Bob,
Thanks for the inspiration. Ok.. tomorrow night, I'm going for it!
lucy

"Bob Myers" > wrote in message
...
> At the risk of taking this thread off in a completely unintended direction
> (who, ME?), let me put a different $0.02 in....
>
> I don't usually use recipes as such when putting together the typical
> dinner. My approach tends be something more along the lines of
> what I like to call "Iron Chef - Home Edition" - I get home, realize
> that SOMETHING has to be done about putting food on the table,
> and then start looking through the freezer, refrigerator, and pantry
> for Tonight's Theme Ingredient. In other words, it becomes more a
> game of "hey, here's some chicken - what could I do with THAT
> tonight?" and going from there. There's even the time element -
> "let's see what Bob can make out of this in an hour!" - since the
> family usually isn't willing to wait until midnight for me to put together
> some magnificant culinary masterpiece. (Not that everything I make
> with more time available qualifies as such, but...oh, skip it...:-))
>
> Now, I know that this sort of approach is a bit scary for a lot of
> beginning cooks - the thought of "flying solo," without a recipe to
> refer to, is upsetting. And you probably DON'T want to be
> abandoning your cookbook or whatever too early in the game. But
> the point I'm trying to make is that you also need to be willing to
> stretch yourself a bit, and start to move away from a strict reliance
> on the recipes of others; be willing to experiment a bit, and try to
> apply the techniques you've learned from the recipes to other dishes
> that you put together on your own. I know I will catch a lot of flack
> from some others here with this next comment, but I'd recommend
> spending a little time watching EVERYONE'S favorite TV chef
> (OK, yes, that's being a little sarcastic), Emeril Lagasse - NOT for
> his recipes, NOT to learn something new about cooking, but for
> nothing else than absorbing a little bit of the attitude of "look, this IS
> only food we're talking about here - it's not life and death, and if it
> doesn't turn out quite right, so what? Do it different NEXT time."
> Too many people, IMHO, are just scared to death to go into their
> kitchens and have fun. So you wind up with a couple of inedible
> pork chops, or you waste a few cups of flour - we're not exactly
> talking about cutting diamonds, here. Have fun. Make the things
> YOU want, to YOUR tastes. Play with the ingredients. See what
> happens if you add a bit more or less of this or that.
>
> This doesn't, by the way, mean that recipes have no place in
> cooking, or are only for the novice. If you want to turn out something
> consistently each and every time you make it, and especially if you
> want to tell someone ELSE how to make it, you're going to need
> to measure ingredients, write things down, and so forth. All I'm
> saying is that you want to be very careful to avoid the trap of thinking
> that the Only One True And Sacred Way to make a given dish is
> given on page whatever of the Betty Crocker Cookbook. If that
> was all there was to this, we could replace every chef in the world
> with a robot.
>
> Bob M.
>
>
>