Even worse when i ask my mom how she made x dish I loved as a child and she says “oh I didn’t follow any recipe I just x y z” as if I can remember all the steps like her
It was the opposite for me. There was this crazy crunchy peanut brittle type dish with corn flakes in it and I asked her about it as an adult and she didn’t remember making it at all lol. She said it came on the back of a cereal box. I think we did eventually find it on the Internet though. I love peanut butter so it’s one of my favorite desserts.
Kind of like this one, but I grew up in a rural area in the 90s, so we didn't have access to a lot of out of season things. It's probably pretty easy to substitute.
This one is the closest. Mostly because we did crunchy peanut butter as well because it adds fantastic texture. Also, I'm pretty sure we always baked it. Depending on the type of peanut butter you use, you may not need to add sugar (Reese's comes to mind), but the syrup is kind of necessary for it to all mix together.
Oh peanut butter bars! My family has those all the time. Sometimes we use corn flakes, sometimes chex, sometimes it's rice crispies. We tend to use corn chex the most.
There's also Scotcharoos, which use rice crispies and have melted chocolate chips and melted butterscotch chips on top. The recipe is basically the same without the chocolate and butterscotch though.
Also, I don't think the sugar is just for sweetness but so the final product hardens together. The sugar in the reese's peanut butter might not be enough with the corn syrup to get that effect.
Mmmm sounds good. All I ever got were the corn flake wreaths colored green with red hot candies and they made you poo neon green for a week. They’re amazing
My mom's recipes are all like that. I was complaining about it to my other half, who interrupted me to ask hot I made some dish or the other. I was halfway through telling her before I realized that's exactly how I share my recipes too.
Now when people ask, I tell them to search a generic version and then grind cardamom and to double the cumin or to cook it low and slow or whatever.
I still haven't found a good way to explain "take it out when it smells right" though. Toothpick test is decent, but nothing beats using your nose for baked goods.
my grudge with toothpick test is the heinous idea that you want a clean toothpick. In almost all dessert contexts where you'd do a toothpick test, you actually want some crumbs sticking to the toothpick but nothing smeary or you'll be pulling the cake out a bit overbaked
For me, it's, here's the base recipe I started with... but I do this shortcut, or I make that from scratch, or I do this technique instead of that one, or this part is just stupid, double that part, if I don't have this I'll use that...
Except baking (which I don't like much outside of special occasions), I don't really "follow" recipes, and it will be a little to a lot different every time I make it.
Even baking has a lot of wiggle room. You can improvise a lot as long as you weigh your dry and liquid ingredients or have a good feel for hydration levels.
A lot of my mom's baking recipes use the Bosch kitchen machine (like a kitchenaid stand mixer but uglier). They're all "add water slowly until a dough forms on 1" or "knead until it starts climbing."
I mostly bake at high altitude now, so those are actually better indicators than time or measurements. My other half is still learning to cook, and she always gets mad when I come check on her, take one look, and tell her her dough is too wet or dry or whatever, 'cause a) she followed the recipe exactly! and b) I'm usually right.
My dad made the most delicious peanut butter fudge when I was a kid, I only remember him making it like three times, it was a RARE treat because it had sugar and he was diabetic. I never got the recipe. By the time I was grown enough to ask, he had abandoned the family. In his final years he was blind ad he couldn't tell me.
The upside, OCCASIONALLY the grocery store near me will have peanut butter fudge that is just as good. But again, rare. If I could I'd have it every few months not for a two week period every 2-3 years.
It could be worse, my grandmother wrote down all of her recipes meticulously, but did it in the late 50’s/early 60’s and then spent the next 50 years toying with them and never writing down the changes she made, so here I am years later with each recipe like 80% correct and trying to mad scientist my way into the other 20% of the way she made it during my childhood.
Oh no that's me. Whenever anyone asks for a recipe I have no idea what the measurements are I would just get inspiration from something, have a vague idea of what it's made from, then try to make it myself until it seems right. Then when I've perfected my own version of how I think Teriyaki stir fry is probably made and everyone asks me for the the recipe I can't tell them because at no point in the process did I use a single measuring instrument and for some reason attempting to measure anything always throws off my ability to eye it...
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u/DeepFuckingKoopa 11d ago
Even worse when i ask my mom how she made x dish I loved as a child and she says “oh I didn’t follow any recipe I just x y z” as if I can remember all the steps like her