Are you a "one trick pony" when it comes to cooking??

[coltle6920]

What I mean is do you stick to a recipe and are afraid or unwilling to experiment?

I eat ribs at least once a week and am always trying out new seasonings or marinades.I recently tried a cajun seasoning on my ribs and found that it also tastes pretty good in chili and even beef stew.I use cumin mainly in chili but found that it enhances the flavor of ribs without making them taste too "Mexican".I recently bought some "Hoisin sauce" and found it also works nicely on ribs.It has an unusual flavor to it while also being somewhat sweet.It works best when used to baste while cooking.I usually cut the rack of ribs into thirds and season each part differently.

I enjoy cooking but I especially enjoy experimenting with different seasonings or marinades.I never write anything down on paper so every meal seems to be an adventure.

 

[BC38]

My lovely bride and I have been married for just over 30 years now.
In that 30 years I probably haven't had to cook anything more than breakfast more than a couple of dozen times.
Before we married, I cooked, but I was never what I'd call good at it. I have always been what I call a "subsistence" cook. I can cook well enough to keep folks fed, but nothing fancy or innovative. Ordinary, nutritious, decent food, that is edible, but nothing special. That's about the extent of my cooking talent.

Not exactly a "one trick pony" - more like a working quarterhorse

 

[A10]

I love to cook. I like to throw open the cupboards and see what might taste good.....

 

[carpriver]

I am a fair cook, I like cooking certain foods, chili, pasta sauces, steaks and ribs. I normally have some idea of what I am gooding put is my sauces, and rubs. I made a really good alfredo sauces, a couple cloves of garlic, sauted in some butter and olive oil, Heavy cream about 2 cups some real good parmesan ariginio cheese grated, some pepper and a grind of fresh nutmeg. Put the water on to heat for the pasta start to saute the garlic, add the cream stirring until the cream come to a boil reduce heat add the cheese in small amounts stirring until incorporated, continue adding cheese until all is incorporated add pepper and nutmeg. reduce heat to very low cook the pasta, drain add a some olive oil, mix, and cover with the the sauce. of course you could saute some shrimp with the garlic and remove while cooking the alfredo . I also make a olive pasta sauce that is killer.

 

[robvious]

I consider myself a pretty good cook... make my own marinades and rubs... can run a grill n smoker... have won an award for my chili (just a car club thing... no biggy)... and I can bake too... I even write some of them down... and have shared some here... I have lots of ponies to trick...lol

pie is peach...
venison tenderloin teriyaki n black bean marinade and burgers...
venison loin, venison sausage and turkey burgers...
my cornbread recipe... previously posted but worth repeating

 

[hardcase60]

To me a recipe is a guide not anything that is cast in stone. Don't recall one that i didn't tweak. If I'm wanting to make something new then half a dozen or more cookbooks come out of the bookshelf. Compare ingredients and pick what I think will taste best or I may add something(s) not called for. Never had to throw anything out. Yet! One rule, if it don't call for onions and garlic you had better start thinking outside the box. hardcase60

 

[Cyrano]

It's a good thing I handload better than I cook or I would have blown myself up years ago.

 

[TX-Dennis]

I don't follow recipes. Recipes follow me.

Seriously, though, I'm all about improvising in the kitchen. Sometimes it works; sometimes not so much.

 

[gman51]

Since I quit eating processed foods I make most everything by the try this in there cooking. Ginger does wonders for chicken dinners. I love cilantro, onions and garlic in just about anything.
The way I make mashed potatoes it is a meal in itself when I am done putting everything in it.
I really don't know what herbs or seasonings to use with what and first time I tried using cumin I put way to much in it. The dog wouldn't even eat it. It got dumped.
I always cook like I am having company over and I freeze what's left for many more meals. I don't throw left overs away.

 

[two-bit cowboy]

Always thought I had no aptitude for cooking. Turns out I just didn't have a desire. In the last few years, since retiring after nine years as a B&B owner, I've enjoyed learning to cook more than just a gourmet breakfast, where my main specialty was an individual vegetable frittata (baked in huge muffin tins) served with a baked ham steak and grilled corn salsa. (In all modesty the meal got rave reviews from hundreds of guests.) I have time now to work on other meals so I've put the time to good use.

