confession is good for the soup!

One of the things I hoped to improve on when undertaking these cooking challenges was my ability to follow a recipe. I'm not very good with that particular skill, not very good at all. It used to be that when I served David supper he would say "is this from a recipe or did you make it up?" and he would be all surprised when I would say that OF COURSE it was from a recipe. Except that that is only half true since, and I'm about to confess something here, I don't think I have ever once cooked something following a recipe. I have a whole groaning shelf of cookbooks that I love to look through. But food inevitably happens in my house in one of two ways. 1) I find something I like the look of in the grocery store. I buy it and bring it home, confident that I can find a recipe that will use it. 2) I find a recipe I like and try to fold ingredients I have into the shape of whatever food I'm trying to make. However, recently a third disturbing option has begun to appear. I start making one thing, find that it really doesn't seem to be working, and continue adding stuff to it until I come up with a new food. Which results in conversations like "What is it?" "Who the heck knows, it started out as cake."

I think the main problem is that I cook using my memory instead of logic. I remember what foods tasted like so I'm sure I can replicate past meals by mixing the flavours I can recall. But I am also terribly terribly impatient. I'm way beyond "Don't have pasta sauce? Try a can of seasoned tomatoes!" I'm more of a "Don't have pasta sauce? What about squash?" kinda girl. I keep trying to break myself of this bad habit but so far without success. I can't stand the thought of buying everything I need for a recipe and then getting home and discovering that I am missing, say, lemons. And then what? Do I walk back to the store and buy lemons? That's an hour and a half of walking! Do I NOT make supper? Or do I look at this recipe and say "You know what? I think I may have lemonade somewhere."

Case in point. When we lived in Toronto I adored walking to the Chinese outdoor markets near our house. One of my favourite activities was randomly selecting a product that I couldn't identify, and then bringing it home and cooking it. I tried this with bittermelon, although I was very good and asked the two asian women running the stall what it was called and what to do with it. They said peel it, soak it and fry it. Then serve it with beef. I did, and it was disgusting. One of those times you take out the seeds and peel the vegetable and the amount of flesh left after that is so minimal you wonder why people eat it at all. Then again, I went to an asian grocery store and bought Japanese noodles with a spicy sauce and they were just lovely. A definite repeat, so you never know.

I suppose I should count myself lucky that I married the one man in the world who would dutifully eat anything you put in front of him. Even his 'I will absolutely under no circumstances eat that' list is somewhat flexible. He has eaten all sorts of stuff that sometimes even I am slightly nervous about. And I'm not nervous about a lot of food. I can't afford to be, it's a survival instinct around here. Don't be afraid, though, if you come to dine, I'll make you pasta. Or something pasta-y, at least.