A Little About Cooking

Why I like to cook what I cook.

I’ve started a post In this Savoir·vivre section on meals I like. It’s not quite recipes — I’m not providing measurements and every single ingredient or step — but it might inspire people a bit.

I felt like I needed to give a little context about my relationship with cooking, but I didn’t want folks to have to scroll through a long-winded intro before getting to the good stuff. I hate the way most online recipes do that. Put the damn recipe up front. If I want the background (and sometime I do) I’ll read it after.

Thus this post, which keeps the fluff away from the food.

From 70s TV Dinners to Some Decent Cooking

As with many other things, my food tastes in are pretty broad, but not too fancy. My favorite food categories would be Southern, Italian, German, and anything that falls under comfort food. I’ve also been throwing in more Spanish/Mexican and Indian of late.

I credit my high school to college (and a bit beyond) years as a waiter that made me the pretty good cook I am today. I studied what the chefs were doing whenever possible and asked questions.

After the rush, of course, you don’t want to be killed. I also had one place where they’d let me behind the line when it was dead and show me basics and tricks of the trade.

I’ve also owned a decent collection of cook books which I flip through for inspiration and instructions. For a time I had a subscription to Cooks Illustrated which is a simply amazing magazine. They’re know for smartly writing about different cooking methods they try to find out which ones work the best.

After a while I felt like I had learned enough of that to get by as a good home & friends cook. Plus, the internet came into it’s own and that’s now my go-to.

Usually, if I’m looking for something new I do a search based on ingredients I already have — say shrimp and pasta. Then I search the photo results and see what looks good before hitting a recipe.

Actually, I usually pull up more than one recipe to compare. I usually then take ingredients from both (or more than two, sometimes) but choose one recipe to follow when it comes to measurements.

It’s a little unorthodox, or maybe it’s not. But, it works great for me.

So, that’s kind of my cooking philosophy, if you will.

If you want to actually see some stuff you might want to cook, head here.