What if You Have No Recipe

Have you ever tried to make something without a recipe? Sometimes you make something wonderful and you wish you had written it down, you try to recreate it, but you can't always do it. Other times it is a disaster...whatever it was that you were trying to make failed miserably. We can only make a recipe with the ingredients we have, we can always go to the store and buy more and different ones, but sometimes that isn't possible and we have to make due with what we already have. Sometimes we can stare at the pantry shelf or the open refrigerator and nothing comes to mind, we can't figure out exactly what we should make. We don't know what ingredients are going to taste good together and what things clash horribly. There is no forcing things together in hopes of a good outcome, they either go together or they don't. We can't change the taste or the texture, we cannot MAKE things blend. Sometimes it is best to keep it simple, open one can of soup add water and voila' you have lunch. Other times simple just doesn't satisfy. We want more than soup, we want gourmet, we want a three course meal, we want steak, lobster, fondue and flambe', doesn't happen too often, but we can still want it, may not get it, but we can still hope and dream of it. Sometimes we don't have a recipe, sometimes we have to go it alone and figure out moment by moment exactly what we are going to add, may work, may taste awful, may just be bland...but in the end we don't always need a recipe because what we create turns out just fine....sometimes though....it fails...and that is okay, because there is always another day, another try, another recipe.

When Planning Fails

I plan my meals each week. I sit down surrounded by recipes and lists of our favorites, catagorized by meats, and figure out the menu. I have a handy pad that lists all the days with boxes for each meal. When I was doing daycare I planned my breakfast, lunches and snacks too, but now I just do the dinner box, I use the extra boxes for notes and such. It comes with a perforated shopping list along the side so I can jot down what ingredients I will need for my meals. I plan and make my shopping list so that I know I have everything I need, and I have found that I throw a lot less away because I use it all. Most of the time what I have planned fits perfectly into the day, sometimes my day gets a little busy and I have to swap days and fix something a little easier because I have run out of time. then..there are the days when I start to fix what I had planned and I am halfway into it and realize that what I had chosen to make at the beginning of the week just isn't what I want anymore. I made the decision on Saturday what to make on Thursday, now I am invested in making it and I have to live with that decision. Even if it doesn't smell that appealing anymore, or look that appetizing. I've already started, I don't want to waste the ingredients or start something over because I have already invested so much time into what I have started. Do I throw it out and waste all the time and food? Do I continue and hope that somehow it becomes much more appealing and starts to look and smell better? Do I finish it and put it away and have a salad? What do I tell the family? I didn't like dinner tonight so I threw it out? What if they like it? I made the choice of what to fix, but maybe they don't want it either, or maybe they do. I am at a loss to know what to do when maybe what you chose to make for dinner just isn't exactly what you had in mind when you started it.