Your Cooking Style

[celiathepoet]

How would you describe your cooking style? What ingredients or cuisines do you favor? Do you like to cook for groups, or children, or just yourself? What aspects of cooking are your favorite? What are you good at? What cookbooks or recipe sources do you rely upon?

[Amelia]

Pretty much seat of the pants. In my twenties I worked hard at learning good techniques, so I feel confident enough about how to put things together that I can be free to mess around with flavor combinations. I'm also a very ingredient-driven cook. I like to shop for what is fresh and on sale, and then figure out how it can go together.

Yes, I love the show Chopped.

[Jenertia]

I had a job a while back that ended early - 4:30 pm - and left me plenty of time to cook at the end of the day. I got right into the food shows on PBS, cookbooks, and online recipe sites. I only cook for a two-person appreciation squad (me and my husband), so I'm always looking for simple, different, good, small-quantity meals. I'm somewhat restricted by my husband's food pickiness, but for the couple of years there where I went hog-wild, I still had plenty of room to maneuver, and we were trying to make take out foods like Indian, Chinese, Indonesian... anything we could find the spices for.

For those years, I rarely made the same thing twice. And I made courses, a thing I haven't done before or since, really - I'm a one-plate meal person. That one plate can include sides and a main and maybe garlic toast or something small, or it can be a stir fry or pasta, etc., but I almost never plan more than one course.

And there's a line of complexity where I turn the page on a recipe: I'll dirty a lot of dishes, I'll have all the burners going on the stove at once, but if I have to start a component of a meal three hours before, or make three whole segments of the meal from scratch before I even assemble the final meal, it had better be delicious. You know? Like lasagne is on the line, with the noodles, the meat sauce, and then the assembly. If I made lasagne with a bechemel sauce as well, that would end lasagne (if it weren't so wonderful).

So, my style is easy, but I'm willing to work if it's worth it. International, but with about 50% of the meals just being family-traditional stuff. About a 7 on the 1-10 Experimental scale, maybe. And I love making something that uses an unexpected ingredient ("what do I do with this" thread, Imma looking at you) and then we end up really liking it.

[Scotsbloke]

When I'm on my own I heat up Tesco's Finest Ready Meals. When I'm with kids I cook from scratch. My style is pretty simple and usually some variation of 'meat and two veg'. I'm an unreconstructed carnivore and loves all sort of meat and game. Fortunately my kids do too and happily tuck in to roast pheasant or venison casserole.

We also like fish - especially 'meaty' fish like halibut, tuna or salmon but I usually just grill it.

I'm probably in a bit of a rut, don't use a recipe book and should find some inspiration!

[Jules]

I have a very Californian cooking style. Those are the cookbooks that I gravitate towards and find that they suit what I already like to cook. It's pretty heavily influenced by rustic Italian and Mexican cooking; I like to use a lot of fresh vegetables and meats, I grill a lot, and don't generally make things that are swamped with fats or gravies.

My husband had to teach me to deep-fry, as that simply wasn't in my repertoire, and I still prefer to leave it to him. He gets that from the Midwestern style of his family. I've been slowly introducing them to properly cooked vegetables. And lettuces other than iceberg.

Also, physically, I'm a pretty messy cook. If I don't clean as I go, the kitchen is a certifiable disaster area. I'm not known to do much in the way of measuring either, unless I'm baking something new, and can't leave a recipe alone to save my life. I'm a total seat-of-the-pants cook. That's slightly aggravating when you're trying to teach someone else, as I honestly don't know how much of what goes into some things; I just put stuff in until it tastes right.

[China Cat]

No cookbooks, no recipes. Just simple, as in: burgers, meatloaf, roast chicken, pork chops, steak, spaghetti and meatballs, broiled fish, crock pot roast, steamed vegies, rice, potatoes or bread. I'd love to learn some easy peasy vegetarian meals...*hint hint*

[Nora_Charles]

My cooking style has gotten kind of warped since I separated from my husband. Crash is a very selective eater, so mostly I cook for me. I have a standard run of stuff, but I love to find an elaborate recipe in a magazine or online and go for it. As far as styles, I love Asian and Mediterranean cuisines, and I eat a lot of vegetarian because decent meat is too expensive for my budget. I tend to cook in a very "winging-it" kind of method. Sometimes I might read a menu description of something and try to recreate it, or I might read a recipe and butcher it according it to what is in my cabinets. I tend to think of recipes as guidelines or inspiration points rather than directions.

