so, this blog will document my attempt at cooking without recipes. i’ve been cooking a long time, but i tend to be a rule-follower kind of girl. recently i’ve started getting interested in figuring out how to cook food without 1) following recipes and 2) with tastier results. it’s not that i must follow a recipe, but i feel more comfortable with recipes, and let’s be honest–generally recipes (written by people other than myself) generate better tasting food than what i come up with on my own. when cooking without guidance i’ve found that i tend to get flustered at key moments, throw in too much of certain ingredients, over/under-cook, and neglect the essential ingredients that result in the right balance. like how a squeeze of lemon juice often brightens dishes. i get that from recipes, but forget to do that on my own.
to get me started i’ve been perusing the scientific cookbooks, namely harold mcgee’s On Food and Cooking and CookWise: The Hows and Whys of Successful Cooking. and it’s starting to pay off. last night i made pasta with scallops, asparagus and ramps (which i was very excited to find at the grand army plaza greenmarket). and while it wasn’t great, it was good. i realized what would have put it over the edge was a splash of white wine after the initial sauteing step. and the only reason i didn’t was totally lame and embarrassing–I wanted to drink the wine instead! yep, totally lame. and embarrassing. i sacrificed the good of the dish for our drinking pleasure.
this morning, despite drinking that wine last night, i managed to pull it together and made a successful “no-hands” breakfast: poached eggs on toast, roasted asparagus, and sausage. i was pleased with my egg poaching abilities, and the roasted asparagus was tasty, but the best part (and my recipe-free triumph) was the sauce. a hates hollandaise, and i didn’t really want to do that anyway, so i melted some creme fraiche with a little chicken broth, added some grated parmesan, and a splash of truffle oil at the end. and it totally worked! it was great on the eggs and the asparagus, and seemed like a well-balanced sauce, or flavoring, or whatever.
my recipe-free cooking streak ended later in they day with some baking (baking will be the ultimate challenge. baking recipe-free is totally intimidating). rhubarb was on sale through fresh direct, so with a fresh supply of rhubarb and strawberries i mixed up some rhubarb strawberry pudding cake. of course, the food made from a recipe is the only dish i have a picture of…
