Cooking With A Recipe Is Highly Overrated
One of the first things I learned when I was beginning to cook was that trying to get my mother to give me a recipe was near impossible. My mother was taught to cook and bake by her grandmother. My great-grandmother was supposedly an amazing cook, but she never really stuck with a specific recipe. Her favorite phrase, which my mother will say any time I ask what to put in a recipe is “What you put you find,” meaning, put in whatever you want to taste. She will then give me an excessive and minimally confusing list of ingredients I might want to find in my food, along with some random ratios. A rice pudding recipe that has been passed down for 4 generations is as follows: 1 cup of milk for every egg. Put in as much as you can fit in the pan, while leaving room for the other ingredients. Enough sugar to make it sweet, but not too sweet. Add rice, but not too much or too little or you’ll ruin the texture. Orange zest- enough to smell it a little, but not enough to overpowe...