When my sons were I use to bake a lot of cookies. I'd try different recipes from cookbooks, newspapers, and magazines. One day when I was shopping I came across a recipe on the container of Hershey's Cocoa for German chocolate cake, my favorite cake of all time. It had different ingredients than my recipe but I thought I would combine the two. OMG! It was sooo scrumptious! I called it my Double Chocolate German Chocolate Cake. To this day my youngest son reminds me that I owe him one for his birthday. I'll have to make him one when I visit them in Atlanta, GA. Have you ever added your own personal touch to a favorite food or recipe?
I do add to recipes, especially when baking. I love to add coconut to things like cookies, cakes, muffins, etc. I also usually double the amount of vanilla. I found a great recipe the other day for Bran Muffins and added coconut, grated carrots, nuts, mini chocolate chips and dried cranberries. They were so good. I also like to add veggies to casseroles and soups. I have a recipe for chicken that uses Cream of Chicken soup and I always throw in whatever veggies I have on hand, like onions, peppers, mushrooms, celery, carrots, corn, peas, broccoli.
Yes I also like to add vegetables to casseroles and go wild with them in homemade vegetable soup and pot pies. It's fun being creative in the kitchen.
I'm not big on baking but when cooking soups , I am always adding my own personal touch. To be honest, when I cook a soup, casserole or stir fry, its all about cleaning out the fridge, so I never know what I will be using. No recipe is ever the same twice in our household and thank goodness my hubby isn't a picky eater because the chicken or veggie soup I made last week will be totally different this week...lol
My wife doesn't like soups or stews much, so I cook a lot of them for myself. I find that I can more easily lose weight when I'm eating soup. However, I don't use anything that even remotely resembles either a recipe or a timer. I just add things that seem like they would go well together and am rarely disappointed. For soups, I find that it nearly always helps to add a generous dose of Quinoa to the base.
I also cook without a recipe, just open the refrig and start mixing. I also eat a lot of soup and can maintain my weight when I am eating soup. I make cookie and muffns from a mix but I add additional fibre and coffee to the mix to beef it up some. Most people do not realize the muffins came from a mix.
I can't do it! I pretty much follow recipes to the letter... Which has been really confusing because lately I've been using a British cookbook, and they do everything by weight... so there I am in the kitchen trying to weigh 60 grams of sugar or 20 grams of salt... It's actually supposed to be more precise, but it's tough to do when you usually just use cups and tablespoons, etc...
I like to experiment with different ingredients. I've made banana pudding using Oreos instead of vanilla wafers. I've added cherry pie filling to vanilla pudding. I use various foods in different ways. It's fun and usually pretty tasty too..
I tend to improvise quite a lot, which I think stems from my years working in Africa as a volunteer. When you have a limited amount of vegetables and only the most basic of cooking equipment, you have to be pretty imaginative. These days, the range of vegetables and the cooking facilities are considerably broader, but I still tend to cook by instinct rather than anything else.
I do not use cookbooks often unless I am trying to make a dish that I have no idea of. Most of my cooking is adlib and even the recipes I post here will never be cooked the exact way. "ADLIB" is the key ingredient!
Visitors to Ethiopia and Eritrea should be very cautious when ordering the ubiquitous breakfast item, the egg sandwich. This is, essentially, a small omelette in an Italian-style bread roll. You may get a slice or two of tomato. What you are almost certain to get is a raw chilli tucked neatly out of sight. How many first-timers I saw fall for that one, I couldn't begin to count.
Love it Tom! When I was discharged from the Army, my best friend was about to go to VN, We decided to have one last fling, just in case. So off to Tijuana and tons of drinking and having a great time. Finally when we needed to go home, we hit a little diner and as usual, there were many glasses of hot sauce sitting on the counter. Before I could stop him, he ran to the "free tomato juice!" You can imagine the results!
I grow Tabasco peppers. At times my evil brain is tempted to buy a jar of pimento stuffed olives and replacing the pimentos with Tabasco peppers. It'll never happen but I have some family members I'd like to see eating one. I often have these devilish thoughts. Maybe someday I'll actually go through with one.
'Ouch' is the word I'm looking for. I am reminded of the time somebody removed their contact lenses, rather forgetting they had been chopping chillis a short while before.