Recipes are Road Maps…Learning to Cook Intuitively and Finding Joy in the Kitchen

By Chef Andrea

A few of the cookbooks I added
to my collection last year.

There’s probably been a cookbook or food magazine beside my bed for more than 75% of the nights I’ve slept on this earth, maybe more.  I am that person who actually reads the cookbook, you know the introduction and thoughts the author shares before you get to the recipes.  I also enjoy reading the introductions to recipes where the author shares little tidbits of info like how the recipe came into existence or ways to alter it with different little tweeks.  Yet despite all the cookbook studying, I have to say it’s a bit of a rare moment when I actually follow a recipe exactly as it’s written.  I’m more likely to do so when I’m baking or making a recipe for the first time from a culture I’m not familiar with.  In the case of baking, it’s different than cooking.  A person will do well to respect the laws of nature which include the ratios of baking.  But cooking is a different ball game and there’s plenty of room to improvise and personalize a recipe to make it your own.  And that is the topic of today’s conversation—learning to cook intuitively, and hopefully having a little fun doing so!

I realize my audience ranges from longtime, experienced cooks and CSA members to the other end of the spectrum with individuals who are still finding their way in the kitchen and learning what it means to eat seasonally from a CSA box in the Midwest.  Plus there’s all of you who fall somewhere in between.  There’s a place for all of you at this table, so pull up a chair and lets talk.

End of Summer Vegetable Ragout

What is a recipe?  It’s a list of ingredients accompanied by a list of instructions for how to bring those individual ingredients to life.  It’s a map to guide you along the way, but the actual journey is up to you.  In the beginning as you are first learning to cook, or if you’re making a recipe for the first time, it is advisable to follow recipes.  This helps you learn the path, but once you know the path you can start to veer from it.  If you don’t have a basic knowledge of cooking, this is a good place to start.  As you read a recipe, start looking up the words you don’t understand or know.  What does it mean to saute or braise?  What is a “chiffonade of basil” or what should you do when a recipe tells you to “reduce a sauce to half.”  You could go to cooking school to acquire this knowledge, or you could just dive in and get started with cooking.  As the recipes you make start to come alive, you’ll quickly start to build your knowledge of some of these basic cooking skills.  Honestly, the best way to learn how to cook is to actually do it!

One of my longtime mantras is “Never Be Intimidated by a Vegetable.”  The same goes for cooking.  Yes, some recipes can seem intimidating with their long list of ingredients and/or a long list of instructions.  If you are feeling intimidated by a recipe, it’s ok to choose something that seems a little more approachable.  No one expects you to be a gourmet chef and honestly, some of the best food you will ever make may be the simplest to prepare.  If you start with good ingredients, you don’t need to do much to it.  Many vegetables taste great simply prepared with salt, pepper and butter!  Honestly, this is how I cook many vegetables, including the sweet little baby white turnips and asparagus we’ve been enjoying this spring.

Caramelized Fennel and Beet Pizza

I’ve had members tell me things like “I made your recipe, but mine didn’t look like yours.”  You know what, that’s ok.  Ten people could prepare the same recipe and it could turn out 10 slightly different ways.  Just remember that “Life is Research!”  There are no failures in the kitchen, only opportunities to observe and learn.  Honestly, one of the best ways to learn about food is to watch and see what happens.  In culinary school I never wanted to make mayonnaise because I was so afraid I would mess it up and it would break.  And then one day my friend and cooking partner insisted I make the mayonnaise.  “No Donnie, I can’t make it.  I’ll mess it up!”  Donnie refused to make it which left me with no option except to try.  I did, and I broke the mayonnaise.  My worst mayonnaise fear had been realized, and man did I feel liberated!  I did it, I messed up the mayonnaise!  That day I learned how to recognize the signs of what mayonnaise looks like right before it’s about to break.  I learned how to prevent that from happening and I learned how to fix it if I did mess it up.  Did I fail that day when I messed up the mayonnaise?  No, I conquered it!

Squash and Poblano Quesadillas

While it can be fun to explore new recipes, sometimes it’s good to stick to some tried and true, good old reliable recipes.  If you’re just learning to cook and/or learning how to eat out of a CSA box, I encourage you to find a few basic recipes that you can master.  The beauty of cooking with the seasons is that your ingredients will always be changing, so even if you make the same five-ten recipes all the time they’ll never be the same.  For example, find a recipe for a stir-fry sauce that you like.  Maybe it’s a teriyaki sauce or an orange sauce.  The stir-fry sauce will always stay the same, as will the basic procedure for making a vegetable stir-fry but you can adapt the preparation each week to include whatever vegetables are in season!  The same goes for things like quiche, pizza, quesadillas, scrambled eggs, etc.  Don’t waste time searching for new recipes all the time, just stick to the ones you know and like!  Remember, recipes are there to guide us, but you can learn to substitute ingredients that are similar.

Vegetable Enchiladas

You’ll notice many recipes include things like “Salt, to taste” or lines like “adjust the seasoning to your liking.”  What exactly does this mean?  It means it’s hard to tell someone exactly how much salt or pepper a recipe will need.  Yes we can ballpark it, but the final adjustments to seasoning really need to be done in the kitchen using your own senses.  This is why it’s important to start to learn more about how different ingredients can change the way food tastes.  Why do we salt food?  Because salt helps to wake up our taste buds and enhances the flavors within a dish.  You seldom want food to taste “salty.”  Rather, you want food to taste balanced.  If you taste something and it tastes “bland” or is just lacking in flavor, it may just need a little more salt.  When you add salt to a dish, make sure you incorporate the salt and then let it set for a few minutes so the salt can dissolve.  Give it another quick stir and then taste the food again.  If you skip this step, you can easily add too much salt to a dish!  The other type of ingredient you may want to use sometimes to adjust the seasoning in a dish is some kind of an acidic ingredient such as vinegar or lemon juice.  Acidic ingredients also help to wake up our taste buds.  If you taste a dish and it tastes “flat,” it may benefit from adding a little splash of some type of acid.  This concept hit home and finally made sense to me when I was in culinary school.  I was in one of my first skills classes and I was making a basic lentil soup.  I seasoned it to what I thought was “perfect” using salt and pepper and then took it to my chef instructor to taste.  She agreed, it was a pretty good lentil soup.  But then she told me to go get a bottle of sherry vinegar.  I brought her the vinegar and she added just a little splash to the soup.  I stirred it in and tasted it again.  Wow!  Everything in the soup came alive with just that one little addition.  So what do you do if you aren’t sure what a dish needs and you don’t want to mess up the entire thing!?  Separate a little portion and play with it.  Add a little salt, add a little acid and see what it tastes like.  If you find something you like, try to replicate it with the rest of the dish.

Apple Turnip Quiche

Cooking is an essential skill we all need in order feed ourselves.  I fully acknowledge that there will be days when making a meal, cleaning the kitchen and doing what it takes to feed yourself and your family will feel like a chore.  That’s the reality of life, but I do hope there are more days when the kitchen is more like your happy place, a place where you can retreat to at the end of the day and actually find joy in the process.  As you gain confidence, build your skills and start to assemble your own collection of recipes you enjoy making, you’ll also likely find yourself cooking more intuitively.  You may reference a recipe, but then you might start to just cook using whatever ingredients are in season and following your own instincts with how to prepare the food, build a meal and do the final steps of seasoning.  So remember, recipes are here to guide us, not restrict us.  Have some fun, get creative and enjoy the process of creating food.  If you learn something along the way, I hope you’ll share it with our membership in our Facebook Group so we can celebrate along with you and learn from each other!