I feel this way for photography, about filtering. If you take 1000 photos, only show people your 20-50 best. Now you are a good photographer.

A lot of this is recipe selection too! If you are a beginner, and have people coming over, don't pick a new recipe or a complicated old recipe. Do something easy, especially if you're doubling to feed more mouths.

corollary: Thanksgiving is a day for cooking standards, not innovating (unless you've practiced)

also: A lot of recipes are absolutely terrible. That included internet recipes but also recipes by renowned chefs and whatnot. There seems to be some sort of evolutionary pressure for over complicating recipes out the wazoo.

E.g. when trying to find a recipe for a vegetable lasagna, and skipping all the incomplete recipes, you end up with a recipe that involves 10 ingredients, involves a pan, a couple of bowls, an oven dish, quite some prep-work, and an oven.

The lasagna recipe I prefer has 6 ingredients, uses an oven dish, an oven, and no prep work. If you don't count the time it spends in the oven it's maybe 10 minutes of work. It's tasty to the point where the first time I made it I overate to the point of having a stomach ache for hours afterwards.

Guess which recipe is better for someone new-ish to cooking?

I agree that most recipes are terrible. And a lot of them aren't even sensible. As in, if you'd follow them, you'd not really get a usable product out of it. Maybe an overcooked mush, a runny sauce, or just slightly flavored water instead of a broth.

But other than that, I think recipes, especially online, tend to be way too simplistic. The biggest crime is that they use way too few spices. Not the amount, but the diversity. Especially for sauces and marinades. I get that creators have to appeal to a broad audience without specialized ingredients available, but please at least mention them if they would optionally enhance the flavor.

And recipes tend to not mention optional cooking techniques that would make the finished product better if employed. Things like deglazing a pan, blanching vegetables in preparation, specific ways to cut vegetables into appropriate chunks, etc. Recipes aren't really meant to teach you those techniques of course, but sometimes it really makes sense to employ them at the right time. It would be nice if the recipe would at least mention what you can do to improve the quality.

Can you share your recipe? I would be interested in in one that doesn't require any prep. I assume you have to cut _something_ though?

The prep consists of mixing the ingredients, and layering it with the lasagna sheets.

Basically you mix 50/50 of pre-cut spinnach from a jar, I use the small jars, and premade spaghetti sauce, add about the same amount of cheese as you've added spinnach. I use shredded gouda but I'm sure whatever mildish cheese you can get locally would work. Mix in cream cheese with herbs and two or three heaping teaspoons of pesto. Then you layer this sauce alternating with the lasagna sheets. No need to pre-soak the lasagna sheets, but make very sure they are covered all around with sauce or you end up with hard bits. Bang in the oven at 190c for 40ish minutes.

You'll have to adapt the recipe to what you can find locally, but as most of it's is pre-made stuff from jars there's very little prep. If you want to get fancier about it you can of course substitute jars for hand-cut ingredients instead. In my experience the most crucial ingredient is the pesto. Too much and it's overpowering, too little and the lasagna turns out bland. The rest of the ingredients are quite unspecific in how much exactly you use. I don't measure anything really when making this.

Gotcha. That makes sense. All of the jars sounds like NL where I live, also the Gouda.

I guess when I was picturing a vegetable lasagna, pesto and spinach were not high on my list as I don’t particular care for either of those ingredients.

I have an idea for how to do something similar though with different ingredients! Thanks for writing it all out.

Ha what a coincidence, I live in NL too :P

re: spinnach: I'm sure you could substitute it with just about anything really. You barely even taste it in the finished product. It mostly provides bulk and texture.

Yea, for me it's largely the texture that I find so abhorrent! Since I have your attention, are there any products that you find are better in a jar as compared to fresh or in a can? I come from the US and while I would say we also have a wide variety of items in jars, daily staples I would say less so, but we use a lot more cans.

I've been here 1.5 years but I must confess I have little desire to experiment with jars because getting rid of them is a pain in butt given where I live. If the product is superior though, I can make the effort to dispose of the glass appropriately.

I've never seen anyone more stressed in the kitchen than my partner trying to debone and roll a turkey for Thanksgiving as opposed to doing it the standard way in the oven.

They went to culinary school, but this was a production for family and was uniquely stressful for them. It turned out fantastic but they were wrecked for the rest of that long weekend.

Prep first and follow the recipe. It’s not as hard as it seems if you get all your ingredients ready and then start cooking. It is literally a list of instructions. It tells you what to do. No imagination needed.

It becomes a lot easier to fuck it up if you try to prep on the fly because you’ll never get the timing right, which means you won’t be following the instructions any more.

This neatly encapsulates why (and how) Pabst Blue Ribbon beer plausibly (but never confirmed) won that blue ribbon in 1893: at a time when beer was especially hard to get just right, tasting the same every time is a huge technical win.

It is the same with military history. Many wars are lost because of blunders, often your military can do more damage to itself than an enemy can do.