I like spicy foods so my spice cupboard is a who's who of the best of the local groceries' wares. Spicy doesn't mean just HOT; it means -- to me -- more flavorful. Mexican food is good, but if you really like it hot some Korean and many Eastern European foods put even the Habanero to shame. However, I must admit that this coming summer I hope to raise my own jalapenos (until the peppers turn red) and make my own chipotle powder on the smoker.

I like beef, pork, and chicken. I make my own rubs and marinades. I've got one -- never made the same way twice -- I call Kansas City Plus. If you like Kansas City style BBQ think of that as a .38 Special; mine's the .357 Magnum. It works best on pork loins done on the smoker with low heat and for a long time. Key ingredient: Hungarian Paprika.

My Korean bulgogi marinade and rub on beef strips rivals anything I ate during my two tours in South Korea, and the food I ate there was fabulous!

So, yeah, I have more than one trick up my sleeve.

 

[Whitwabit]

my wife is amazed when I cook .. the old fashion way is how I was taught .. many of my recipes don't have a recipe .. and I don't measure .. I can pour a teaspoon of salt into my hand and it will be an exact teaspoon when measured .. she asks how I can do it over and over and I don't really know ..

I was a dish washer at a restaurant and one day the cook didn't show up and I became the cook baking cakes and pies and many of the main dishes .. between the owner and my dad who had been a cook I was well taught !! I did that for 3 years .. I was just 16 years old when I started .. instead of hiring a cook he said I did the job as well as anyone and I was permanently promoted to the cook position..

We would fry 275 to 300 eggs on a weekend in the mornings and go through 10 pies a day and usually 2-3 cakes ..

 

[shouldazagged]

I did 90% of the cooking through two marriages--the second, and the third, final one--to good cooks. I've lived alone for twenty-one years this month, so I do it all now. Almost never eat out.

As my health declines in old age I don't do quite as much experimental cooking as I used to, but still usually eat well. I learned many years ago that cooking is fun, and that all the world's great cuisines started with poor people making cheap, readily available ingredients taste wonderful.

Then it was just a matter of building a good spice and herb assortment and throwing out the rulebook.

 

[coltle6920]

Garlic (salt or powder)is definitely a must have in my pantry.It may sound surprising to some but I find myself spending more time in the Asian aisle looking for ideas than anywhere else.

I'm looking at trying out ginger,nutmeg and maybe even wasabi in the future.I'm thinking of some kind of dry rub/coating for chicken wings.

 

[old bear]

"What I mean is do you stick to a recipe?"

The first time I try a new recipe I don't vary from it. That way if it's a flop I know it's not my flop.

If I do one a second time, ya bet I'll jazz it up some. Sometimes it works and sometimes not so much.

 

[KalamazooKid]

I cook a lot of venison and for a couple of decades I've really been experimenting and trying to upgrade the recipes to keep the family and friends interested.

I tried using the hi temp cheddar this time in my smoked summer sausage. Everyone that tried it said it was the best they ever had. It was a HUGE hit over the holidays!

Next time I'll double the amount of cheese I use (used 1 lb with 15 lbs of meat).


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[walnutred]

My wife refers to my cooking as snowflake meals as no two dishes are ever quite alike. They are almost always good, but not really repeatable.

 

[Ivan the Butcher]

My dad was a "One trick pony" in the worst way. In the early 1960's mom was a big wig in the Ohio PTA and would go to Chicago for meeting 2 or 3 times a year. (it could have been for a few days away from her bratty young son! ) Dad's "pony" was to cut a can of corn beef hash open on both ends and push the "Loaf" out. Remove the lids, and slice into 4 or 5 pieces. Lay "patties" down on a cookie sheet and dent with a spoon. Break a raw egg into each dent, and place under the broiler. Serve with toast.... Lots of toast!

If mom was gone 4 days, we had hash 4 days! McDonald's wasn't it our town yet, and Dad thought pizza was of the devil!

My brother and I are not great cooks, but we have a few tricks. My wife always left a few casseroles in the fridge if she would be out of town a few days, and would let the kids choose a casserole or one of my concoctions, about half the time they'd choose my "Brainstorm" dishes (for a change from the repetitive deliciousness of there mom's good cooking!)

