I like to cook. I like watching reality cooking shows, too, the kind where amateur chefs learn to be professionals (though that is so not my ambition). Part of the reason I enjoy the shows is that they inspire me to creativity and to try new things.
Cooking is enjoyable for me because it turns something that must be done into a skilled pursuit which exercises my creative side – at least, the way I do it. Here’s what I’ve learned.
1. Start with the best ingredients
You can’t go very far wrong in cooking if you are starting with good ingredients: fresh fruit and vegetables, whole grains, lean protein and monounsaturated oils. And you can’t go very far wrong in life if you are starting with sound basics: willingness and ability to learn, hard work, perseverance and a desire to connect to other people positively. It’s like learning your scales if you want to play jazz. You can’t jam until you know the basics of how to play.
My go-to book for good ingredients, by the way, is George Mateljan’s The World’s Healthiest Foods, Essential Guide for the Healthiest Way of Eating
2. Stand on the shoulders of giants
Sometimes on the cooking shows, you will see creative cooks whose specialty is combining unusual flavours together. Almost invariably, they are knocked out because they produce some ridiculous random combination like pork and peaches that was never going to work, “because if it works it’ll be amazing”. Well, yes, it would be.
Don’t be those people. I rarely follow someone else’s recipe exactly, but what I do do is look through recipe books and websites for recipes that use my planned main ingredients, and get a sense of what else is frequently combined with them. I then imagine what that would taste like and come up with my own combinations.
photo credit: FotoosVanRobin
If I’m learning to do something, I’m aiming eventually to do it my way, but I’m going to do that after I’ve learned what generally works. You don’t seriously think that nobody ever considered pork and peaches as a combination, do you? The reason that you don’t see it served as a classic dish is that the flavours just don’t work together that well. Someone tried it and discovered that – so you don’t have to. Pork and apples, on the other hand…
3. Season to taste
Sometimes, when I create a new recipe, it’s a success first time (though I’ll usually still try variations when I make it in the future). Sometimes, it’s OK, but it’s not quite right. The other week I made a venison and mushroom pie. The flavours of the herbs and the red wine and the onions and garlic that I used (following principles 1 and 2) were lovely, but they lacked a bit of oomph. I knew just what it needed – tomato. And indeed, when I opened a can of tomatoes and added them as a kind of sauce, the taste was, if I can say so, excellent.
The thing about creativity (or any new thing you do) is that your first attempt often isn’t amazingly wonderful. What the first attempt does is show the potential and suggest ways to improve. This is where your creative imagination comes into play – figuring out what would make a good thing even better.
Those, then, are my three principles. Start with good basics, learn from what classically works, then do something that’s new – as a learning experience, a data point towards producing something amazing.
I’d love to hear your comments and suggestions on how to apply these principles to things I’ve never thought of, by the way. That’s part of my learning too. (Oh, and some of my other recipes are here.)
Technorati Tags: cooking, creativity, recipes, life lessons
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