Recipes: Bane of My Existence

People ask me for recipes, and I go...

You mean you want me to measure crap?!?!

I started helping my Korean grandmother (who didn't like me very much, by the way) in the kitchen when I was, like, FIVE.  I'm fixin' to turn 38 this month.  Somewhere between 5 and the time I got sucked into a corporate vortex to support my family's bourgeois existence in a masterplanned hell I lovingly call Stepford, I cooked alongside my grandmother, mother and father, ate a hell of a lot of good food and some really bad food from all kinds of cuisines, worked in my parent's restaurants, worked in other people's restaurants, taught cooking classes and catered dinner parties for people with really posh kitchens and money to burn on culinary hacks like me.

That makes 33 years of watching, doing, learning, burning, scorching, cutting, mistaking salt for sugar and vice versa, perfecting, ruining and generally osmosising all things kitchen. If you look at it from a scientific standpoint, that's Idon'tknowhowmanythousands of experiments and hopefully as many useful observations that have enabled me to to recreate most of the food I taste with a quick glance at an ingredient list to fill in the blanks where my palate might fail me.  

With the exception of chi chi foo foo fancy food, baking, and sushi (which, imo, takes much more skill and experience to properly prepare than some other cooks seem to think), I'm pretty happy with my ability to turn out a good dish regardless of cuisine - sometimes using recipes as a guideline, but never really having to worry that I missed a crucial step because, well, I've got the basics WAY down pat by now.

I guess that's why the idea of coming up with recipes of my own is so daunting.  I haven't had to *THINK* about cooking in a very long time, and I'm really kind of working off muscle memory.  But I do think that even in a sea of really GREAT resources like epicurious and allrecipes, I might be able to offer something of unique value that will help my friends speed up the learning curve to the kind of consistently good cooking that results from a tight grasp on the basics.

So as I put fingers to keyboard to come up with recipes, I'm going to try my best to impart not just instruction, but some rationale and cause and effect explanations that should make your time in the kitchen an increasingly predictable (in a good way) and fun process.

Here goes nothin'...

shinae