Recipes

When I first started this blog six months ago (seems like longer) I thought I’d be sharing recipes. Ashoka’s blogging experience is a cautionary tale for any blogger. I asked epicurious to print and give credit for a twenty year-old recipe. A month went by and their legal department denied my request.

Unless you’re into molecular gastronomy, and I’m not, cooking is pretty much “been there, done that.” OK, here’s a little experiment. Like all the grandmothers in Italy, I’m going to take a pan, film it with olive oil, add a few slices of garlic and a bunch of spinach that I’ve washed and dried. I’ll add a little salt and pepper, perhaps a sprinkle of peperoncini and wilt the spinach. Let’s say I serve it with some chicken, pollo arrosto. That’s a roasted chicken breast with some olive oil, salt and pepper. Maybe some white beans, fagioli a l’uccelleto. Sue me for my bad Italian spelling, but don’t sue me for copying the recipes from generations of Italian matriarchs.

I never looked in a book for this. This is what I cook, day in and day out. I choose the meat and vegetables, the type of oil, and the amount of seasoning. I added marjoram to the chicken. Food Police, slap the cuffs on me now! In the 1500’s an Italian grandmother seasoned her chicken the same way! Now I’m blogging about it and must have offended someone.

I didn’t give you the site as this gal has achieved enough notoriety by presuming to alter a “perfect” recipe by a well-known corporation. Note to fellow cooks: there is no perfect recipe. My husband has opined over the years that a cooking robot is all that’s needed in the kitchen (the same husband who just had his wedding ring made bigger, and needed to place in it our anniversary and my birthday so he’d remember). Whereupon a friend said he should consider a robot for other wifely duties, and that ended that particular conversation!

That said, I use my culinary expertise to keep improvising and improving my skills, as that is what makes cooking interesting for me. If I land on a patch of grass that’s been stepped on before, it should be an honor and not an offense. In this litigious society I find it difficult to provide you with recipes from other cooks. And as I don’t run a tasting kitchen (don’t tell dog Zoe that) I can’t reliably test original recipes to blog about. So I’ll do my best and hope you keep reading and commenting! Dee