Kicking myself!

[mockchoc]

I just ate the best soup I ever had and I made it from scratch with chicken carcases.

I'd used the stock for a pork and chive wonton soup but had a little left over so day ate it for lunch without any wontons but added some kimchi to it.

Think I just died and went to heaven being a soup girl.

Trouble is I didn't use a recipe or write one down.

Dammmmmmmmmmmmn!

Do you keep track of the good recipes you make up? I rarely do.

[bixaorellana]

When something turns out really well I do try to write it down immediately because I know I'll forget later when I want to reproduce it.

[Deleted]

Using a recipe takes away most of the pleasure. A good soup made from a recipe will never equal the wonderful moment of discovering that you have improvised something exceptional.

[mockchoc]

Oh no matter.......I will always remember this day and the best soup ever.

Guess I should try to recreate it ASAP though. I bet I forget the one thing that made it so special.

Bixa the problem is if you aren't measuring things at all and just keep adding what you know will enhance the flavour as you taste then it's not really a proper recipe.

Next time you go to make it it can't be exactly the same because there aren't quanities written down.

I am rubbish with following recipes or writting them if I conjured things up. Fact.

Need to find a solution.

[Deleted]

Maybe the secret ingredient were those specific chicken carcasses, like no others that you will ever find.

[bixaorellana]

When I do remember to write something exceptional down, I do it immediately after eating, while all those little extra additions or whatever are fresh in my mind.

I don't agree with you, K, about a recipe taking away some of the pleasure. There are certain things we don't make often and, even if we don't follow the recipe exactly, it helps to cue our memory & keeps us from accidentally leaving out that special something.

[gringalais]

I do that quite a bit. I usually can replicate it quite closely, but it often seems like something is missing.

[Deleted]

I have noticed that such moments are often a matter of perfect spice and seasoning combinations rather than the actual food ingredients.

[Don Cuevas]

From mostly idle curiosity, I decided to seek a copycat recipe for A-1 Steak Sauce. I decided early on the any that used Wishbone Italian Dressing would be rejected, because it would be like "cheating to cheat", if you get my meaning. I found one at last that seemed reasonably decent: blueberriesandblessings.com/2013/05/14/homemade-a-1-steak-sauce/

I was willing to use ketchup and Worcestershire Sauce.

But when I got going on it, it wasn't right in several ways. I couldn't understand why anyone would strain out the raisins. Mine also had dried tangerine peel, for lack of a fresh orange. (I also used orange juice.) I didn't want the peels strained out.

At 15 minutes of simmering, the flavors were unmarried. Acid dominated, there was a deficiency of salt, and a lack of "heat".

I set about remedying these over the next half hour, adding prune butter, habanero vinegar (just a few drops), Mexican azucar mascabada (a coarse brown sugar), a drizzle of Squid Brand Fish Sauce (to enhance umami), and several careful doses of water, as it had become more like uncongealed pudding than sauce.

I started to strain it, but decided that that was ridiculous, so I blended it adding judicious amounts of water. Finally it achieved a consistency and taste that was close to the Original A-1 Steak Sauce, though not exactly. Sra. Cuevas and I did a quick tasting of both the copycat sauce and the Original. The copycat was thicker, fruitier and mellower. The Original was more fluid and tart. I think that the copycat version will improve with age.

What did I learn? Copycat recipes may be spurious at best. Next, this one took over an hour to make and involved dirtying numerous utensils, pot, bowl, blender.
Total Yield: One and a half pints! I could have bought a bottle of the Original at Superama supermercado in Morelia.

[Don Cuevas]

I recently found two fxxed up recipes in on of my favorite cookbooks, James Beard's American Cookery. The one for lasagna, p. 587, was seriously screwed up. One for Cream of Mushroom Soup, p. 96, a mere peccadillo.

In the lasagne recipe, we are instructed to cook the lasagna noodles in boiling water, then keep warm in oiled water. You then make the tomato meat sauce and the bechamel sauce. You also need to parboil, skin, then brown some Italian sausages. After that, you may begin assembling the lasagna laminae. I can only imagine the condition of the waiting noodles.

The business with the cream of mushroom soup is that after simmering a pound of sliced mushrooms for up to 45 minutes, you then strain them out of the chicken stock and set aside. Then you thicken the broth and added milk/cream with a beurre manie, and add the cooked mushrooms back.

I was only wondering why the straining step?

I made this soup yesterday and used an onion-flour roux and skipped the straining step. It was a wonderful soup. I'd also noted a lack of herbs or much other seasoning so I added some thyme and chopped fresh tarragon. Mine was further enriched with some lime juice (yellow lemons almost non existent here in this season) and a beaten egg.

[Deleted]

I have always patently avoided lasagne sheets that require pre-cooking. I use the Barilla sheets, and one of the main things I like about being able to put them in my cooking dish dry is that since my dish is not the same format as one or two sheets of Barilla lasagne, I can snap them in two or into other formats to get perfect coverage.