[jennw]

Due to some pretty severe (and potentially fatal) food allergies, I tend to cook the same bunch of meals over and over, the tried and true stuff. I'm also very simple eater, maybe because of my farm upbringing. A slab of meat, and veggies and potatoes. No sauces, no spices, no dips, nothing extra, really. Our family grew up on very typical country dinners (like from back in the days when everything was made from scratch, even before running water, when we lived off the land and all the women cooked all day to feed the farmhands).
I used to think it was my allergies that kept me from experimenting with new foods, but I've been trying as many different things as I can (only with epi-pen and husband both nearby) and I just have no palate for these new food combinations. Luckily my husband will eat pretty much anything, so I'm free to cook what I want to try, and nothing goes to waste.

[Mickey17]

I would say that I am not necessarily a fly the seat of my pants kind of girl, but neither to I strictly conform to a recipe. I tend to review recipes for flavors that go together and then most of the time I don't measure anything and add stuff that I think will work. But I never start without a recipe as inspiration.

I tend to cook California, Italian or Mexican more than anything else. Eastern food seems to be hard to work into our menu because my dad has problems with curry seasoning. And I haven't even really had the chance to try it, so on the off night he is not there, I generally don't feel adventurous enough.

I prefer to cook for groups. Kids or adults. When I cook for myself (or just me and Squeak) I end up going with tried and true comfort food. I think because it is hard to justify the clean up for just myself and it is hard to do all the prep, cooking and clean up with a 2 year old under foot and no one to distract her.

My favorite recipe source has turned out to be Martha Stewart's Everyday Food. Almost every recipe I have made from them has been pretty delish.

[Maud Gonne]

Mostly I don't use recipes, though I'm starting to a little. I used to begin by deciding whether it was a pasta or a rice night, and working from there - pasta with tomato sauce (with or without meat), pasta with white sauce (with or without chicken), pasta with carbonara sauce; rice with vegetables, rice with curry (from a jar), rice with chilli (chicken/beef/veg), noodles with stir fry... like that.

These days I do cook a potato or a chop now and then for something a bit more retro, and I also hit up a recipe book for things like the sauce for sesame noodles, lamb keema, um... stuff. I'm starting to cook a little more Indian stuff lately, for which I obviously need recipes. I love cookbooks but mostly just use them for inspiration, fantasy reading, or baking recipes. I'm a devotee of Nigella Lawson and learnt a lot of basics from Delia Smith and my home economics book. Mostly I'm looking for something quick and simple to get on the table when besieged by whining children. But I cook for myself and the mister; child 1 doesn't eat anything and child 2 can scavenge what she likes from ours.

[Herkimer]

I am to a weird extent Jenertia's food-cooking twin.

I cook 95% vegetarian though I'm trying to up the meat content a little bit for the kids (also because otherwise I tend to impulse-buy meat in sandwiches and at restaurants, which I'm trying to avoid).

I'm incredibly messy, my floors are always a wreck, although I'm much better now about getting stuff put away while I work.

I cater to my husband's pickiness because that drives me less batshit than seeing him picking stuff out of his food or flat-out skipping a meal with content he doesn't like. But every once in a while I say fuck it and throw in all those mushrooms or olives or goat cheese or cilantro or brussels sprouts or cabbage. As you can tell this is still a hot button for me, though.

I mostly cook from scratch. I've tried to let go and do more quick meals but I just don't like the taste of things from cans and jars. So I often spend at least an hour cooking dinner. I'm working more on doubling portions and freezing, which saves a lot of time but doesn't force the ingredients compromise.

[Rapaz]

I think I might describe my cooking style as "bachelor baroque." Meaning, I cook from scratch using real ingredients, but most of the time it's a one-pot meal, heavy on the meat, and lots of flavor.

The one thing I've never taken to is salad-making. I love eating salad (especially with homemade dressing -- yum!), but making it just isn't something I think of.

And since I'm not feeding a huge family, I struggle a lot with managing to use food before it gets stale or goes off. This influences my cooking a lot -- I don't like to make things that don't produce good leftovers. I hate waste, but I also won't do that depression-era thing where you eat something you dislike simply to avoid wasting it.

The big change over time for me has been frying -- I don't fry nearly as much as I used to. My tastes changed, I guess, and now I use techniques like braising a lot more than I fry or saute.

[Opinionated Siamese]

I either cook using recipes that aren't very complicated (my mom's spaghetti recipe is probably about as complex as it gets), or will throw a bunch of stuff together, ad hoc, and hope it works out.

[wipeout]

We're very much into two-pot/pan meals for everyday eating: one for noodles, pasta, or rice, and the other for whatever goes over the chosen carbohydrate, whether it's stir-fried or sautéed veggies, curry, or tomato sauce.

