There Ain't No Devil, It's Just God When He's Drunk

My friend Kiki over at Make My Funk did a great post about cooking. The funny thing is that I had planned on doing one on the same subject as well, only I was too busy getting ingredients to write one until now. After she beat me to it. However, hers was all about learning how to cook- something I feel everyone should learn how to do .

Mine is on discovering cooking sources. Despite writing an 80pg dissertation on cookery books, I have never used them. I don't know why- I suppose following a recipe feeds into the feeling of homogeny, statically doing what I'm told, and recalls images of Communist Russian architecture to my mind- boring, bland, and docile.




I thinkI take after my mom and dad's style of cooking rather than my grandma's. My grandma is an absolute slave to the cook book and can't even make a dish without following a recipe to the letter.

But recently I've been getting bored with my meals and even though I think I can cook pretty decently with the random stuff we have laying around the kitchen, I acknowledge that I fail when it comes to just 'creating' a meal without a predetermined idea. If I feel like having chicken, I only really know how to make (a freaking amazing!) roast chicken, or chicken fillets, which I then put on baguettes to make (freaking delicious) sandwiches or salads. Recently, I've been obsessed with Thai and Vietnamese spices and flavours, so I've done my fair share of creating Vietnamese salads, prawn rolls, and Thai beef going by taste and trial and error. And those have been pretty amazing too.

But recently I was over at a friend's house and we were making dinner for the family. And like my grandma, my friend is pretty useless with out the aid of a cook book. The meal we made was fantastic and got me thinking about getting a few of these cookery books for myself.

What we had was chicken. Chicken rolled in brown sugar. Then cooked (she pan fried it, but I grilled it) . Then we made a Vietnamese sauce for it that I had never heard of before- green chilies, shallots, fish sauce, lime juice, coriander, and sugar. Freaking amazing! Most of the dressings I used to make were rice vinegar based rather than lime juice.

So now I'm rethinking cook books, but still holding onto my rebellious edge. I want to redo that chicken recipe, but use beef instead and omit the cumin. I'm realising that cook books have a lot more in them than I thought, and I can always just steal the ideas and amend them to fit my cause. I don't need to feel like every dish I make needs to be 'uniquely mine' because there's nothing wrong with following a recipe every now and then. Even though the odds of ever following one to the letter is still pretty slim.