My absolute favourite salmon recipe, cooked on the barbecue over a soaked cedar plank, comes from a cookbook… Sort of. The recipe calls for a marinade to be made with sun-dried tomatoes and fresh parsley being the main ingredients. And the very interesting thing about this recipe is that the marinade is made the day before, but it isn’t put onto the salmon until you’re just about ready to barbeque it. I follow the marinade instructions but I take a lot of liberties with the ingredients.

First of all I put copious amounts of everything, well above the ‘suggested’ amounts in the recipe: parsley, sun-dried tomatoes, garlic, salt and pepper. I also do equal parts of parsley and cilantro, adding a third main ingredient. When I make this for my sister who doesn’t like cilantro, (coriander), I swap out cilantro with basil for a small batch, but my family and I like the cilantro flavoured version too much to only do basil. My final alteration is that there is also olive oil in the recipe, but I use the oil that comes with the sun-dried tomatoes instead.

I couldn’t give you any more details because I measure nothing. Not a measuring cup or spoon in sight. This is my favourite kind of cooking, taking a recipe and making it my own. Not starting from scratch, altering a recipe to create something better.

I do try to follow a recipe precisely the first time I make it. I like to see why the recipe got into a cookbook on its own merits. But unless it’s sensational the next time I make it, I’m going a bit (or a lot) rogue… and subsequently every time after that too because I almost never measure my alterations with anything other than memory and instinct.