seemingly everywhere i go on the tube at home i'll see a show about thanksgiving cooking and how to make things better, easier, cheaper, different, spicier, jazzier, whateverier. why change? if it's something you like then keep it the same. mind you, i'm all for trying something new but i have a good sense of what tastes good with what. there are some things i can't figure out or have no idea what they are yet i'll try them anyway. reminds me of city slickers. the two guys who owned an ice cream company and their game was mixing ice cream flavors with food. there are times i fail miserably and there are times i hit it spot on.
i saw bobby flay's tweet this am about creamed spinach and nutmeg as a side for his dinner. eww,... i don't like spinach but it just sounds like an odd combination. every once in a while i'll throw out something different or put a little dash of this or that in something and it works. i'm lucky because i love to cook. my family eats 93.2% of what i cook and the girls don't throw it against the wall. i don't see anyone slyly putting their plates under the table to feed the food to the dog and then proclaim, "daddy, i'm done. it was terrific food!!!" i don't think i've ever coooked anything yet that someone has said, "this is the best i've ever had." i've cooked a lot of good food but that one exclamation has eluded me.
one thing i like doing is just being able to throw something together. seldom do i look at a recipe book unless it's something i've used before and can't remember everything. we have a lot of recipe books and we use them occasionally. all the smallish measurements throw me off. drives me nuts. a dash here, a dollop there, do what tastes good. gramma taught me that. i most certainly cook for flavor, not health. i like good tasting food. i know what i like. i know pretty much what my family likes. i love it when they want something i make instead of spaghetti o's or something out of a box. hell, even our son likes watching cooking shows with me. i usually hear a, "daddy, that looks gooooooood!" when we see something that looks killer.
couple years ago my cousin asked me if i wanted to send in a recipe for a cookbook she was helping put together. wow! i don't thin i did just because writing down what i cook, the way I cook, would be difficult at best. i don't typically measure a lot unelss it's out of a box. i would love to put some things down for our kids to learn later on but i like the way i learned to cook; by taste. i found what i like, how i like it, and tastes change.
i lived in louisiana for several years. my tastes changed from meat & taters in the midwest to good, full of flavor, kick ass cajun and creole cooking. good down home southern comfort food. went and worked all over the world, literally, and had my tastes change and get diversified from other places; other influences. i was able to bring some of those home with me and incorporate them with what i already did and make things different. i would say change things from being bland, rather adding new or different flavors in to things.
here's one; people talk about cajun food. when i hear people mention it they usually say, "hot" in the same breath. cajun food isn't hot. it's seasoned very well. there's a difference. for example, every hot sauce, believe it or not, has a different flavor. some are hotter, some have more of a pepper taste, some more salty or more of a tomato taste, things like that. i taste cajun foods at places up here and they usually taste like shit. gumbo is not a soup; gumbo is a meal all in itself. it is not like paste and it is not to be served over minute rice. if you can't make a dark brown rouz from scratch then you don't need to be making a gumbo because you'll either burn it or you'll cheat and buy "roux in a jar." lastly, campbell's soup is good but their chicken gumbo is just a soup in a can.
experiment. enjoy. try to challenge yourself with new ideas, recipies, or flavors. i love doing that and finding i can cook different things together. bad thing is, i do something one week and it's a hit at the table, i'll forget what i did the next week when i try to make it again.
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