 Recipes are not really my thing. As someone training as a professional chef, I'm concerned with developing my creativity, techniques, skills and knowledge of produce, rather than my ability to copy the cooking of others. Once you learn the principles behind cooking, recipes become merely checklists - in the industry these are known as specification sheets. These are used to assist the ordering process, as a basis for costings and as aides-mémoire for forgetful chefs and guidelines for stagières. Because I don't cook from recipes myself, there's a certain irony in my publishing a recipes section on my blog. However, when I started this blog I found myself producing photo-recipes to illustrate posts about my home cooking and work at college. So in this section I've indexed these photo-recipes and provided links to them, along with a few others without photos.
 You'll notice that I tend not to be very precise about quantities (and sometimes about ingredients). The closest analogy I can come up with is from the world of music. Many performers spend their lives valiantly attempting to reproduce notes as documented in the sheet music. That is not to denigrate such efforts. The best classical performers make wonderful music and add their own unique colour and feeling to their output. But it's a search for reproducible perfection. I play jazz, or at least I try to. I like to extemporise, taking my cooking exactly where my mood dictates. Each time I cook a dish it will be different - recognisable as the same dish, but reflecting the mood of the moment. My toolset comprises my knowledge of ingredients, my techniques and my palate. With these invaluable friends in my kitchen I can close the cookbooks and make music.
I've separated the recipes along classic lines because that's the way most people expect to find them, although personally I'm not really interested in food that conforms to the classical courses of French haute cuisine - I'm more into tapas-style eating for everyday meals and full tasting menus when it comes to fine dining experiences. |
