A couple of weeks ago, I “created” a tomato soup and grilled cheese recipe. It is perfect and it is entering our weekly rotation of dishes.
My process for finding new recipes is to search online for a number of recipes, pull out the ones that feel right, and start mixing, matching, and experimenting. I end up with something that owes a great debt to the predecessor recipe(s), but also has been tweaked — sometimes a little, sometimes a lot — to get it right for us. This is the primary way I have learned to cook, and some of my favorite recipes in our go-to-list have been derived this way. My vegetable minestrone originally came from this recipe, while my pav bhaji originated with a UVA grad student’s posting with gusto a long time ago (I still love the language in his recipe, including his intro):
Pav Bhaji literally means Bread and Vegetables. It doesn’t sound all too exciting when you put it this way but the 15 million Bombayites who relish it off the hawkers on the pavement have their taste-buds in the right place. Pav Bhaji is the quintessential Bombay food. It is a fast-food, but it takes quite some time to prepare. It can be eaten on the run and yet is sometimes served in restaurants. It is a half-meal which grabs you by the gullet and fills the belly without emptying your pocket. Never make this dish for just you or one other person. A pav bhaji session is for a group of at least 5! The 5 people in question must have a good appetite and must eat pav bhaji the way it is to be eaten – lots of bhaji with every mouthful!
Both recipes have been modified significantly from their author’s original form. I think the term for this is “forking” where you take a piece of work as a base and you create something derivative from it. Many things work like this. Most famously in the context of this blog, is computer code which is shared, branched, and forked on github. Legal contracts and briefs often start out by finding several models and working from there. But perhaps the most long-standing quintessential human use of copy and modify is with food and recipes. This is how I imagine from the dawn of fire and cooking that our forebears invented, modified, and spread their recipes.
It only seems natural and necessary that we need a github for grub then, right?
takingpitches 