Food is my life. If I am not eating it, I am thinking about it, cooking it, reading about it, watching it on TV. It is my way of socializing - I love to cook for my friends and relatives, and I also like to cook for new friends. It gives me a point of reference. Sharing a meal starts conversations. At least, it gives me something to talk about.
Unfortunately, I am a horrible decision-maker. To avoid making decisions, I have always relied on order. I read the paper in the EXACT order it comes on my front step. If I make a to-do list for myself, I have to follow it in order. It's a disease, really. Following a recipe falls into this category. I feel comfort in preparing the ingredients, creating my mise en place in the EXACT order it comes in the list, and laying them out on the counter in the order that they will be added to the recipe.
When I was newly married and settling into regular day-to-day life, I didn't want to have to make a decision about "what's for dinner", so I planned a schedule: Monday is salad night, Tuesday is beef, Wednesday is chicken, Thursday is pizza night, and the hubby had to pick dinners for the weekend. As the two of us grew together, and started falling in love with the whole process of the meal - preparing it, pairing it with a wine or cocktail, eating it, etc., I started expanding my horizons. The only "schedule" that stuck was pizza night.
I started making pizza from scratch in 1995, but after a year of making the same recipe every week, I started expanding my horizons - and my company. My family (two sisters, parents, friends, etc) started showing up on Thursdays for home-made pizza, and I didn't feel like I could keep serving them pepperoni pizza every week, so I bought a cookbook of only pizza. Since I still wasn't keen on picking one, I just starting making the pizza in the order it appeared in the cookbook. This served a few purposes: I didn't have to pick a recipe, our repeat guests got variety, and we tried things we wouldn't have tried otherwise. I think the latter of those purposes is my favorite thing about it. As time has gone on, it has been less about the food and more about the deepening relationships that come from gathering weekly with my family.
After a while, people started giving me pizza books as gifts, and in 16 years, I am still making pizzas in the order they appear in the cookbooks, and I still haven't repeated a recipe or book, and I still have several more to get through. Most of the recipes I have made have been (even if I do say so myself) good, but there have been a few "garbage" pizzas, and I don't mean the kind that has everything on it. There was a onion, walnut, blue cheese pizza that called for 3 large onions. Well, apparently, my idea of a large onion and the recipe author's idea of a large onion were different. I had onions the size of grapefruits, and the finished dish looked like I had buried it in sauerkraut. My sister Pam was over. She, my husband Jeff, and I each tried to eat a piece. We are all onion-lovers, but this was too much. Looking back, it probably would have worked out if I had learned about caramelizing onions.
Pam was also our guest when we had the unfortunate caviar and mace pizza. I think it was the first time any of us had tried caviar. I don't know if I had added too much mace, or maybe caviar wasn't my thing, or perhaps it wasn't good caviar. In fact, I am pretty sure it wasn't good caviar, since, in my inexperience, I had purchased it at the regular big-name grocery store, and it was from a jar. The mace was overpowering - the overwhelming flavor of the pizza was Vic's Vapo-Rub. I learned that my garbage disposal (ironically, a gift from Pam) was very powerful and could chew up an entire pizza faster than a teenage football team.
I am now making two pizzas every Thursday (one recipe from each of two books, since cookbooks seem to clump like recipes together, and I wanted variety) and have added "drink of the week" to the mix. It is almost the same format. I received a giant drink recipe book from my sister, Jennifer, and I started out making the drinks in the order of the book. After several weeks of gin concoctions, I decided maybe I should mix it up a bit and switch chapters weekly. Again, variety was more and more becoming a theme of the evening.
Also, throughout the years, as I have become more and more comfortable in the kitchen, I have branched out from the recipes a little. I have substituted ingredients when I have been unable to find an item or cannot afford an item. If a recipe repeats a crust or sauce, I have learned what works and doesn't and tweak those recipes to my liking. Sometimes, I tweak them, just for expediency sake. Sometimes, I tweak because I find out (at the last minute) that I had accidentally purchased the wrong ingredient, didn't have one that I thought I had, or didn't have enough of an ingredient. It happens a lot, actually. Or, if it calls for 3 large onions, I may just put in 1½, because I have unusually large onions.