Ivan

 

[LMWIS]

Maybe two tricks...,

My dad used to clean out the fridge every couple of months, cut everything into cubes, and put it into a cauldron that he would position over two burners on the stove.

The first day you could generally recognize what the cubes were. Over the next few days it would boil down to an inedible grey mass, being continually served for dinner until my mother insisted on throwing out the remainder.

We called it 'Baseball Stew' because I'm sure if he found a baseball in the fridge he would have cut it into cubes and boiled it with everything else!

Personally, if it doesn't come off the grill I had nothing to do with it. It's always good, but I will admit to a certain repetition to my cooking that could definitely use some 'spicing up.'

 

[cmort666]

I'm a "no trick pony".

I can barely get edible food following the recipe verbatim, and it had better be a simple recipe. I'm certainly not going off the reservation.

 

[Ron M.]

I like to grill meat but as for kitchen duty, my best "one trick" is lasagna using ricotta, lean ground beef and sausage, with enough mozzarella to choke a horse. No one has died yet...

 

[Qball]

I used to cook a lot, but only for myself.
When i met my spouse she took over cooking, and everything must taste like it used to.
She won't try anything new
The only thing i'm allowed to cook now is "pork pancake"

 

[PatriotX]

My grandmother was of the school that when in doubt - use more bacon grease !

Her idea of a 'balanced' meal was where all the cans nested inside one another when done.

 

[wbraswell]

I almost never make the same thing, the same way, twice. I like to try a little difference. I've learned my lesson(s) about moderation. Better to add too little, than too much. I once put too much black pepper in a dish, and that's hard to do, for me.

 

[Erich]

This has been a fun thread - it's really interesting reading everyone's thoughts about and experiences with cooking.

Me, I grew up in a household where Mom did almost all the cooking (Dad would make reasonably authentic pizza - not the Domino's kind - from scratch every Saturday night, which was pretty far "out there" in our rural Indiana community). I'd say in retrospect that she didn't have fun with it all the time: there were certain dishes she knocked out of the park, and others were a bit more mundane. I wouldn't say it was especially her thing.

Ever since I could remember, I loved smelling all the spices in the spice rack - not that many of them ever got used. When we gardened, Dad would send me out to get herbs (garlic, basil and oregano, basically, sometimes flat-leafed parsley) for the pizza or pasta sauce, and I just loved smelling them. Some hippie-dippie family friend gave me a kid's cookbook for my First Communion, and I read through it and thought I'd enjoy making porcupine meatballs. Mom was terrifically supportive, and I have happy memories of her supervising me to make this "exotic" dish (it used thyme, which we pronounced "thighm" - I think that might have been the only recipe that used that dusty bottle in the spice rack Mom received as a wedding present). When they saw I liked cooking (hey, you're making food that you get to EAT! ), Dad started used me as a slave to make dough for pizza, bread and pasta and Mom used to have me help with the weekend breakfasts (gotta love pouring waffles as a ten-year-old - makes you feel like you're accomplishing something worthwhile). I was bored a lot living out in the country (when I wasn't fishing, mushroom hunting, tapping maple trees, arrowhead hunting, shooting rockets, etc.), so I wound up reading a lot of Mom's cookbooks, too.

And I liked to eat, and even found I liked certain "weird" things . . . after a suitable period of scowling suspicion. Since Dad's job as a professor exposed us to people from a lot of different cultures (and Mom and Dad's families lived in New York - the Italians made food with those crazy crushed red peppers no human could eat and tiny coffees that smelled like cigar butts, and the Germans were gulping down slimy creamed herring and weird pickled pot roasts), I got to (had to - I don't remember being given a choice! ) try a lot of things that were weird to my classmates. (Tacos! In rural Indiana in the early Seventies, these seemed about as odd as finding a pyramid of human heads next to the IGA.) Of course, a lot of them were pretty good.

So when I moved out, I started making a wide variety of stuff just because I liked it. Like others on the thread, I really enjoyed doing sauces. I can bake, but I'm not super into it. When I married Gina, I used to do virtually all of our cooking. When she retired five years ago, she took over. She'd previously been sort of indifferent toward cooking, but I had been a bad influence and got her to liking food during our time together. Her post-retirement cooking underwent an immediate paradigm shift from the cooking she used to do when we met (everything set to BLAST, follow a short list of recipes like a robot) - now she was all about making stuff we'd like and figuring out how to coax out the flavor. Dang, but she's a good cook now.

