MadCookery

Most people view cooking as a rigid science. These people receive a formula and these people follow the formula. The cook may be encouraged by the lack of ingredient to make simple substitutions, or they may add, remove, or replace simple spices and then congratulate themselves on their ingenuity. This leads to boredom, this leads to the cook being a drone following directions, this leads to bland food with no expression and no matter how good the food tastes thee is no reward. No matter how it turns out the cook might as well microwave a TV dinner. They can pretend they made some great achievement, but it is not theirs. Cooking by formula is not always a bad thing. Sometimes it is nice to settle back with a simple dish made without thought, sometimes it is required to follow the directions to achieve a quick and simple meal at the end of a long day, but other times any true cook needs something more, they need to create.

There is a simple set of rules that I follow to smash through the wall of the mundane. I encourage any cook to try them and discover the sense of achievement and adventures in food they can lead you on. It can be a frightening leap of faith in yourself, but the rewards are well worth facing the fears of failure. You do not need to have gone to culinary school to enter the world of cooking as art and experiment rather than formula and mindless creation, you do not need to be a chef, just a cook with a love of trying new things, pushing your skills and imagination to their limits, and a fearless sense of adventure in your cookery.

Here are the 10 rules of Mad Cookery:

1. I will not follow recipes
2. I will not cook the same dish twice in the same way
3. I will try new ingredients and techniques and not fear them, even if I have in the past not liked it, and I will not ask what can I do with this ingredient, but instead what can I make this ingredient do for me
4. I will not buy what I can make, except for base ingredients that I do not wish variation on for the dish that I am working on (e.g. pasta noodles when working on a sauce) or items for which the payoff is not worth the time spent (e.g. some spice mixtures)
5. I will not be afraid of failure, it does not exist. Even a complete disaster is an experience in taste and instruction in cooking
6. I will not always plan my dishes in advance, I will create them as I go
7. I will try the same dish multiple times, making changes each time to reach perfection. Once I feel I have a dish has reach perfection I will continue to try to improve it.
8. I will not follow rules of cooking, ingredients, or flavors except for the basics, which I will always expand upon (e.g. the mother sauces, base dough, and other base elements). This includes the rules of Mad Cookery when deviation is needed to expand a dish.
9. When I want to learn something new I will read about technique, theory, and many recipes for the item not just a single recipe. Once I have studied this information I will create my own variation on the dish.
10. I will constantly endeavor to push my own limitations of technique, skill, and knowledge

I found that by following these 10 rules cooking can go to new levels that are never repetitive and never boring. Sometimes you will fail, that is okay and failure is inevitable, but other times you will succeed beyond your wildest imagination, and those times will make all the failures worth it. Sometimes you will spend weeks, months, or even years perfecting a recipe only to find that you created an almost exact duplicate of an existing recipe. Some will believe that this is a failure, but it is not, because there are times when a near perfect recipe exists and rather than follow it you have worked to the same perfection through your own experimentation. It all can be summed up to say that the goal is to: learn; expand; explore; experiment; enjoy, and most importantly, have fun doing it.