Recipe optional

If you haven’t heard of the author Michael Perry, stop reading this and go to his website right now.  Over the years he has chronicled his small town life in Wisconsin from the point of view of a volunteer firefighter, part-time pig farmer, and more recently, husband and father.  In Truck: A Love Story, he remembers the year he rebuilt his truck (and somehow made this fascinating to me) and met his wife.  With self-deprecating humor he describes the cooking paralysis he experiences when calculating that it would take him over fourteen years to try all the recipes in his relatively limited collection of thirteen cookbooks…and that’s not even counting “the Internet, otherwise known as the Devil’s Mind-Fryer” where he finds twenty recipes for snickerdoodles on one recipe site.  “How in the name of sifted sugar do you choose?”

My cookbook collection is more than thirteen, and that’s after spending much of the past year weeding out the ones that I don’t use and selling them at Half-Price Books.  I am down to a few basic must-haves and several restaurant cookbooks so that I can recreate dishes that I have enjoyed elsewhere, like the mac and cheese from Reata in Fort Worth.  However, I am more likely to read a cookbook than cook from it on an average night.  There are pretty pictures, you can read a few pages at a time and set it down, you can dream about all the yummy stuff you’ll make when you have the time and unlimited resources necessary to buy exotic ingredients at Whole Foods…what’s not to love?

I don’t rely on recipes to cook dinner for the family because I’m comfortable enough with the “I don’t have any swiss chard but spinach is green so nobody will know the difference” approach.  When a recipe catches my eye, I think in terms of 1) would I eat that and 2) do I have some of the key ingredients?  For example, this week we had my version of this recipe for white bean stew.  Got some of the ingredients?  Check.  Cold enough to have soup?  Check.  I replaced the can of white beans with dried white beans that I soaked.  I replaced the chopped tomatoes with crushed.  I added some minced onion and a couple spoonfuls of pesto.  It all went into the slow cooker before work and when I got home I stirred in some spinach.  Easy peasy lemon squeezy.