Jennaism Cooking?

I've been getting a lot of recipe requests. People wanted to know about things like my pumpkin pie, naan, and pies in jars. I have the link for the write up about jar pies here, and my apple pie recipe is on Huffington Post. But generally, I do not use any sort of recorded measurements or recipes. I learned to cook through the building blocks of a single recipe and from there its all experimentation and luck. For instance, for last night's curry I steamed a pile of chopped summer squash, red pepper, and cauliflower with a bit of salt in a large basin like pan that was a hand-me down from my friend Jim. It's a semi-wok so I steamed right there in the pan and then added my yellow curry paste, some cream, some honey, and cheese curds. It was a pretty farmy curry for late harvest but it was good. I served it over basmati rice with naan and no one left the table hungry. But nothing is written down. It's all just "doing" and as frustrating as it sounds I think that going freelance is how most of us learn to cook.

I do however, have the easy naan recipe from online I used as my base of operations. You can click here for that. I didn't use a lot of the ingredients they suggested, like minced garlic, melted butter or milk. I just read how to do it changed it up in a way that seemed more appealing. Here's a Jennaism change: after I fried them in olive oil in the smoky skillet I would butter them with melted butter via a cook's brush and then gently sprinkle sugar and sea salt over them. It made a savory/sweet combo that was pretty boss if I do say so myself. I find with naan people either want to use it as a rice/meat scoop (like me) or eat it as a side dish. So I offer it up in a basket and let people decide, but there is always more honey and salt on the table if they want a flavor boost.

I adore cooking, but most of the time my recipes are just me saying things like "add some flour until it feels *just* sticky enough to be annoying and then stop even when you want to add more because it won't get in your fingernails" That isn't really specific. I could write Jennaism recipes though, but they'd be more like a narrative with food than measurements and rules? Do you want some of those? Does anyone else cook like this? You must.