If you’ve been reading this blog for long, or if you’ve ever cooked with me, you know I believe fiercely in messing with recipes.  I’m more likely to modify a recipe than to follow it.

When I do follow a recipe to the letter, there are two main reasons, which I think apply to most people: either it’s a very special recipe (from my Grandma, for example), or else I don’t understand it well enough to mess with it.  Every cook has a different threshold for “understanding something well enough to mess with it”.

Some cooks are bolder than others.  I’m pretty bold, and sometimes I pay for it.  But I believe that everyone can benefit from learning to modify recipes. Not only does it save your butt when you’ve run out of something, and need to make a substitution, but it lets you adjust recipes to your liking – you will like the results better.

And so, I present: the Recipe Builder: a little toy to help you learn how to mess with recipes.  This one is a recipe for pasta with vegetables.  Nothing complicated, more a proof of concept than anything else, but I hope to do a whole series of these, each one focusing on a recipe that’s friendly to modify in a variety of ways.  I’m thinking hummus… lasagna… soup… quesadillas.  Those sorts of recipes, with the goal of showing how recipes in general can be adjusted to taste, with little risk of things going wrong.

Please go play around with it.  I’d love to know what you think.  Do you find it useful?  Do you know someone who would?  (Or do you think it’s silly?) Do you wish it would do [fill in the blank]? Got ideas for a recipe that would work well in this form? Leave a comment and let me know!

As some of you know, my day job involves building websites. I had a lot of fun creating this, and not just because I didn’t have to test it in IE6, that most reviled of web browsers.  For the geeks in the audience, I got to use some cool jQuery that I normally don’t get to dirty my hands with, not to mention all the CSS3 features that don’t work in older browsers. So, it was worth it for that alone.  I learned some things about WordPress that I never knew (for example, that it will chew up my HTML if I’m not careful, and that it hates Javascript). But I also got to combine web development with cooking, and in my mind, that’s a big win!

Let the food and fun continue!

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In other news, the burrata was not what I hoped for.  It was clearly headed in the right direction, but needs more work.  Really, I think it needs more cream.  (Doesn’t everything?)  I’m optimistic about attempt number 2.