Tag Archives: recipe

Telephone game

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We’ve all played it at some point. I whisper a complex message to you, you pass it on as best as you can. It goes through a group of people and the end result is nothing like the original message.

I have a recipe for Spanish Rice given to me by my mom over the phone. It’s a list of ingredients to put in a frying pan, with almost no measurements. “A big squeeze” of a bottle, “just a little bit” of another item. The only definitive instructions are to bake in a dish at 350° for about 30 minutes, with the water ‘just above the rice’.

I just made it for the first time this year and didn’t put enough water. I salvaged it by adding water in a much bigger dish, but it’s definitely not the best version I’ve made. I’ll make it better next time, because I’ll remember this experience. But both my daughters love this recipe and I’ll need to do a better job of sharing it with them rather than this vague set of instructions that I’ve used for over two decades now.

This makes me marvel at the way knowledge was shared through oral traditions, for thousands of years before written history. It makes sense that stories and metaphors were used to help make the information easier to transfer.

A great example is the three sisters:

“The Three Sisters are the three main agricultural crops of various indigenous people of Central and North America: squash, maize (“corn”), and climbing beans (typically tepary beans or common beans). In a technique known as companion planting, the maize and beans are often planted together in mounds formed by hilling soil around the base of the plants each year; squash is typically planted between the mounds. The cornstalk serves as a trellis for climbing beans, the beans fix nitrogen in their root nodules and stabilize the maize in high winds, and the wide leaves of the squash plant shade the ground, keeping the soil moist and helping prevent the establishment of weeds.” ~ Wikipedia

How many generations did it take to learn of this symbiotic relationship between the 3 plants? And then, how clever to call them ‘sisters’ to help solidify their relationship and easily pass on the information to the next generation.

But I also wonder what knowledge was lost, or passed on inaccurately? What stories live on, like those of a great flood shared by cultures and peoples all over the world; yet have been given different meanings and interpretations that are based on the metaphors and stories of them being transferred poorly, like the telephone game, over centuries and centuries, over an unknown number of generations. For most of human history the telephone game was the main way to transfer knowledge. What was lost along the way?

Recipes from the soul

One of my favourite cooking quotes is, “Don’t ever let a recipe tell you how much garlic to put in. You measure that with your heart.”

I come from a family where recipes are impossible to follow.

Asking my mom how much of a spice to add, she shakes an imaginary spice bottle in a circle saying, “Go twice around the pot.”

My sister is cooking a recipe while on the phone helping our cousin’s wife cook the same recipe (and my sister is measuring for the first time to help): ‘Put a teaspoon (of a spice) in.’ Then once she adds the teaspoon herself, “No, that’s not enough, put another teaspoon in.”

My grandmother in her Guyanese accent, “Ya put a pinch a dis, a dash a dat” Or, “Cut-up some onion and mix it up with da same amount a garlic.”

“How much exactly?”

“Da same amount, not too much, not too little.”

As a result, I never follow a recipe:

A teaspoon of garlic? That can’t be enough!

A pinch of black pepper? Do you mean per serving?

Parsley? And no cilantro, that has to be a mistake!

Why isn’t there ginger in this recipe?

Hoisin sauce would make this rice stir fry recipe so much better.

Ground beef? I think I’ll just cut open a couple spicy Italian sausages and use use them instead.

I don’t really like to cook, but when I do, I don’t measure anything exactly as a recipe says. I don’t stick to the ‘suggested’ items list. I choose and measure items with my heart and soul.

My brother-in-law gave me some advice once, he said, “Follow a recipe exactly as suggested the first time, there’s a reason that exact recipe made it into the cookbook. Then if you don’t like it, change it up.”

Great advice… I just can’t follow it, and I blame my family! 😜

Spice it up

I make a pretty good rice stir fry. It’s a simple recipe that I made up one day when I saw we had a lot of veggies and leftover rice. My secret, very little soy and ‘way too much‘ hoisin sauce, sesame oil, garlic, and fresh ground pepper. And, a home made pepper sauce that is a family recipe my sister makes for me. I’m not a great cook, but I do some creative things at times and this is one of those times.

When I say ‘way too much‘ of something, I don’t mean drown in the flavour, but I notice that recipes always seem to be conservative with flavours and they try to find some kind of artistic balance. I say screw that when I’m being creative in the kitchen. Most recipes don’t add nearly enough garlic. Most recipes sprinkle black pepper. Most recipes that use sesame oil measure it in teaspoons or at most a couple table spoons. If you saw how much of these I add, you’d think I was ruining the dish… but none of these tastes are overpowering, and my dish is not boring or bland. It has kick, it has zest, and it sends my family back for seconds.

I make a few family concessions. My wife likes way more cilantro than my daughter, so I use a small amount in the dish, but have more chopped for my wife and I to add to the plate. My wife doesn’t like beef in it so I cook a side pot of beef in a similar sauce for my daughter and I. We each get our own version of the dish.

The point is, I really go crazy with certain ingredients, and I think that is seldom done in recipes you find in books. Some flavours deserve a good overdose, others you have to be careful with. Garlic, go nuts. Rosemary, be gentle. Fresh ground black pepper, double the recipe’s suggestion. Dill, be reserved.

Yes, you can have too much of a good thing, but more often than not a recipe simply won’t give you enough of the good stuff, and that’s how I go ‘off book’ on a recipe. That said, my brother-in-law shared some good advice with me recently. He said that the first time he follows a recipe he does it exactly as it is described. That way he can judge what earned it a place in the recipe book, before he gets creative. Good advice. Don’t try to fix something that isn’t broken. But if you taste a recipe and it needs more garlic, well then the next time you cook it, go a little garlic crazy.

Favourite steak sauce

I love steak. Seared, medium rare, moist, chewy, with a thin slice of crispy fat. Tonight I bought an eye of round roast cut and made my own steaks out of it. I’ve cooked the end piece in 2 slices for myself and the rest have gone into the fridge, seasoned, and in a ziplock bag, for a future, shared dinner. These will taste better than ones I ate today, after having the marinade soak in longer, but I enjoyed my steaks so much that I wanted to share my simple 2-step recipe.

1. Sprinkle la Grille Montreal Steak Spice liberally onto both sides of the steak, forcefully pushing the spice into the meat with your palm.

2. Mix 50% HP Sauce and 50% Lea & Perrins Worcestershire Sauce with some of your favourite (liquid) hot sauce to taste. Dip your streaks in.

That’s it. That’s all you need.

Cook on the BBQ, turning only once if you can, so as not to dry out the sides. I tend to have the BBQ above 500° when I add the steaks, and drop the temperature a bit. Then I flip onto a hot, unused part of the grill, put the lid on and lower the heat. I don’t always get the timing right and sometimes end up with medium rather than medium rare, but the moisture stays in cooking it this way and I’m not disappointed.

A simple recipe that you probably already have the ingredients for in you kitchen.

Enjoy!

A fun ‘how to’ video

One of our teachers at Inquiry Hub Secondary, Ms. Yu, posted a video challenge on our all-school Microsoft Teams:

I whipped this video up yesterday. It was fun to do, and didn’t take that long to make.

Imagine trying to make this video 20 years ago. What equipment would you have needed? How many hours of editing would it have taken? Now, anyone can create a simple ‘How to’ video in a matter of minutes, or a couple hours if you want to edit it and add captions/music etc.

We live in a time when producing and sharing creative ideas is easier than ever. I’m connected to a lot of educators online that create and share amazing things with me. I’m also connected to educators that have so much to share, and they don’t. If you are the former, thank you for your contributions to my learning. If you are the later, what are you waiting for?