On Recipes

Oct 8, 2023

Before I start throwing too many recipes around, I feel I should post some warnings, disclaimers, and general rules-of-thumb for their interpretation.

• The biggest one is that when I’m cooking, I almost never measure. I’m an intuitive cook, albeit one with a pretty solid grounding in basic techniques. As far as I’m concerned, most recipes are departure points; there are vanishingly few I follow to the specific detail every time. Thus, in any recipes I publish here, measurements are almost always going to be approximations.
• As a general rule, I cut way back on salt. This is because I have issues with high blood pressure and a family history of heart disease, and because in my opinion, we tend to oversalt food in our society. My general philosophy is to use just enough salt during cooking as is needed for its mechanical / chemical processes, and let people season to taste on the plate.
• The first rule of cooking with alcohol in my (or really, any) recipes:
  Cook with something you actually like to drink. In almost every circumstance, you’re going to be reducing the quantity of liquid, which is going to concentrate the flavor of the beverage. If you don’t like it in the bottle, you’re not going to like it in the food.
  At the same time, use some common sense. For example, don’t cook with the 1842 Chateau Connard that costs you $18,427.19 per bottle; there are perfectly acceptable wines that are available for less than $15. If you don’t know any, find a store that does tastings. (and invite me. we’ll have fun!)
• If you don’t like the flavor of an ingredient or don’t happen to have it on hand, it’s absolutely OK to leave it out or substitute something else.
  You do need to use a little common sense here too; leaving out some specific spice generally isn’t problematic (although it may change the key character of the dish, e.g. paprika in Chicken Paprikash). Leaving out a liquid ingredient altogether is almost always problematic, however, so those are the types of things you’ll want to swap out instead.
  Will your result be the same as mine? No – but here’s the secret: I don’t get exactly the same result each time either… which is what makes life and cooking fun, interesting and multi-dimensional. Who wants humdrum predictability?