A few things that would be good to understand about recipes:
I personally don’t buy any recipe books unless it is a very unique one. Most recipe/cookbooks are given to me as gifts. Today’s world has just about any recipe or technique at your finger tips thru the internet. I usually buy magazine, technique, how-to, and/or culinary text/educational books.
I have learned many ways of cooking or preparing food just by working with or beside others. Most of my recipes are in my head. and I modify them to the available manpower, ingredients, storage, cooking times, and proper handling that is available. From there I can tweak them and create different tastes, textures, colors, flavors and combinations. I can however produce them (recipes) in bulk format to be written down for others in the galley.
Usually we (I) make it a practice (in the Galley) to not take anyones recipes for several reasons, but here are a few I can think of right now.
General suggestions -however- do help. Because they stimulate the ‘how to’ process of what exactly we may be able to cook with what we have…and if its feasible for time and preparation.
Below is a widget that display some recipes from allrecipes.com . I chose this for those of you who would like to see some good and ever expanding recipe collections that even I use in the kitchen. Allrecipes.com is not the fancy Michelin 3 star or NYC 4 star rated restaurant food (although I would say some of their recipes probably taste better)…BUT everyday ‘Good Stuff’!
In addition to that allrecipes.com tells how many star rating it is out of 5 stars, and it tells you how many people voted on it. For example I want the simplest, best tasting, pumpkin pie recipe there is on the site. One recipe has 5 stars but only 2 people voted on it, so I go to the next one that has 4.5 stars but 67 people say it was good. I would pick that one. Then to take it a step further, if 3 recipes had about the same rating and people voting…then I would pick the one with the least and easiest ingredients to get and the simplest instructions to put the dish together.
Also, allrecipes.com has user reviews for the recipes so even though you see a 5 star recipe voted by 200 people they may still tell you it was a little bland and to add some hot sauce. So then if you have time, you see if it was an overall consensus that it was bland and then adjust accordingly.
If that wasn’t enough, allrecipes.com has a US and Metric scaling and conversion calculator for making those small recipes feed hundreds of people. So simple, so easy…But yes, you still need to know how to cook.
If you really want to take it a little deeper, Cooks Illustrated (.com) is like the online consumer report magazine for cooks but that will cost you a yearly subscription for access to their site and there is so much more than the magazine at your fingertips.
I personally don’t buy any recipe books unless it is a very unique one. Most recipe/cookbooks are given to me as gifts. Today’s world has just about any recipe or technique at your finger tips thru the internet. I usually buy magazine, technique, how-to, and/or culinary text/educational books.
I have learned many ways of cooking or preparing food just by working with or beside others. Most of my recipes are in my head. and I modify them to the available manpower, ingredients, storage, cooking times, and proper handling that is available. From there I can tweak them and create different tastes, textures, colors, flavors and combinations. I can however produce them (recipes) in bulk format to be written down for others in the galley.
Usually we (I) make it a practice (in the Galley) to not take anyones recipes for several reasons, but here are a few I can think of right now.
- Usually smaller recipes are not translated well for larger groups of people.
- Multiplying does NOT always work when using smaller recipes.
- Lack of or different ingredients.
- And, no matter how hard we try, its probably not going to taste like you remember it.
General suggestions -however- do help. Because they stimulate the ‘how to’ process of what exactly we may be able to cook with what we have…and if its feasible for time and preparation.
Below is a widget that display some recipes from allrecipes.com . I chose this for those of you who would like to see some good and ever expanding recipe collections that even I use in the kitchen. Allrecipes.com is not the fancy Michelin 3 star or NYC 4 star rated restaurant food (although I would say some of their recipes probably taste better)…BUT everyday ‘Good Stuff’!
In addition to that allrecipes.com tells how many star rating it is out of 5 stars, and it tells you how many people voted on it. For example I want the simplest, best tasting, pumpkin pie recipe there is on the site. One recipe has 5 stars but only 2 people voted on it, so I go to the next one that has 4.5 stars but 67 people say it was good. I would pick that one. Then to take it a step further, if 3 recipes had about the same rating and people voting…then I would pick the one with the least and easiest ingredients to get and the simplest instructions to put the dish together.
Also, allrecipes.com has user reviews for the recipes so even though you see a 5 star recipe voted by 200 people they may still tell you it was a little bland and to add some hot sauce. So then if you have time, you see if it was an overall consensus that it was bland and then adjust accordingly.
If that wasn’t enough, allrecipes.com has a US and Metric scaling and conversion calculator for making those small recipes feed hundreds of people. So simple, so easy…But yes, you still need to know how to cook.
If you really want to take it a little deeper, Cooks Illustrated (.com) is like the online consumer report magazine for cooks but that will cost you a yearly subscription for access to their site and there is so much more than the magazine at your fingertips.
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