The funny thing is that I get real satisfaction out of cooking something creative. One of my favorite things to do it to just make Sunday supper - throw together stuff that we have into something that sounds good. To me there's something about coming up with a sauce with fresh herbs and having a soul-satisfying simple-but-good plate of macaroni with a bottle of wine. If someone happens to drop by, great: the more the merrier. No serious thought or worry about a menu (Lord, but my wife likes to make "company" meals into an ordeal), just "Hey, that's sounds good; let's try that" and away you go.

Not really a one-trick pony, but I have those things that are easy and satisfying to do, and because I'm mostly cooking to enliven my spirit these days, those are where I usually go.

Thanks again for a great thread, amigos.

 

[A10]

This is fun.....I thought I'd give a little background as well. When I was growing up, Mom had a couple dishes she would make but for the most part really didn't enjoy cooking. Dad was the one I got my inspiration from. I learned creative cooking by watching him in the kitchen. He made some dang weird stuff (bologna casserole just to name one) but it was always interesting. When I was going to college I worked in restaurants, both dishwashing and prep cooking. That is when I started experimenting with different flavors and spices. And truthfully my wife has been an inspiration. 34 years together, and three failures for dinner. Tuna loaf you coulda killed a moose with, cilantro salad that was pure cilantro, and a chili that was......deadly (we like spicey but holy **** that was problematic).

 

[chaparrito]

I'm the cook around here. I love reading cookbooks and cooking publications. I virtually never follow a recipe. They are mostly for inspiration. The wife complains that although she loves my cooking, when I'm gone she'll not be able to make my "recipes" because they're never done the same way twice.

 

[DeathGrip]

Learning experiances

I was the youngest of three and was home with mom while she did her daily mom stuff that included making all of our meals. She always made me taste stuff. Dad might cook on the grill on occasion or make a bacon and egg breakfast.

When I got a little older my sister taught me to make fried eggs and get them even. But I knew how dad made them and took it from there. The last time she was here I made her some eggs and she said they were the best she ever had. She asked me how I made them and I reminded her that she taught me.

When I moved away from home Mom sent me a box of recipes of some decent dishes that she new I liked. That box is one of my favorite possessions. I learned that cooking was fun and I got my food the way I liked it.

Then I joined the Army. They had pretty good food for the most part and I learned a few new things there.

I remained a bachelor for quite a few years and ate the same stuff for a while.

Then I met my soon to be wife. She was a little German girl and had been raised in her parents restaurant in Nurnberg. Oh Man! She loved to cook for me and my friends and I learned to eat a lot of things I never woulda before. Sadly she's gone and I didn't pay much attention. Kinda hard to do when she kicked me out of the kitchen most times.

Since my wife has been gone I've had to learn to make things again and am doing pretty good with it. I've even learned a few things from my Spanish speaking friends.

I guess you could say I still have room to learn more. But it's an enjoyable learning.

 

[Maddog 521]

I have an old family recipe for donuts. It's the best donuts I've ever eaten. The key ingredient is "mashed potatoes". I usually make them a couple times a year. They are gone pretty quick. I also make a mean batch of Beignet's. I do follow the recipes on these two.

 

[the ringo kid]

What I mean is do you stick to a recipe and are afraid or unwilling to experiment?

I eat ribs at least once a week and am always trying out new seasonings or marinades.I recently tried a cajun seasoning on my ribs and found that it also tastes pretty good in chili and even beef stew.I use cumin mainly in chili but found that it enhances the flavor of ribs without making them taste too "Mexican".I recently bought some "Hoisin sauce" and found it also works nicely on ribs.It has an unusual flavor to it while also being somewhat sweet.It works best when used to baste while cooking.I usually cut the rack of ribs into thirds and season each part differently.

I enjoy cooking but I especially enjoy experimenting with different seasonings or marinades.I never write anything down on paper so every meal seems to be an adventure.

Not me, I experiment all the time.

 

[alexfitch225]

Alot of the cooking I've done over the last few years has been loosely based off a recipe but I tend to always stray off on my own direction.

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