Recipes. The law of the kitchen or guidelines?

90% of the time recipes are a great thing to have handy. Chefs don’t always want to have to think off the top of their heads to come up with a recipe for a meal. When it comes to situations like that I love recipes, I have the chance to look at something that has already be made by many so you know it won’t go wrong. This is when I take the opportunity to enhance that recipe and make it my own. A personal pet peeve of mine is when people take a recipe for let’s just say a stuffing and stand there and measure out every single ingredient and tell me that since the recipe has it that’s what I have to do…for me recipes are strictly guidelines, it is perfectly acceptable to change them or adapt them to suit your needs and wants. That is how new recipes are created, if you “follow them to a tee” then it gets boring. The only time I ever follow a recipe exactly and measure each ingredient out it when I am working on baking and pastry dishes otherwise have fun with it and experiment sometimes. Food is both and art and science, it is okay to experiment.