This is a story about cooking without recipes. And it doesn’t end with you picking up the phone to order pizza.
I can cook without recipes now, but to give you confidence right up front, here’s a list of some of my more memorable kitchen disasters: A spaghetti sauce that tasted mostly of salt. A shrimp and broccoli thing in which the shrimp was overdone and the broccoli almost raw. A vanilla custard topping on a chocolate dessert that was the consistency of milk.
When you start cooking without recipes, you will make mistakes. You will throw out the salty marinara. You will crunch your way through the broccoli. You will drizzle the vanilla-custardy thing over the chocolate dessertlike sauce, and everyone will love it. You will survive.
And then you will get good at it, and your skills will become instinctive.
Grandmothers cook without recipes, but that’s because they learned at the side of their mothers, day in, day out. They know how a roast should look, how a pie crust should feel, how a soup should taste, and those reflexes and instincts dictate what they do more than something written on a 3- by 5-inch card.
People don’t make time to do that today, and besides, grandmother may be downtown in the office or out hiking a mountain trail. So how do you get those instincts without 10 years at the side of a great cook? Here’s a start.
1. To cook without recipes, start with a recipe. I’m serious. Pick a dish that you’ve made often enough to know what it tastes like. Then, add or change just a couple of things. Is it normally made with ground beef? Make it with ground turkey and see how it changes. Do you normally add lemon juice? Change it to orange. Does a recipe call for a teaspoon of oregano? Add a teaspoon of basil instead. Is something made with Cheddar cheese and Tabasco? Substitute Swiss cheese and add some Dijon mustard.
The key is to use a recipe you already know well, and to change only one or two things. Otherwise, you won’t know which change you liked and which you didn’t.
2. Experiment with cheap stuff. It’s a lot easier to deal with ruined ground beef than a ruined rib roast.
3. Keep your substitutions consistent. Substitute one kind of meat for another, one spice for another, one fruit for another, one liquid for another. Don’t substitute a solid for a liquid, a meat for a starch, or a main ingredient for an accent ingredient. It’ll throw off all your proportions.
4. Taste ingredients as you add them. Have you ever tasted a drop of vanilla right on your tongue? A fresh basil leaf? Golden raisins? Cornstarch? Extra-virgin olive oil, all by itself? Red pepper versus white pepper versus black pepper? Garlic powder versus garlic salt versus fresh garlic?
If not, then you don’t know what they’re doing to your recipe. Get in the habit of tasting each ingredient as you build a recipe. Your instincts about how to do it will develop more quickly. Of course, this doesn’t go for raw meat, eggs or other things that need to be cooked to make them safe to eat. And one taste of an habanero chili is probably enough to last you a lifetime.
5. Learn from restaurant menus. Spend some time before you order building the various dishes in your head, ingredient by ingredient, and imagining how they will taste.
Imagine pasta with olive oil, garlic, sun-dried tomatoes, grilled chicken, goat cheese and capers. Then, order it and see how close you got. Were you able to taste it just by imagining the ingredients? Can you get a feel for how much of each ingredient you would need to make a whole dinner’s worth? Then, you’re probably ready to try it at home.
6. Experiment with convenience products. Is it Hamburger Helper, stroganoff-flavor? Add beef broth instead of water, saute some fresh garlic and onion when you brown the ground beef and you’ve changed it entirely. Is it a jar of spaghetti sauce? Add some fresh basil, oregano and a dash of red pepper and then adjust according to your taste. Pasta salad from a box? Add kalamata olives, sliced plum tomatoes and fresh dill. It’s cooking without a recipe, but it gives you a safe place to begin.
7. Think through a dish three ways. Creating a dish from scratch? Then think it through on the basis of flavor, color and texture. A chicken-rice-mushroom casserole is all the same color and all bland, so choose spices that will bring it to life. However, too many strong flavors will compete and cancel each other out–say, garlic, jalapeno, cumin and red wine vinegar. Everything should be a balance: Strong flavors and quiet flavors. Crunchy and smooth textures. As a crowning touch, different colors on a plate.
8. Try it on family first! If this needs an explanation, you’re more courageous than I ever was.
9. Start small. Remember that spices build, so start with a quarter-teaspoon of things such as salt, pepper or chili powder and work your way up.
10. None of this counts in baking. Baking is magic. Find fabulous recipes and follow them obsessively. You can always add nuts to brownies, coconut to cakes, or mint extract to your chocolate chip cookies, but the basic building blocks of baking need to stay in place. Otherwise, it’ll be more frustration than fun.
And, finally, trust your instincts. If it sounds weird to you, it probably won’t work. Sure, your kids eat peanut butter and marshmallow sandwiches, and chefs combine Asian and French cuisines with hardly a thought, but you and I are somewhere in the middle. When you start creating whole dishes on your own, stick with the basics until you’re confident. In the beginning, it’s more practice than creativity.
Later, however, you’ll have the fun of going to the store, making choices based on what looks good that day, cooking it on your own and seeing a lot of smiles around the dinner table. The best reward? When someone asks for a recipe and you get to say, “I didn’t have one, I just made it up.”
And sure, if it makes you feel better, keep that pizza number by the phone. On the other hand, you could create your own.
ONE-PAN POTATOES AND CHICKEN DIJON
Preparation time: 20 minutes
Cooking time: 10-15 minutes
Yield: 4 servings
4 medium potatoes, sliced
1/4-inch thick
1 pound boned, skinned chicken breasts, sliced 1/2-inch thick
2 tablespoons vegetable oil
1/4 cup prepared honey-Dijon barbecue sauce
1 teaspoon dried tarragon
1. Microwave potatoes 8 to 10 minutes until tender. Brown chicken in oil in large skillet over high heat 5 minutes.
2. Add potatoes to skillet; cook, stirring, until potatoes are lightly browned, 5 to 10 minutes. Add barbecue sauce and tarragon; toss until heated through.
Variations: Instead of tarragon, try other herbs: rosemary, dill or basil. Instead of honey-Dijon barbecue sauce, you could substitute virtually any sauce. If you go with a milder sauce, you could add some browned Italian sausage or jalapeno peppers to jazz it up. You could substitute some squash or tomatoes for some of the potatoes–but remember that potatoes take longer to cook.
Nutrition information per serving:
Calories ……….. 295 Fat ………… 16 g Cholesterol .. 60 mg
Sodium ………. 190 mg Carbohydrates .. 17 g
