My Turn: Practice makes recipes perfect — or not

This essay was inspired by a recent conversation with my friend Pam from San Gusme, Italy, about my polenta biscotti recipe.

Some of us like to cook. Some of us like to bake. Some do both, with varying degrees of success.

I enjoy my cookbooks and meanderings around the deep, dark web seeking recipe ideas. If I find a potential recipe online, test it out and am pleased with the results, I will print out the page and use an old-fashioned three-hole punch to place it in my (now thick) blue binder.

Often-used pages become spattered or fingerprint greasy over time. I annotate and editorialize with comments to omit or add an ingredient, or to increase something that I felt was in too short supply.

More importantly, I date the recipes and provide what I narcissistically believe to be critically important commentary. (I like to think that these cookbooks will be the legacy that I bequeath to some deserving cook in my last will and testament.)

For instance: “Chicken saagwala — 10/23/05 — good, but very spicy hot.”

Then there’s the beloved sautéed chicken breast with balsamico reduction pan sauce: “1/27/11 — Nancy says — I don’t like it. I love it!”

Ask me about the custard-y popovers made for our four-decades-long traditional Thanksgiving weekend brunch. The recipe was lifted from "The New Moosewood Cookbook" (by Mollie Katzen): “11/29/03 — Jude J. exclaims OH BOY!”

Or for Oven-Fried Chicken: “12/13/98 — delicious. Made for dinner guest, John G., while watching President Clinton’s impeachment hearings.”

For times that I’ve been attentive to my food management plan, the insertion may contain Weight Watchers points.

A loser concoction gets a cross-out boldly across the page.

My all-time favorite review occurred in 1975 after my third attempt at shepherd’s pie in the kitchen of our off-campus house in upstate Oswego affectionately referred to by us housemates as “The Hacienda.” Each night we traded off dinner duties, with the cook in charge deciding on what was to be made from the ingredients in the cupboards and two fridges (yes, two), amassed with the $10 a person per week that we spent on groceries.

That evening we ate our dinner. My housemate and friend Mark, still a dear friend some 45 years after this episode, calmly stood up from the table, walked across the kitchen and took the cookbook off the shelf. Without fanfare, he ripped the page from its binder, silently balled it up and threw it in the trash.

That, my friends, was the ultimate editorializing.

Linda G. Maryanov,

Port Washington