Restaurant Recipes Arent for Everybody
Unless it is very simple, no one, no one should make a restaurant recipe for the first time under performance pressure. If your entire family is coming for Thanksgiving dinner, resist the urge to try and impress them with an untried dish, no matter which chef created it. This kind of restaurant recipe avoidance makes sense. Some other reasons for avoidance do not.
Even when they know a restaurant recipe will yield great results, some terrific cooks hardly ever use them. This is strange because these same cooks often have boxes of clipped – you guessed it – restaurant recipes, not to mention a cookbook library to rival that of Boston Public. So why don’t they make those cakes, casseroles, and appetizers developed by Wolfgang Puck and friends? Because they also have other boxes of tried and true “receipts” passed down to them by mothers, grandmothers, and aunts. When in doubt, they fall back on these golden oldies with the same comfortable sigh a child makes when he falls into a soft feather bed.
These cooks are convinced that old cookbooks are the best cookbooks. They speak in hushed tones about The Household Searchlight Recipe Book. Predictably, they like old restaurant recipes; better still, old restaurant recipes from restaurants that have been in operation a long time, places such as La Pyramide in Vienne, France. Better even than that, restaurants like The Cafeteria in the Diamond Department Store that closed its doors years ago. Recipe savers as opposed to recipe users fail to realize that life is too short and the world too full of potentially delightful culinary experiences to keep on repeating the same recipes over and over again to the exclusion of others that look promising. It also escapes them that today’s new recipes will eventually become tomorrow’s old ones.
A second group of cooks that tends to leave restaurant recipes alone (they also clip them) do so out of necessity because it is an unfair world and they have husbands who want their meat and potatoes plain, or small children who won’t touch anything that “looks funny,” or teenagers who are fortunate that pizza contains the four food groups. It’s no fun to cook for an unappreciative audience. Much is said about the responsibility of the chef, but something should be said, too, about the responsibility of the diner. In many households the diners don’t keep up their end of the mealtime bargain.
A third group of cooks who should probably and usually do leave restaurant recipes alone (but they can feel free to clip them if they want) is the group with no real time in which to prepare and serve food. Overextended and stressed out, they usually veer away (wisely) from recipes that would invite high expectations from their families and guests. What if they don’t have the few minutes needed to return the haddock filets to the oven coated with a special sauce for a final browning? It will be awful. These are the people who panic when they realize you have to soak wood skewers in water for a while before using them because company is expected in five minutes and they don’t have “a while.”
Through no fault of their own, restaurant recipes, although religiously collected, are often passed over when it comes time to prepare dinner. Even cooks who appreciate recipe innovation and love to dine out at fine restaurants can have trouble changing their own culinary routines to include the new and different. What we admire, we don’t always practice, at least, where food and cooking are concerned.
Source: http://www.positivearticles.com/blog