Alternatively it'll be a giant salad with mixed lettuce, an apple, dried cranberries, blue cheese, sunflower seeds, and homemade balsamic dressing.

Sometimes on a Sunday we'll make a lasagna or some other layered-baked-in-a-pan meal that lasts several days.

Sometimes I make soup, and we'll get some nice bread and maybe have a side salad.

When guests come over we'll do a full meal with meat, a vegetable or two, and a starch. Usually the barbecue is involved. Sometimes the starch is risotto.

Other than for guests, it's almost all vegetarian around our place. Most dinners go together in about half an hour tops. It is rarely fancy but very high in flavour. Indian, Asian, Mexican, and Italian are all flavour influences, but nothing we make is authentic in any way.

[spygirl]

It varies, but leans to the elaborate by most standards, I guess. A few weeks ago, CB and a friend came home from a snowboarding trip and I cooked up a quick dinner for them, just some gnocchi I'd frozen and a quick white wine cream sauce with pesto. Our friend stared at me stirring up the roux and observed "you cook fancy." And that was before he knew the gnocchi were homemade, even.

About half the time I cook from a recipe, usually something new or exciting that I want to try; the other half it's from memory or instinct. There's a rotation of about 10 or 15 standby meals that we come back to with some frequency -- favorite soups, slow cooker stews, big dishes that yield millions of leftovers, grilled meats, basic chicken, that kind of stuff. Most dishes involve sauteed onion and garlic as a base before stir frying, adding canned sauce, etc. Most dishes get beer or wine or vermouth added in some way. There are a few recipes I love that I refrain from making as often as I'd like them; I can think of one or two that CB would maybe like more often than I do but overall he doesn't seem to mind whatever I plan out. He's not at all picky -- well, okay, a little, but happily our preferences are almost totally in sync so it's rare that I want to make something he won't eat. We don't branch out much with vegetables, although we do try, occasionally, to eat beyond broccoli, green beans, roasted brussels sprouts, or salad.

This semester will be very low-key, culinarily, since CB has late classes three days a week and won't be home to cook with me. I don't mind putting out the effort a few times a week to get something big and gourmet, but I'd rather do it with my sous chef.

[Corinne]

My cooking style is a cross between Herkimer and Rapaz-- lots of one pot, lots of flavor (ideally), lots of concern for good leftovers, mostly vegetarian, mostly from scratch. Although that last may change some now that I've used all the red sauce I froze last summer.

Occasionally I deviate either towards incredibly elaborate recipes or, falling off the other end, to frozen pizza or Indian food, but in general I try to cook from basic ingredients to keep myself fed well and well-fed, because I feel so much better that way.

Baking is another story-- I experiment endlessly to get specific dishes as I'd like them, and am constrained (lately) only by trying to limit the amount of food I produce to what's manageable.

[Niki]

I've been all over the place. I used to cook elaborate dinners as a twelve year old then fell off the wagon until recently. I'm getting back into cooking and baking, something I always did as a young kid and teenager. As those who've been in the snow day thread, I'm on a bread baking kick since I have few supplies but enough to make some kick ass bread.

I made a fairly labor intensive mac 'n cheese yesterday because of the chopping, the bechemel sauce I almost buggered up, timing things, etc., but it was worth the effort in the end. Colin loved the dish. Jake's been watching me more and more lately, so I'm wanting to get back into cooking more from scratch or almost scratch.

I like basics that can freeze well or work better as leftovers. Most recipes I'll follow a few times before ditching the cookbook.

[ecaron]

I realized recently that I'm not a recipe-follower. When I'm making something the first few times, I like to have a recipe on hand to get a feel for the timeline and measurements, but then I fly solo. When I'm making stew or roasting a chicken, I dig around in the pantry and just throw in whatever I've got that looks good. I'm pretty casual, and confident that I know what I'm doing.

My mom's very casual in the kitchen, too, which makes sense because she's the one who taught me to cook. When I was growing up, we didn't have measuring spoons (we used actual teaspoons and tablespoons) and an incomplete set of measuring cups, so we'd have to kind of guess at 1/3 and 3/4 of a cup. That 'eyeball it' mentality kept me from worrying too much, I think. That, and the fact that I've been cooking for a long time. I've made my share of mistakes. The first time I made scrambled eggs, they turned out pretty bad, considering I was 3 and I was trying to cook them on the floor. Literally, I cracked a bunch of eggs on the linoleum and stirred them around for a while, not really aware that I was missing a few crucial steps.

ETA: I favor Mediterranean and Italian flavors, but not exclusively, and lately I've been more and more interested in Asian flavors. I've discovered that I don't hate ginger as much as I thought, for one, and sesame oil has been a revelation.