I never cook with a recipe. More often, I have no idea how a dish will taste until it's done, and by then I have moved on to the next project. Sometimes I'm not even sure that I can duplicate the recipe, or remember each ingredient and their order. I have memorable dishes which I didn't track and therefore only remain as a flavour, such as the rich biscuit cake I made for camping and cutting trails when I was volunteering in the Canadian winter and the avocado green curry which my friend Colleen fondly recalls. Although the flavour remains, the rich sensation of raisins and dates and molasses and the order and amounts of ingredients are long forgotten. Other dishes suffer from a lack of ingredients, such as Tofu Surprise, which is not really the same without the spicy olive juice that is no longer available.
Although I occasionally record what ingredients I have combined to make a dish, I normally view them as ephemera. That has changed with this project. Acting on the delight of my various guests, I have decided to collect my recipes and concoctions for all to enjoy. Since I never read recipes, and am making my own cook book without outside influence, this collection is inevitably idiosyncratic. For example, I have organized the recipes by their cooking method instead of type of dish, and interspersed small essays which refer—by times loosely—to food and food production.
I mean for the book to be an examination of the cookbook genre, as well as a text savoured as an exercise in writing even while people try making the dishes. I hope that people will modify my recipes to make their own creations and that my recipes will come back, changed.