Disgruntled Cook

I'm not much for cooking anyway but when I do (unless I'm baking, as Donna said) I don't usually follow a recipe. I don't do much of anything more complicated than putting a chicken breast or pork chop in the skillet with a bit of olive oil and seasoning it up and then throwing some sort of veggie side on the plate with it. The few times I have managed to get creative in the kitchen it's been with tossing in stuff that I think will taste good together (discovered some kick @$$ dishes that way. hehe) and seeing how it comes out. I don't have the patience for long drawn out recipes. LOL

I do, however, always try to rememeber what all I used so that I can replicate or improve it next time...if there's ever a next time.

Never with baking -- too much science involved there to stray from a recipe or try making up my own.

But with dinner -- I always follow a new recipe but see, there's not so much science involved with most of my dinners so once I've done it once, I'll tweak it. For some things, I've never had a recipe.  Like roasts, I don't really know how I do roasts.  Let them dry out in the fridge for a few days, shove them in the oven at 500F, turn it down to 325F or 350F, cook til it hits 135F inside (I have a thermometer that goes in the oven but the display sits on the counter -- long metal thing linking them) take it out, let it rest, cut and serve.

My dh the engineer always uses the recipe.  Once I was doing dinner and he was going, "We can't cook dinner, we don't have what we need!" Confused (b/c we did TOO have what we needed) I asked, "Like what?" "A RECIPE!" "Who needs a recipe for pepper, onions, tomatoes and sausage? You cook them up and throw them on a plate with good bread or pasta!"  And it was fine.  Oh, but ya know, I did add spices . . . Italian seasoning and some garlic, too (fresh), and maybe oregano . . .

I do have some good soup recipes that you can try . . . 

You know what dh's favorite cooking magazine is? COOK'S ILLUSTRATED -- it's by the people who do AMERICA'S TEST KITCHEN on PBS and the magazine write-ups are very much like the show.  "We tried this, we tried that, here's what we found worked best." He loves their scientific, methodical approach (and uses it to point out to me that recipes are TESTED and therefore I should FOLLOW them LOL). You can glance at their magazine (probably) in your grocery store.  Mine carries them someplace weird . . . by the meat counter maybe? They have a really good tortilla soup recipe . . .

FWIW,

Penn

PS -- one thing I do with my chicken soup recipes is to cook the chicken in low-sodium commercial chicken broth (which tends to be lower-flavor than homemade but I don't do homemade) and that seems to boost the flavor a bit.  You might try it if you can vary from your recipe LOL.

PPS -- when we were teenagers, my sister found my mom's old recipe spiral and used it but nothing other than ingredients was written down -- not even amounts. I guess my mom was a good enough cook even when she was a teen (well, she should have been -- she was cooking for 20+ at 13) that she just needed to remember what she'd included and she'd know from experience the amounts and how/when to add them. I guess you'd need more?