I’m with the Pud on this one. The best cookbook ever written is “Ratio.”
Now, I’ll grant you, that if you want Grandma’s cookies exactly the way Grandma made them, then yes, you need her recipe. But for me, following a recipe to the letter takes all the joy out of cooking. And Grandma didn’t use enough vanilla.
Yorkshire pudding is actually a great example. Equal parts milk and flour, 1/4 cup per egg. It really is that simple. And I’m sure that the first time I made it I used that ratio exactly. I haven’t done it since, at least not without some creative topping I dreamed up. Recipes are great for getting ideas, and for seeing how new cuisines are put together. The most important part of recipes are the techniques, which half the recipe websites just leave out. When in doubt, ask youtube!
All in all though, baking is just about making and keeping bubbles. Once you learn the few simple ways it’s done: cream the butter, or whip the eggs/whites, or mix the baking soda with acid, or trap the yeast in strands of gluten, or whatever. Each creates it’s own size and type of bubble. Each texture of batter/dough holds different bubbles well.
Use a recipe the first time, but just on keep doing it, and learn how you like things to be. Then do it your way. And don’t let anyone make you be afraid to mess about.
One friend called me a “jazz cook.” And I think that’s the best way of putting it. The bad side is, when something amazing happens, I can’t always repeat it. :o
I learned by standing at the foot of my bed (no footboard) - that way there is less bending down to pick things up, and you can use tennis balls - bedspread will prevent them bouncing or rolling. There is a lot less bending this way and I found it as a time saver between drops (wanting to correct mistakes/apply learning immediately).
to a lot of people, being that time-consuming is one of the ways they define “hard.”
one of the pitfalls of baking is that the ingredients can be “fluffy” like flour which can “pack” inconsistently in a measuring cup. Or can vary in density like salt; a teaspoon of table salt is going to have a lot more salt in it than a tsp. of Diamond Crystal kosher salt, which itself is going to have more salt than a tsp. of large-flake Morton’s kosher salt. 's why a number of people e.g. Alton Brown, J. Kenji Lopez-Alt recommend measuring baking ingredients by weight.
Even simpler recipe for Yorkshire pudding is equal parts of all three ingredients. I was using eggs from my mom’s chickens, which are unusually large. So I started by cracking the eggs into a measuring cup, and then putting in the same amount of milk and flour.
And all of the traditional Thanksgiving dishes are easy. That’s how they became traditional: When you’re feeding twenty people at a time, you need something that’s cheap and easy to feed to 20 people.
Do you mean equal by weight? I’ve heard that works well in wet/humid weather. I’ve never heard equal by volume before. But that just illustrates the point: It’s really not as fussy as people make it out to be.
While it’s not that difficult to get used to driving on the other side of the road, there are plenty of reasons not to deal with a hire car on holiday. I hate the hassle of dealing with a car, parking, petrol, and getting scammed for the most minor of cosmetic damage. Plus, I like to drink. So, I’ll stick to trains unless I absolutely have to use a car to get to a place.
Grafting plants (apples, pears, cacti and whatever) is viewed as a mysterious and arcane skill.
I teach as many young folks as I can, and they are amazed when they actually produce nicely grafted plants.
It is really inexpensive, and greatly rewarding to produce your own tree from a bit of twig grafted to a bit of rootstock.