How to Cook: Recipes

I'm not a recipe cook.

Some people that make foods (especially bakers) cook by strict recipes: exactly one level cup of that, one tablespoon of this, a heaping teaspoon of that. Cakes are the weird one- you do want to stick pretty closely to the recipe due to fluffiness factors.

However, I'm going Primal. No flour (grains), yeast (grain puffer/flora imbalancer), no sugar. I can't actually say yeast messes up your gut flora, but I'm going to research that. It's a personal opinion that is likely wrong. That means most of the particular recipes that go with flour are out of bounds. Bread, that's not a recipe food. Throw yeast, flour, butter, and sugar, with maybe an egg into a bowl, mix, add a little water, knead, let rise, knead, let rise, bake. I used to love to make bread.

A little history of me as a cook: I started messing with food with my sister in an attempt to make pinwheel cookies. We mixed the white part and the chocolate parts together and had nice light brown cookies. Dad might have helped with that. We were about four and five, and we didn't know that the pinwheel part of pinwheel cookies came from splitting the dough into brown and white and rolling two layers together.
I successfully made dog biscuits that were moist and chewy. They tasted horrible and were too salty. The dogs didn't complain though.
Cabbage stew, which is not a stew at all, was part of a recipe collection in fourth grade. It's cabbage, beef broth (or veggie broth), potatoes, and maybe corned beef. I thought I was a chef. It's good though. Mom still makes it for Erin when she complains.

Though we wrote down the recipe for cabbage stew and at least had a recipe for the cookies, my best successes came in college when I didn't really follow a recipe. I sort of had a recipe for Mom's potato soup (still working on mastering that one), but I would typically just throw some things together in a pan and call it delicious.

Recipes are good, but I haven't yet found them very necessary. I've tried to record a few methods a time or two. Tuna salad, for example, needs just enough mayo to make it sticky, a good squirt of mustard, and a spoon of pickle relish.

My mother doesn't make the same thing twice. She makes her potato soup by the same guidelines every time, but sometimes is very thick, cheesy, and creamy, and other times it's pretty watery. You add some flour... but that's the directions.

The point is, recipes are not laws you have to follow. Don't have sea salt? Use regular. No sense wasting a recipe. Use sweet potatoes instead of regular. Skip the sugar. Play, experiment, try.
Don't have ground beef, but you have sausage? BINGO. My mom and I cannot make chili together. She uses hot sausage, and I use ground beef. They don't mix! Mom's Chili is about the only thing I don't like to eat that she makes. For me, half the fun in cooking is flying by the strings on your apron. You can't guess what might suddenly go missing, be spilled by the cat, or overcook right at the wrong minute.

If you're making a massive dish, don't experiment with totally new methods. Cook small first. You know what you like without having to eat a lot of food that didn't turn out to taste good to you or having to throw it away. You don't need a recipe as much as you need your senses, your common sense, and a dash of instinct.