than what my mother-in-law used to make, because I made a lot of them in college and understand why the stuff that goes into them does. That means I can make one with whatever is available, and it comes out fine. If you don’t understand a dish and throw stuff together, maybe not.
Some things - like meat loaves or stews or gumbos - are designed to take whatever you have.
Precisely. I’m not saying that every single person should use a recipe. Cooking from feel and experience is awesome! But the notion that using a recipe is not “really cooking” is an idea that steers inexperienced cooks to completely avoidable tragedy, frustration, and the belief that they “can’t cook.”.
The other day they had a Tomato RedPepper Bisque at my groceries’ deli. I bought a couple and could have gotten away with heating it and serving with a salad. Instead I bought some cod, shrimps, scallops, and mussels. I steamed the seafood and added it to the soup. I also added some old bay, sautéed celery, fish sauce, etc. I served it over rice in big soup bowls.
It was great, (and easy) but I’m not certain what it was.
Yep. I look at it this way- recipes are kind of like a template. If you’re learning how to cook, you can follow the template exactly, and assuming it’s a well-written recipe, you’ll come out with something passable.
Once you know how to cook in a general sense, you end up cooking certain dishes enough to where you essentially memorize the recipe and don’t have to measure quantities exactly, or use the probe thermometer- you can tell when it’s done by other signs.
But… when you try something new, you have to go back to the template the first few times until you get it down and can just do it without the recipe.
I mean, I can cook plenty of stuff without recipes- mashed potatoes, green bean casserole, macaroni and cheese, grilled steaks, broiled steaks, chicken-fried steaks, fried chicken, fish several ways, various sorts of barbecue, etc…
But if I’m going to try and make sausage, I still pull out the Charcuterie book. Or if I’m making Pad Thai, I still break out the cookbook, because I haven’t made either of those enough to understand them intuitively. Of course, experience makes it easier to follow a recipe, but I don’t have the ratios down by heart, and I can’t just tell if I have the right proportion of fat to meat, or palm sugar to tamarind paste without measuring based on a recipe.
