The main difference between a great recipe and a bad recipe is the combination of ingredients you use to make it. Getting the amounts of each ingredient correct is also vital if you want the meal to be a success. If you add too much of something it can upset the flavor balance. Perhaps some dried oregano is a good idea if you are making an Italian recipe but half a teaspoon of dried oregano might be enough. If you throw in a whole packet, it will make the dish taste bad, so be careful how much of each ingredient you use.
Anyone who has ever looked in his or her refrigerator and then flipped frantically through every cookbook in the house searching for a recipe by ingredients that they happen to have on hand has pondered the question of just what exactly makes for a great dish. Improvisation has a place in the kitchen and this has been the origin of many great recipes.
Give The Cookbooks A Rest
However, cooks now have many other resources available to them and while there, certainly are still many occasions when people look at what they have in their pantries already and decide to do a recipe search by ingredient, the World Wide Web offers a simpler and much faster way. The net has enabled information sharing between individuals and organizations on a global scale, with innovations like recipe directory sites now available to help cooks find recipes much more easily.
How Simple, Exactly?
Maybe you find a block of feta cheese, some parsley and a couple of eggplants in the refrigerator; of course you must be able to make some kind of Mediterranean recipe with those ingredients - but what, exactly? This is where you find a recipe search engine very useful. You can search for recipes by using the ingredients you want to use as keywords for your search.
So if you have the ingredients listed above, you may pull up something like the Turkish stuffed eggplant recipe called imam bayaldi; you see that you will also need tomatoes, olive oil and some bell peppers. Supposing that you have these ingredients handy, which you probably do, and then you can get started on dinner! At the very worst, you can simplify a trip to the market, since you now know exactly what you need to get there.
It goes without saying that experimenting in the kitchen is still a good idea; you can look for recipes to inspire you to make your very own cooking creations or simply to fire up your imagination for some new recipes of your own creation. It all depends on what you use and your own creativity in the kitchen.
So to answer the question of what makes a great recipe, it is all about the ingredients or more precisely, knowing what ingredients work together and how to skillfully combine them to create something truly great. We all have our culinary missteps from time to time, but you should not let them discourage you. When you have lots of different ingredients to use but you do not know what to make with them, you can open your browser and try a recipe search by ingredient in order to find a new dish, using the ingredients you have on hand in your kitchen. The results may pleasantly surprise you and everyone else at your dinner table!
Good food and plenty of it is a necessity rather than a choice and being the mother of four boys I know that only too well. That is the reason I started Recipe Directory. Eating the same food all the time can be really boring and it is useful to have a resource for meal inspiration. Cookbooks can work out expensive and there might only be one or two meals in there that appeal to you, so being able to do a recipe search by ingredient is a much better idea.
The Best Recipe Search Go to: http://www.RecipeDirectory.org
Copyright (c) 2009 Christine Szalay Kudra
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