Trouble cookin'

Prompt: Write a scene in which two characters play opposites to each other. For example, one may be taking things too seriously while the other is fooling around. One character may be cheerful while the other is gloomy. One suave while the other is clumsy, etc.

Source

Something to think about, don't you think Avi, Cassie said, as she thumbed through the large tome that was the recipe book.

Sure, sure, the recipes look interesting, some day it might be useful to leaf through them and see if there's any substance in there. Sometimes you end of finding the most clever techniques and ingredients in the most boring of places, Avi said.

Oooh look at this one, takes two hours of preparation times, and has seventeen separate ingredients, needs three pots. It should be a big project, the writers say, invite a lot of people so you can show off your prowess, haha that's funny. Damn I wouldn't want to get the order of those wrong or overcook something, or misunderstand something and have to do it all again from scratch. And imagine if after doing all of this you mistook salt for sugar or something stupid, that'd be the end of all of it.

Exactly, which is why you should be focusing on what you're cooking, your ingredients and methodology, rather than going straight by the book. Because then first, you don't understand clearly what you're doing since you're only following the instructions, you don't know how turning this up here will change things down the road. It's so mechanical, no art in there. And what if you've got a different gas range from the cook, or the water content in your tomatoes is different form the author's? You put in all the effort, and do it exactly as they tell you do do, and yet you're left with something entirely different because no recipe can account for all the things you have to get right.

Yeah, not all things can be set exactly like how the author set it, but it's a step, no babe. Like you make it first and come with maybe a crappy version of it, and the next time you do it again but this time maybe you're using fewer tomatoes, or using something else entirely, and one by one you're reverse engineering the dish, all the while keeping everything else the same. One day you figure out, ahhh so that's what I needed, lesser moisture in my batter and you know exactly what to do.

Uhh uh exactly, so if you're going to be changing things and making modifications anyway, why even follow the letters to the word like a robot, there's always space to play around, get the sense of what the author wanted and work towards that on your own no. And obviously you won't get it right the first time but you can look at the recipe for what went wrong and do it again, and then keep iterating until you get there, except this time you'll not have followed the instruction but used it as a guide in your journey of moving towards a certain dish. It'll be your recipe, with inspiration from the pages, and you will understand what you did right or wrong much better than rule-following.

Yeah, maybe there's a bit of a middle-ground babe in between not looking at any of the recipe and just using your skills and experience to work towards something and literally following everything like a robot. Most cooks and writers don't actually intend you to follow their instructions as if they were written by gods, there's a lot of leeway there. Those people understand the importance of figuring things out so they leave space for you to get there.

Yeah but I'm not comfortable with how people make it so precise sometimes. Like seven and a quarter spoonfulls of so-and-so. Is that quarter of whatever really going to matter, and so forth. Either they should be giving out more general instructions, to be clear the method's supposed to be improvised, or need to be clear there's zero place for making it your own way, no.