You may remember that I said w-a-a-a-y back last September that I had shipped the final manuscript for my cookbook to the tech department (i.e., my husband) and that we were planning to get it out perhaps before Thanksgiving but certainly before Christmas. I then gave you some previews, one for my salad dressing chapter. Well! Didja notice that there was no cookbook by the end of last year? We decided to release it later, this spring, with the hope that people would be planning parties for the summer by then and there would be all this pent-up demand for a cookbook specifically aimed at such occasions. That’s still the plan. Here it is the beginning of the fourth week in February; we should release it early next month, I think. Then I plan to do a few little demos highlighting the ideas from various chapters.
In the meantime, though, I’ve re-read the manuscript about 12 times, or so it seems. I got rather tickled at this from the great, great Smitten Kitchen blog, with the author talking about her first cookbook:
Writing is like splashing bright paint all over a giant white canvas — look at all of those lovely words all lined up! Aren’t they darling? Copyedits are like measuring the space between each mark of paint and having to answer questions like, “This splatter is .25 inches from that splatter, and you call it a ‘blue splatter’ but this one is .5 inches away and labeled ‘splatter, blue’. Was this intentional?”
I also had a friend read a couple of chapters, not really as a copyeditor but just to tell me what she thought, and it was interesting to get her questions about statements I’d made that seemed perfectly clear to me. So, so helpful! (Thank you, Layton!) Especially when you’re trying to explain how to do something, and especially when you’re trying to be as . . . granular . . . as I’m trying to be, there’s lots of room for error. One nice thing about self-publishing is that you’re in charge of the whole process and can revise the book even after it goes live. I’ll probably issue some kind of freebie coupon for the first 25 readers to request one, with the only caveat that I’d like any feedback. If I end up doing the revision(s) you request, I’ll give you a new one. How’s that for a deal?
But on to the subject of this post, which, as you see from the title, is about the importance of having master recipes. This principle is especially true for items that you make to have on hand such as salad dressings or sauces, since you don’t necessarily use up what you make for one recipe. Most online cooking resources such as blogs give you an individual recipe for each item, since that’s the way they’re set up. I recently ran across a lovely, lovely cooking website called Once Upon a Chef when I was looking for something and have been totally sucked in by Jenn Segal’s great stuff. I still have my perennial favorite Smitten Kitchen, as referenced above, but Pinch of Yum is taking somewhat of a sabbatical, I dropped Half-Baked Harvest from the rotation, and while I love Sally’s Baking Addiction, she’s focused mostly on desserts. So I was kind of in the market for another blog to follow, and OUAC seems to fill the bill. She has great process photos and also has an ingredients shot for each recipe. Her site is beautifully set up and easy to navigate. I’ve already saved a couple of her recipes for use later and will report on my success when I make them. As I’ve said before, I am truly in awe of cooking blogs that crank out new recipes, week after week, month after month, year after year. As far as I can tell, my new fave is at least a decade old, having begun around 2009.
On to the small-ish quibble that I have with her site (and pretty much everyone else’s). I got very intrigued with her (gorgeous) salad selection, especially her Asian-themed salads. Some had a peanut-butter dressing; some had a ginger-sesame dressing. One had a ginger-peanut dressing. I actually copied and pasted three of these into parallel columns so that I could compare them. Yes, I was correct: the three were slightly different from each other, in terms of ingredients and also in terms of ingredient proportions. I picked two of them to look at a little more closely, since both had the word “peanut” in the title. One had four times as much peanut butter as another one, even though both made 14 ounces total. One was Thai, one was just “Asian.” Okay, you might say, but I bet if I looked closely at the two recipes I’d see that the Thai one has other ingredients that are specific to that cuisine, such as fish sauce. and the other one doesn’t. And you’d be right. Here’s the thing, though: Do you really want to have all these different versions to deal with? What if on Monday night you make her Chinese chicken salad with leftovers from Sunday’s roast chicken, but you don’t really care about it’s being authentically Chinese? And then on Thursday night you make something sort of vaguely Thai-ish involving roast pork and noodles and you want a side salad that’s also vaguely Thai? Wouldn’t you like to have a couple of master recipes to call on and to be given permission to use whatever you already have made and sitting in the fridge? As I say in my own chapter on salad dressings, “The salad police won’t nail you for a mismatch.” Unless you have a huge family there’s no way you’re going to use up 14+ ounces of salad dressing for one meal. So there the first dressing from Monday sits, perhaps with a little peel-off label on the jar, and you take a look at the Thai slaw recipe and realize that the dressing is different, but she hasn’t said anything about using the same one here, so you sigh and make a new batch, and then you resolve to just buy dressing at the store from then on. Don’t do that! Just use up the Chinese dressing on the Thai slaw. It will be okay, I promise. And it would also be okay for you to look at her peanut-butter-containing dressings as a whole, or her sesame-ginger dressings as a whole, and say, “I think I’ll just use this version and not worry about the others, as this one seems good to me.”
O-o-o-o-o-r. you could go on over to my salad dressing page and pick the peanut-butter-lime dressing and/or the Asian vinaigrette as your all-purpose dressing(s) for any salads you serve with Asian-inspired meals. Maybe you want to have both on hand if someone in your family won’t or can’t eat peanuts. (The peanut dressing isn’t made with egg and so should keep just about forever.) I linked to my salad dressings master page way back last June. That’s hard to believe, but there it is. I’ve done a little tweaking to this material for the cookbook, but this is pretty close to what I have now. So take a look, or another look, and decide what variations best fit the way your family usually eats, and then give it/them a try.
“Theme and Variations on Homemade Salad Dressings”
And, by the way, as a final note: It’s also okay to combine dressings as long as they have some aspects in common. So, for instance, right now in my fridge I have the last of a batch of my homemade ranch dressing and the last of a batch of my lemon vinaigrette. Those two don’t seem to go together to me, particularly since one is dairy based and one is vinegar/egg based. So they’re getting used up separately. I did add a little cumbled blue cheese yesterday to the ranch dressing (the last of a bag that I had in the freezer) and it was really good. But I’ve combined vinegar-based dressings before, sometimes with such successful results that I say, “Well, enjoy it while you can, because this particular dressing will never occur again.”
What a great idea, having a salad dressing base that can be mixed and matched or added to.