Stuff I Like: Cliff Notes for Cooking

My husband grew up in a home where meatloaf was on Monday night, fried chicken was Tuesday night and so on. This certainly simplifies things, but I prefer a little more variation. I generally enjoy cooking and have shelves full of cookbooks and recipes torn from magazines at the ready to give a try.

Preparing a wide range of dishes has produced a family of adventurous and game eaters. But in deviating from the safety of a recurring weekly menu I have had to come up with a couple of rules to guide the selection process so that I don’t start to hate making dinner.

My first rule is ironclad. If a recipe isn’t a homerun it gets trashed. I have made some real miscalculations. Like the time I served seviche, when no one was ready for raw fish. Or the marinated chicken that sounded delicious but was impossibly bland. I have made many dishes that only I love. Which is fine, but until the day comes that I am cooking for one, it is much easier to shoot for something with wider appeal.

Another thing I do that has come in remarkably handy is to jot down notes on the recipe as I am cooking. As silly as it sounds, I have found it extremely helpful to spy in the margin, “super easy. everyone loves. add more veggies” or “double the marinade. best with brown rice”.

I have these little notes on many of the recipes torn from the pages of Cooking Light or yanked from the newspaper. But it took me a lot longer to actually write in my cookbooks. It felt as if I was defacing them, perhaps a holdover from school days when it was big trouble to write in textbooks.

But little reminders here are probably the most helpful because it is hard to remember just which chicken dish it was that we all liked among a sea of choices in The Joy of Cooking. I have even taken to writing down the name and page number of the ones I love on that blank page at the end of the book. My own index of family hits. Super nerdy, I know. But super helpful, too.

It is stuff like this that I should probably never admit to doing. Really, what could be less cool. But it is the little things that really expedite the making of a satisfying meal and help keep cooking healthy, interesting dishes more of a pleasure than a chore, which works for me.  Even if I am a world class nerd.