Cooking Not

When I see a recipe that looks tempting, I expect to have full input when I use it. What I often find disappointing as most people who love to cook, do, are  recipes such as the one I found today that promised barbecued slow cooker pork chops. I was interested in how the title sounded because when you cook for a crowd, the slow cooker is a great helpmate. There were two ingredients in the recipe: pork chops and a bottle of barbecue sauce. Period. Disappointed, I discarded it immediately as "cooking not".  To me, that kind of so-called recipe is insulting and untrue since the bottle of barbecue sauce is the cook and not the individual who pours  it on the meat. The joy of preparing food to eat, is finding various items to use that will satisfy both the cook and the cooked for. It allows for creativity in adding products that make the recipe unique to the food maven. The search for ingredients that  stimulate the senses as well as providing a nutritious meal, is one of the challenges that those of us who love to cook, look for. I am not a professional chef or even someone who puts on elaborate impressive bragging-rights fare. I simply love to cook - and enjoy the food as well. Too often lately, I find recipes that call for packaged pre-cooked and processed additions that can, with a little more time, be made right in the home kitchen. Furthermore the list of additives in these, are frightening. I do not consider pie crust or bread kinds of  mixes, cooking. I dislike canned or frozen items when fresh can be located. Sauces and soups from a tin or a jar are fast and that's the best you can say for them. I weaken slightly when it comes to spaghetti sauce simply because making a fine sauce can take a whole day to prepare from scratch. But even using your basic tomato base, I never ever just dump the sauce jar onto the pasta without adding to it a raft of other things that perk the redness up to the richness of an elegant Italian dish. You know what I mean if you love cooking as much as I do. These days of speed existence with its cyberspace instant in-your-face-lifestyles, it's just too easy to grab a prepared item from that expensive grocery we all know, where you can buy those to-die-for ingredients that impress your important guests who know perfectly well where you got them because they do exactly the same thing. If you call yourself a cook because you love to cook, do it. Cook.