Cooking without a recipe: Inauthentic Indian

Did you think the blog relaunch was going to be all thoughtfulness and book reviews? No, my friends, no. In the spirit of the “capacious hold-all” mentioned in my beloved Virginia Woolf quote (see my blog header) I will be including all the odds and ends of my life. And I love to cook.

I use recipes when I cook only perhaps 25% of the time. The remainder of the time I get an idea (often inspired by what I have on hand, or a recipe in one of my [many] cookbooks) and go from there.

I know that when I started cooking, the idea that it could be easy, intuitive, was awe-inspiring to me. I don't think I would have realized how relaxed and extemporaneous cooking could be if I hadn't had one friend who cooked like that — without a book, without worries, without a 'net' of any kind. And she cooked the most delicious food.

I would now like to be that friend to you, my blog reader. You, too, can cook without recipes. I am going to try and share my thought processes with you.