Phyllis Good - No Recipe? No Problem!: How to Pull Together Tasty Meals Without a Recipe

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Edited by Deanna F. Cook and Sarah Guare

Art direction and book design by Carolyn Eckert

Indexed by Christine R. Lindemer, Boston Road Communications

Cover and interior photography by Keller + Keller Photography

Additional photography by Artur Kornakov/Unsplash,

Food and prop styling by Catrine Kelty

Illustrations by Jen B. Peters

Text 2021 by Phyllis Good

Ebook production by Slavica A. Walzl

Ebook version 1.0

May 11, 2021

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who shares my life and (thankfully) my love of food

Welcome to Freestyle Cooking, where ingredients lead the way and you get to improvise just like a jazz musician. Where you get to experiment with whatever technique you choose. Where you serve up dishes that come together in surprising harmony.

Great jazz musicians start with a theme. They try it out. They add a few riffs. Something new floats up, and they weave it in. Or they let it call them in another direction. And so they go on, experimenting, trying things. Its a lets-see-what-happens approachopen, full of surprise, yet drawing on what the musician already knows.

With this style of cooking, you bring the theme the ingredients. They help suggest what happens next. You think about what each ingredient has to offer. You take your time. You find your way.

How do you decide what to do next? When I think about what to cook for dinner, three questions usually show up:

1. What am I hungry for?
2. What do I have on hand?
3. How much time do I have?

With a quick check of my fridge, pantry, countertop, and freezer, I become pretty clear about the answers to the first two questions. Then I figure out what form and cooking method will work best with what I found and the time I have. A soup, a bowl, a pizza, a sheet-pan dinner? A salad? A toast topper? Now Im ready to start cooking freestyle jazz cooking!

I offer three assists throughout this book, in case questions come up or youd like a little company while you cook:

Freestyle cooking ideas appear in many of the chapters. Think of them as kick starts, or possible ways to begin and then go on to create a dish. I imagine the Freestyle cooking ideas as scaffolding ways to get your bearings as you get going and then ultimately set a finished dish on the table.

Essential Techniques are where youll find helpful, hard-core information for example, the best ways to cook an egg, the best oven temperatures for roasting vegetables and big proteins, and the ratios of liquids to dry ingredients for cooking grains.

Following the Freestyle cooking ideas and Essential Techniques, you will find specific ideas to stoke your imagination. These are combinations of ingredients you might want to experiment with using together, ways to prepare food you may not have tried before, and ideas for respecting food by the way you handle and prepare it. Think of these as suggestions, with some hints for success. They simply offer you a place to begin!

The Cooking Circle is a group of 14 experienced improvisational cooks from across the country who became a virtual cooking community when I invited them to share some of their cooking ideas and stories with me for this book.

These people are a community of riches each one cooking in his or her own way who will give you encouragement all along the way, plus new ideas you havent yet thought of. Their many tips, hints, and stories come from their vast and varied cooking experiences. You'll see Tips from the Cooking Circle and their names throughout these pages. The rest of the material? It comes from me!

Beth, from Pennsylvania, is a high school teacher.

Christina, from Pennsylvania, is a democracy advocate.

Chuck, from Kansas, is an urban farmer and museum exhibit designer.

Daryl, from Pennsylvania, is a natural-disaster crisis manager.

Eugene, from Florida, is a retired fashion designer.

Evonne, from Virginia, is a retired nurse and now a gardener, cook, and baker.

Gini, from Ontario, is a culinary school instructor.

Jay, from Pennsylvania, is a geologist, retired from NASA and teaching.

Lee and Kyle, from Virginia, are father and son. Lee is a high school science teacher. Kyle is an avid reader, hiker, and gamer.

Lindsey, from Virginia, is an elementary school teacher.

Lorre, from Florida, is a real estate agent.

Margaret, from Pennsylvania, is an urban gardener and book editor.

Zahra, from Ontario, is a specialist in multicultural cuisine.

Gini lays out some groundwork for winging it in the kitchen:

1. Take a favorite recipe and make it faithfully one night, following each step and ingredient to the letter.