RIGHT THAT WAS THE OTHER FOOD-RELATED STUFF I MEANT TO TALK ABOUT--
I grew up watching my mum & my Grossmutti cooking, and being taught bits and pieces of cooking by them, in the context of a culture where feeding people properly and making sure they take enough with them when setting off on trips etc was A Thing. When my baby brother rocked up and started eating solids I watched my mum adapt all her recipes to be dairy-free; and then when I told her age 11 that I wanted to go vegetarian, she said "as long as you cook for yourself". So I've been cooking vegetarian food for nearly fifteen years, and through secondary school I had a Food Technology teacher who thought that the eventual qualification was secondary to teaching us how to cook, and very gently shoved us into creativity well outside our comfort zones - each week the deal would be "next week you're going to cook something where the focal ingredient is potatoes, go" and we'd have the intervening time to compare recipes and come to a decision; or "we're going to make lemon curd/risotto/choux pastry, you get to pick the customisations", to teach us skills. It was epic.
... and this is why my attitude to cookbooks these days is that they're interesting to leaf through for ideas but by and large there's no point in me owning them (because what actually happens is that I cross-compare four or five recipes, choose the bits I think sound most interesting from each, then remember the shape and cook from that memory of the shape -- rather than from paper in front of me, with a few notable exceptions in the region of complicated cakes.
Folk who get fed by me seem to enjoy it, or at least they often come back for seconds and usually want to visit again. :-)
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regna
(no subject)
Date: 2014-12-08 03:44 pm (UTC)I grew up watching my mum & my Grossmutti cooking, and being taught bits and pieces of cooking by them, in the context of a culture where feeding people properly and making sure they take enough with them when setting off on trips etc was A Thing. When my baby brother rocked up and started eating solids I watched my mum adapt all her recipes to be dairy-free; and then when I told her age 11 that I wanted to go vegetarian, she said "as long as you cook for yourself". So I've been cooking vegetarian food for nearly fifteen years, and through secondary school I had a Food Technology teacher who thought that the eventual qualification was secondary to teaching us how to cook, and very gently shoved us into creativity well outside our comfort zones - each week the deal would be "next week you're going to cook something where the focal ingredient is potatoes, go" and we'd have the intervening time to compare recipes and come to a decision; or "we're going to make lemon curd/risotto/choux pastry, you get to pick the customisations", to teach us skills. It was epic.
... and this is why my attitude to cookbooks these days is that they're interesting to leaf through for ideas but by and large there's no point in me owning them (because what actually happens is that I cross-compare four or five recipes, choose the bits I think sound most interesting from each, then remember the shape and cook from that memory of the shape -- rather than from paper in front of me, with a few notable exceptions in the region of complicated cakes.
Folk who get fed by me seem to enjoy it, or at least they often come back for seconds and usually want to visit again. :-)