After more than a month of thinking about it and nearly three weeks of sitting on the (frozen) supplies, I finally took the time today (a week before this gets posted) to make a little recipe one of my friends prepared for us when I was visiting over Thanksgiving. It’s a relatively simple chicken dish that is basically a simple stir-fry, but it’s a recipe without a card or instructions beyond what he told me since it is entirely of his own devising. You see, over the recent years, he has taken to cooking not like I do (starting with a recipe card and making alterations based on smell or taste until the recipe becomes my own enough that I don’t need a recipe card or instructions any more), but by learning from professionals on YouTube. There’s a lot of great channels out there that cover quite a variety of things, but the best ones aren’t how to prepare a recipe and the background of the recipe, but how the various components of recipes work. Fats/oils, aromatics, various techniques: that sort of stuff. He’s had to rely on them since he lost most of his sense of smell when he caught Covid a while back, but knowing the basics, how things eventually taste, and why it all works the way it does is clearly the superior method to winging it by nose as I do. It allows him to put things together in new ways without needing a starting point like I do and it seems to be working out really well for him and his wife. And, now that I’ve recreated one of his recipes at home, me too.