I’m a recipe person. I love to read cookbooks and cooking magazines, and I love to read recipes. I like the lists of ingredients, the step-by-step instructions, and the implicit promise that if you follow the directions, you’ll have something to show for it. Of course, I rarely follow recipes exactly as written, but more often than not, when I’m cooking there is a magazine (or a laptop) open on the kitchen table for reference. Some people are not like this: They make things up as they go along, working largely from instinct, and they aren’t interested in collecting page upon page of cooking instruction. I’d like to think the process of learning to cook, at least for me, is largely about working toward some place in the middle.
As I learn, and gather experience under my apron strings (if I ever remembered to wear an apron), I get more comfortable leaving the recipes on the shelf. And I find some of my favorite times in the kitchen come when I read a handful of recipes and use them as inspiration, cobbling them together in my mind into a single, successful dish. Unfortunately, sometimes the results of these attempts are something less than successful. Sometimes improvisation results in stress, in burned things, under-seasoned things, uninteresting things. I try to remind myself that these flops are just part of the learning process.
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