So I notice most posts here sharing ideas are just recipes being put down, so I was wondering, how many of you ALWAYS cook using recipes, and how many of you cook on the fly?
Me personally I only use recipes when I'm working and know I need to have the same finished product consistently, or with baking and desserts. With cooking at home, creating features in a restaurant or cooking for staff or anybody, I just start throwing things in to get the finished product I want. It's not always exactly what I was looking for but I haven't messed things up very much at all. To me cooking is all about denial and error (don't know how many Trailer Park Boys fans there are outside of canada...). I'm just trying to teach myself the general amounts of ingredients to put in to things by eyeing them up, I feel the best way to cook is from the heart and not from the paper. It helps put my own personal touch to something rather than just reproducing a recipe. Even when I look at a recipe I just use it as a general guideline for how much of certain items to put in, and don't usually measure things just use my hands or spoons to get the general amount said, maybe a bit more or less of something I want to slightly change for a different flavour. I also end up adding things to recipes all the time. I love the experimental part of cooking.
Me personally I only use recipes when I'm working and know I need to have the same finished product consistently, or with baking and desserts. With cooking at home, creating features in a restaurant or cooking for staff or anybody, I just start throwing things in to get the finished product I want. It's not always exactly what I was looking for but I haven't messed things up very much at all. To me cooking is all about denial and error (don't know how many Trailer Park Boys fans there are outside of canada...). I'm just trying to teach myself the general amounts of ingredients to put in to things by eyeing them up, I feel the best way to cook is from the heart and not from the paper. It helps put my own personal touch to something rather than just reproducing a recipe. Even when I look at a recipe I just use it as a general guideline for how much of certain items to put in, and don't usually measure things just use my hands or spoons to get the general amount said, maybe a bit more or less of something I want to slightly change for a different flavour. I also end up adding things to recipes all the time. I love the experimental part of cooking.