I love a good recipe, but I don’t usually follow them. That’s not what they’re there for.

Recipes evolve, and I do mean that in the Darwinian sense. Two recipes meet, you fall in love with them and take the best bits from each and produce a child. The fittest survive and prosper, whether it be in our minds or in books, or on the interweb, and those whose mutations are not an improvement (I’ve had a fair few) become extinct. Their fitness is determined by the environmental force of taste, which can change between individuals and cultures, and so the evolutionary pressures are high, but then the generational rate is also high with meals created daily, so evolution is fast and cut throat.

And I heartily encourage this evolution, I encourage the promiscuity of recipes by taking many of them in a little recipe orgy and seeing what they produce. If I want to make something specific I’ll go on the internet and find 4 or 5 of the best sounding recipes, be fairly true to the main themes that run through them and then pick and choose the ingredients and techniques I feel would create the best mutations and produce the best offspring. When I repeat the meal, I won’t usually use that recipe again, I’ll do it from memory and that ensures a few more mutations, some good, some bad, some amazing – and that, my friends is evolution in action.

So understand that when you use these recipes, they are a guide, they are there to be mated, to be promiscuous with other recipes, to fall in and out of relationships and for you to bring your own mutational tastes to the orgy.

May all your recipes be slutty.  Enjoy!