Thursday, July 9, 2015

making a recipe your own

As a person who has been cooking for almost half-a-century now, it finally occurred to me that the easiest meals to prepare are the ones I do from memory.  For some reason, the need to consult a recipe makes the preparation significantly more tedious.  And when I have to keep waking up my ipad because it drifts away to sleep while i'm chopping or measuring?   grrrr....

Cooking an old familiar dish -- piece o' cake.  It may take me hours, but its familiarity makes it easy.  Cooking a simpler one that I never made before -- much more productive of stress and weariness, not least because of the uncertainty of the result.  Ever get a recipe for a dish that tasted wonderful at a friend's house, but turned out disappointing when you made it? ... you know what i'm talking about!

When making a more complicated concoction, I doubt that there's any quick way to bypass the much-repeated consultations with the written word.  A recipe with a dozen different seasonings, from 1/4-teaspoon of cayenne to 1 1/2-teaspoon ground mustard to 2 tablespoons of sugar-free pancake syrup (as in a batch of barbecue sauce), calls for a lot of back-and-forth which frankly makes me prefer to let J grill steaks....

Reading a "new" recipe VERY carefully before starting it -- or even a recipe i've made a time or two -- complete with visualizing the process, can help me.  In the former case, I can pick up possible errors in transcription.  As hard as proofreading literature can be, proofreading recipes is REALLY tricky, and some people can't describe a procedure well to save their lives.  If I've tried a recipe before and found it worth doing again, reading it through (with visualization) reminds me of what I thought should be done differently the first time.

Reading the new recipe can also remind you of something you've done before -- that makes it easier and less stressful!  If I realize that a new chicken recipe is LIKE an old pork recipe in technique, but just changing herbs and adding cheese, I can pretty well just wing it.

Converting classics and childhood favorites to a lower-carb style requires a few different ingredients AND some changes in technique.  When I first started LC, I was "doing" Atkins according to the book;  their recipes in those days beat hell out of most diet recipes i'd used in preceding decades, and it was worth it to me to buy the old "bake mix" and shake powders, but those things disappeared from the market and I had to find other substances that could do the job.  For a few years I used Expert Foods' thickeners and other special ingredients ... but THEY quit the business TOO!  :-P  Thank heavens their raw materials are known and available to retail consumers....

I've picked up several invaluable tricks from Dana Carpender:
  • To thicken a liquid with glucomannan (konjac) flour, the process goes MUCH more easily if you put the powder in a salt-type shaker and sprinkle with one hand while whisking with the other.  This doesn't keep me from over-thickening from time to time, but at least it prevents the lumps that I USED to get.
  • In preparing shirataki noodles for serving, you can keep dishes from sitting in puddles of water by draining and rinsing the straight-from-the-bag noodles, then microwaving 90 seconds and re-draining them TWICE.  That method seems to drive the water out without the stove-top heating that so often toughens them.
  • Classic recipes with cheesy sauces often require making bĂ©chamel and melting cheese into it.  This high-carb product can't be imitated merely by melting cheese into a low-carb dish, but by melting cream-cheese and cheddar (or gruyere, or whatever) together, you can get pretty close.
  • To replicate the caramel flavor of brown sugar, she suggests using a tiny amount of blackstrap molasses to the artificial-sweetener of choice -- somewhere around a half-teaspoon, depending of course on the size of the recipe.  Ever try to measure out a quarter-teaspoon of molasses???  :-)  Dana recommends putting your molasses into an old honey-bear type of squeeze bottle -- I haven't done this yet, but it sounds like GENIUS.
There are lots of other tweaks to traditional cooking that make our low-carb creations turn out better.  Part of it is intuitive and some is ... less so.  It occurred to me that I should make another "special page" here, where i'll congregate some of these ideas.  I hope my internet friends will share theirs, too!  Together, we have centuries'-worth of kitchen experience!

8 comments:

  1. I love looking at and sharing recipe ideas. I am no great chef or 'Delia'. My earliest recollections was of my dear mums cooking (and also my grandparents), and in those days it really was good home cooking, usually using foods that had been bought that very day with seasonal vegetables from the vegetable patch!

    Of course foods, recipes and what we expect from them have changed over the years. I prefer recipes that only use a few ingredients, although I'm not adverse to trying out those that are more ' finicky' with a wide choice and measurements in various and detailed ingredients ... it is all about personal choice, personal dietary needs, but above all about enjoying our food.

    In my opinion the joy of food is in the tasting, and there is nothing better than being able to sit down and enjoy a freshly cooked home made meal.

    All the best Jan

    PS Many thanks for passing on the tips Tess, it's appreciated.

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    1. Thanks, Jan! You may not style yourself "no great chef" but your recipes on TLCD generally look very appealing! I like your own plate-photos, particularly. :-)

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    2. The images of food on the lowcarbdiabetics blog complitely contradict the idea that LC food is boring of monotonous. My everyday food at home is much less picturesque.

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  2. "A recipe with a dozen different seasonings, from 1/4-teaspoon of cayenne to 1 1/2-teaspoon ground mustard to 2 tablespoon..." This is where curry powder, Italian seasoning, or pumpkin pie spice comes in.

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    1. Hi Lori ... yes Italian Seasoning can be very useful at times !

      All the best Jan

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    2. Oh, I definitely use those, too! :-)

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  3. Great tips! Where do you get the glucomannan, Tess?
    I am with Jan on using few ingredients in everyday cooking - it is what many people do at home - they vary few circulating dishes adding what is handy at the moment - it provides a variety without sending a cook to another groceries shopping trip. May be the author of the recipe you wanted to replicate just used what he/she fancied at the moment? For example, in the recipe from your previous post dried cranberries could be substituted for chopped dried prunes/apricots or even chopped fresh plums/cherries/citrus/sour apple, probably slightly reduced on a skillet to remove some moisture.

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    1. :-D I often have to resort to Amazon.com for off-beat ingredients -- that's where the glucomannan came from. It's always glee-producing for me, when I see in a shop something that used to be very hard to find.... Getting almond- and coconut-flour from a common grocery practically had me doing a happy-dance in public!

      Certainly, we do our share of substituting ingredients when we have something similar, but not what's called-for in recipes. Nuts or fruits are infinitely exchangeable, lean meats for lean meats (chicken breast and pork tenderloin), and fatty for fatty (lamb shoulder and beef brisket).... Some recipes I like are defined by the spices, for example when I used to make apple pie, I used nutmeg instead of cinnamon, because you can get the latter ANYWHERE and the former only from my oven. ;-)

      Barbecue sauce is a very special case, and fortunately one that doesn't have to be created every time -- I make good-sized batches and store it. My favorite recipe is from a Kansas City landmark restaurant (closed in '07) called Stephenson's Apple Orchard Restaurant. I think it's the only thing I ever made from their spiral-bound cookbook, but the rest was horribly carby. BBQ has to be a dance of sweet, spicy, tangy and hot, but most commercial products only do the first and last....

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