“What do you want for dinner?”
“I don't know, whatever.”
That's how it started, a familiar scene in a kitchen between a young couple who was trying to decide what to make for dinner. Me, the asker, and my boyfriend giving the most vague answer on the planet. Remembering a story from my friend who had a grandma with an amazing sense of humor, I took a page out of her book and said simply, “Okay, I'll start making whatever.”
'Whatever' is now code for stir fry, a stir fry made with whatever I have on hand, usual rice, a meat, and whatever vegetables you'd normally have within a stir fry (peppers, broccoli, baby corn, water chestnuts, etc.) and some Asian sauces (hoisin and soy seem to be the standards) along with a few spices like ginger and garlic. It was the ultimate experiment and honestly I wasn't sure it would work the first time. I was expecting a pile of something maybe edible but, more likely than not, gross. You can imagine my surprise when he said he loved it and I enjoyed it too.
Since then I've made up plenty of foods, often simple things that don't take much of a culinary genius to figure out but still, going off recipe and trusting what I know is like driving a car off road; there is an equal chance of getting stuck as there is of having fun and exploring the countryside. So how do you avoid the pitfalls of going off recipe? How do you make your own recipe out of what you wish to make? How do you start to know what pairs with what?
The simplest way to go off recipe is to know the food you are cooking. With the stir fry, I knew what I have had at various restaurants before. I knew what flavors were popular and went well together. If I didn't, I would have probably had less luck. If you want to be able to make something on the fly, you need to try a lot of foods in order to know what tastes good together. You can guess slightly, for example I was guessing in terms of amounts of spices and the like, but you have to also be able to know the flavors.
Another recipe I tend to do off the cuff is cranberry sauce. Every Thanksgiving I make it and everyone loves it to the point where I think if I didn't bring it one year, people would start asking if I was okay. As anyone who has made the stuff knows, you boil the berries in liquid (I use orange juice to add flavor) and sugar until they start popping like mad, and then add the spices while stirring them together. However, that mixture is like pure hot lava if you try to taste it at that point, so while getting the spice mix is key, its hard to tell if the mix you have made is any good or if you have too much of one spice. This is where I use my other tip for those going off recipe: follow your nose. If it's too hot to taste, you can still smell it and smell is a surprisingly integral part of our ability to taste, the nose picking up what our tongues cannot in terms of flavor. Your tongue can taste sweet but your nose is what tells you it is milk chocolate over french vanilla as the scent goes up your nasal passages while you eat. It's why foods taste different if you have a stuffed up nose.
With my cranberry sauce, I constantly smell it, searching for each unique scent of cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves, and allspice. Cinnamon can easily overwhelm all three but if you have way too much nutmeg, it will make your tongue go a bit numb (nutmeg is very interesting in that regard). So you have to balance them, sniffing to see if there is too much cinnamon while keeping tabs on how much nutmeg has been added versus cloves or allspice that have very distinct earthy tones. It's only once I'm certain it is both mixed well and that cinnamon hasn't taken over that I trust it enough to put it in a glass container and take it to my parents' house.
The last piece of advice I have when it comes to going off recipe or making your own, is to take as many risks as you feel comfortable with and experiment as necessary. I wasn't completely sure that ground ginger from the store would work well in a stir fry, I knew ginger goes in stir fry but I associate ground ginger with pumpkin pie normally. I took the risk, and boy did it pay off. However, I was comfortable with that risk because I knew one form of ginger already worked. If you know something will probably work, it's worth the risk of it not. Though as I have found out, when in doubt, you can always ask the internet if a certain substitution or change of style will work. There are a lot more cooks out there than me who know their stuff, and surely someone has the answer.
Speaking of answers, what are your tips for creating new recipes? Anything you made that you were particularly proud of? Let me know and share advice with each other. After all, we're all learning together.