Almost Useless

I don’t use recipes.

I’m not a gourmet cook.

I just hate following directions; I even hate reading them.  That goes for any directions.  I just don’t read them.

Recipes seem useless to me.  Why cook something exactly like someone else tells you to?  Why not be original and do it your way?  Why not invent your own concoctions?  That’s what I call my cooking.  It’s not fancy.  It’s never the same.  However, people love it.  My kids say they miss my concoctions when they don’t get to see me for a while.  My cooking was the big draw at PTA and scouting events for years.  I’m told that people still talk about my cooking – in a positive way!

My specialty is traditional Mexican food.  For many years I treated the school faculty and staff (about 120 people) to a complete lunch for Cinco de Mayo.  At Christmas time, I used to cook tamales, enchiladas, and other favorites, for my alumni association’s holiday party, usually attended by a couple of hundred people.  One woman would call me to ask if I was cooking for the holiday party and as soon as I said yes, she’d say  “Good!  I didn’t want to RSVP til I knew if you were cooking or not!”
And, although I’ve not gone to the holiday party or cooked for it since I moved away three years ago, I hear that people still ask if   I’m doing the cooking.  So I guess you can say that a bad cook, I ain’t!

However, for daily meals, my concoctions prevail.  Concoctions happen when I think of what is in my refrigerator and who likes what.  Recent concoctions include: chicken cooked and shredded with elbow macaroni, seasoned with salt, pepper, basil, oregano, onion, garlic and if I have it, I will add some kind of cheese while the pasta is really hot so it gets all melty.  Another concoction might be: chicken boiled, deboned, add cream of mushroom soup, chicken stock, mixed veggies, potatoes, and I might add rice to it as a filler.  This one doesn’t need much in the way of seasoning.  Oh, this last one is kind of like a stew.  Basically, if I have it and it goes well with another ingredient, I will put it together.

One favorite dish that I make is sort of like a quiche.  I created it by accident.  When I was a fairly new wife, I found myself with no groceries for dinner and no car in which to go get them.  I searched for something to throw together and found that I had eggs, butter, cheese, cheeze-its, and milk.  I crushed the cheeze-its and put in some melted butter and used the mixture for a crust.  Then I scrambled the eggs and added milk.  After pouring it into the crust, I added the shredded cheese, seasoned it with salt, pepper, oregano, and onion.  I stuck it in the oven and when my husband got home and tried it, he loved it.  Now everyone requests my fake quiche and I add whatever I happen to have: mushrooms, tomato, and sometimes spinach.

Sometimes I’m asked to make something I haven’t made before.  If I don’t know how to make it, I look online for a recipe, glance at the ingredients, then do it my way.  I never read the instructions.  I never do it the way they say.  I usually don’t use the same ingredients in the recipe.  I just use them to get an idea of what I should/could use.

While this means that nothing ever tastes the same way twice, this can be a good thing.  I can usually improve on something I’ve made by adding more things or different spices, or changing the main ingredient from beef to chicken or turkey. 

All of this means that I don’t collect recipes.  I don’t write down what I use in different dishes so I can’t really give a recipe to anyone.  I can tell them or write down what I did but I can’t really guarantee it will turn out like mine did. 

It makes me wonder why people use recipes.  Then again, it also makes me think that perhaps I am deficient in some way because I don’t use recipes. What does this say about me?  Is this a recipe for a failed dish?  For inadequacy?  For disaster?

Now I won’t be able to sleep tonight just thinking of this.

Anyone have a recipe for anything that will make me sleep better?