Recipes & Cooking

“I have the right to do anything,” you say—but not everything is beneficial. “I have the right to do anything”—but not everything is constructive.

—1 Corinthians 10:23

I’m not really a recipe girl. My mom always teases me about it, knowing that when I say I used a recipe, all it means is that at some point, some list of ingredients and techniques were involved as I threw things in pans, as I sliced, poured, salted, and peppered with seeming randomness. She does not particularly appreciate this cooking style, and sometimes she has to leave the kitchen because my loosey-goosey approach makes her nervous.

There are, of course, some times when recipes are more important than others. When you’re baking bread, for example, if you were to decide the yeast wasn’t important, you’d have something between pita and a paper plate. In cooking as in life, there are some nonnegotiables, but not nearly as many as you think. Learning to cook is all about learning those nonnegotiables and then playing around with the rest. Recipes are how we learn all the rules, and cooking is knowing how to break them to suit our tastes or preferences. Following a recipe is like playing scales, and cooking is jazz.