Playing with food!

Last year I did this blog:
http://bellescookinghaven.blogspot.com/2011/10/double-dish-cooking-night-ftw.html
 
Well about a week ago I took the first recipe and played with it a bit for Mom's birthday adding a couple of shallots another clove of garlic which really added some nice new flavor to the dish and I bet using some mushrooms as well as some sun dried tomatoes would also add to the taste but did not think of that until we had inhaled it all..

I call this playing with my food, because it can be a bit of a game/gamble to see if changing a recipe will be improved upon or  not.There have been a few times where it did not work as well as I thought at first.
Take for example the second recipe in that link the French onion Mac'n Cheese it seem like a great idea and I even enjoyed it the first time I ate it but then I reheated the leftovers and it was waaaaay to rich and salty. and I think it was combination of too much soup and the mix of cheeses. I want to try it again with only half a can of the soup and Gruyere but I think I will drop the cheddar and gouda and go for a classic fondue cheese sauce instead with Emmentaler( if you cannot find real emmentaler, it can be hard to find at times) you can use regular Swiss cheese.

It might a few weeks before I get to playing with that recipe again to see if that fixes the not good as leftovers!

I think it important to sometime tweak recipes even if they did taste great the first time, there are so many flavors out there you could stumble on to something even better.

I do tweaking all the time to recipes adding some new ingredient I think will add even more flavor or because it might improve it even more than the original version. I like to play with my food in that way, I mean if we only ever do things exactly the way we first did them how do we evolve as cooks or even as people? ;-)