Externe Column: Meals ain't Big Deals

Cooking a tasty, healthy and diverse dinner seems straightforward. Each grocery store offers so many different types of food which form interesting tastes and structures, while at the same time providing vital nutrients. However, I keep getting surprised by people who need official recipes in order to create a meal. I think too many people are restricted to the question if specific ingredient combinations are “allowed”, instead of predicting the taste by themselves.  As long as it isn’t officially a recipe, people stay sceptic.  Like dishes will explode or one will get food poisoned by mixing up different cuisines. Like cooking is a religion and its god punishes those who try out a meal that is not professionally approved yet.

Because there’s the crux of the matter: the moment some uncommon dish is proposed by 24kitchen or a cookbook, the unusualness is no longer defined as weird, but well found or even genius instead.  For example, Leonie ter Veld has quite a success with her book Gewoon wat een studentje s’avonds eet, which could be translated to Just a student’s diner. Apparently, there was a big demand for unusual recipes. A missed opportunity; unusual diners have always been usual for me.  

From the age of five I started experimenting by baking cakes from random dough mixtures with orange or apple juice, without any idea how much of each specific ingredient I put in. And still I hardly use recipes or conform to cultural restrictions. Although I love to browse through recipes for inspirational purposes, I most of the time just make my cooking mind up based on what’s in stock, what’s in store’s discount and variation in respect to the past few days. 

I won’t claim that traditional dishes and popular recipes will taste worse than personally conceived dinners; I appreciate them all. It’s about preferences; no big deal. But from the moment someone says some ingredient combinations are uncommon by an intonation which implies “that’s not how it is supposed to be and can’t be tasty for the same reason”, I’m really eager to go for that specific combo. And I’m even more eager to see the surprised facial response to an unusual taste which is just perfectly fine. Or, if they’ll admit: even well found or genius instead.