2025, books, Food, Mysteries

Glug Glug

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You know my drill.  Find an interesting cookbook out and about.  Get that cookbook from the library.  Try out a few of the recipes.  If they turn out well, consider adding cookbook to the collection.  And the hard part, getting rid of a cookbook to make room for the newbie.

So yesterday I’m made a Roasted Tomato, Potato, Dill and Feta Frittata from a cookbook of tomato recipes.  I like to follow recipes fairly closely when I’m testing a cookbook; I think of it as giving the author a chance to really show their stuff.  After a couple of paragraphs in the recipe, I came upon this phrase – “… heat a generous glug of oil over medium heat”.

To be honest, I’m not sure I’ve ever seen “glug” listed as a measurement in a cookbook before.  I was pretty sure a glug has to do with the sound of the oil if you tip the bottle all the way up and the oil makes a glugging sound as it pushes its way out.  But for fun, I looked it up.  Internet says “about two tablespoons”.  So is a generous glug three tablespoons?  Four tablespoons would be two glugs, wouldn’t it?  Not exactly a precision measurement.

What I didn’t say is that when I read that instruction, I laughed out loud.  The reason for that is that in an earlier recipe, the author explained in excruciating detail how to make a grilled cheese sandwich.

“Arrange the cheese on one slide of bread, then put the two slices together.  Set a skillet that’s the right size for you bread (too large, and you’ll end up with burned butter), add about 1 Tablespoon butter, swirl it around to coat the skillet; as soon as it stops foaming, lay your sandwich in the skillet.”

To be fair, the grilled cheese recipe turned out great but not because I needed step-by-step instruction on how to grill a cheese sandwich but because it called for a Sun-Dried Tomato & Smoky Red Pepper Mayonnaise which was fabulous.

Glug, pinch, dash, handful…. how closely do you follow recipes?  Do you even USE recipes?

27 thoughts on “Glug Glug”

  1. Rise and Shine, Baboons,

    I sorta follow them. Sometimes. Is that specific enough?

    Today is cataract surgery on my left eye. I am nervous about this. If it does not go right I won’t read recipes at all, although the success percentages are high. I will write more later.

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    3. I am back. The procedure went well. My son took me to the surgery center where I was in and out in under an hour. I returned home with a clear plastic bubble-like thing over my eye then took a nap. My vision in the left eye is blurry but it is there. It feels scratchy.

      My favorite glugging recipe is the one for Beef Stew. After flouring and browning beef chunks, pour a glug of red wine into the mix with beef broth and water. Heat til bubbling, scraping browned bits into the wine gravy. Drink some red wine.

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  2. i’m a recipe as a reference kind of cook if I’m making something I’ll look up and get ideas and try tweaking them a little bit. I may even follow it once exactly as directed just to see how it goes and see if I have ideas that I can plug-in

    I have a couple of daughters that turned my wife onto Junior British baking television show where 10 to 15-year-olds are the chefs and it’s delightful. I told my daughter the school teacher who is a vegetarian that I would like to have a tempura bake off for the month of April and she said she’s excited about that so I will be looking at the 27,000 different ways. There are to make tempura and finally figure out how to make one or two that are to my liking. I have never made successful tempura. It’s all been really grumpy horrible stuff so I look forward to getting it right this month
    next month actually.

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  4. First of all, I am more likely than not to use the glug measurement when oiling a pan at the beginning of a recipe, as I find the measured amount—one or two tablespoons—to be generally scant. I don’t think, though, I would be that loose when writing a recipe.

    When making a recipe the first time, I tend to follow it closely, except in cases where an ingredient or quantity of an ingredient is never going to be acceptable in our household. Once I’ve followed the recipe, if it’s basically good, I have a sense how I would change it to make it better by our standards. Then I pencil in those changes for the future. Sometimes the altered recipe bears little resemblance to the original.

    There are numerous things I make without a recipe—stir fries, frittatas, some fish dishes, soups, and also some recipes that I’ve developed for myself and consult just to get the quantities right.

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  5. I’m a glug-glugger too, especially with olive oil.

    I follow the recipe closely when I’m making something for others, or baking. I don’t bake much anymore, but there’s a recipe for lemon melt-aways that I want to make next week. I’ll follow the recipe carefully for that.

    Most of the time I just cook for myself, so I don’t bother with a recipe at all. I make soups, stir fries, and rice dishes for myself a lot, and I don’t bother with a recipe. I make spinach lasagna and veggie chili without a recipe.

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  6. We have loads of cookbooks and many recipes printed off the internet and NYT cooking app that Husband has carefully curated and annotated and put in large three-ring binders. I am not allowed to insert or remove recipes for fear I might mess up his organizing. I am a left brained cook who mainly follows the recipe as written until I have made it enough times to do variations.

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  7. I never use recipes for soups except once I made borscht with meat etc and it took me most of a day! It was delicious though. Same thing for America’s Test Kitchen chicken pot pie. Long prep time but yummy. I must be a lazy cook as I haven’t made either again. One recipe worth the time is Guinness chocolate cake – best chocolate cake I have ever had and worth the time and leftover Guinness.

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  8. My ex used to treat cooking as a chemistry project. Everything had to be pre-sliced, pre-measured, and all in little bowls (like on the cooking shows) on the counter, and there would be NO deviation from the recipe. I once made pasta in marinara sauce with chicken, onion, and broccoli, because that’s what we had lying around for supper. My ex almost didn’t eat it because I didn’t follow any kind of a recipe. She took a bite and was astounded that it was delicious.

    For me, a recipe is a starting point, not the finish line. My mom was/is a ‘garbage cook.’ Meaning she’d come home from work, look in the refrigerator, and see what materials she had to make supper with. Somehow, it always turned out delicious. I do my best to emulate.

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    2. Today I had a glorious lunch that your mom, the garbage cook would have been proud of. Last of the Easter Bunny pasta that I found in the back of the cabinet. The rest of the can of roasted tomatoes from the fridge. Pesto from our garden. A vegetarian sausage – not the last in the package, but not the first. Feta cheese leftover from the frittata. Some salt and pepper. Hits all my “use it up” buttons!

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  9. If I’m just thinking of cooking “something to swallow”, I see a recipe as “an interesting suggestion of a place to start”. If I have a particular thing in mind and don’t want to mess it up, I treat the recipe as if it were instructions for assembling a nuclear bomb.

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  12. I join those who follow the recipe fairly closely first time out – I like to get an idea of what they were thinking. After that all bets are off.

    I also do a lot like tgith’s mom – and I used to love Lynne Rosetto Kasper’s challenge to name three unrelated foods, then see what she could come up with. My recipe for dinner often depends on what leftovers are in the fridge…

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  13. I use recipes but almost always change them in some way. Like Bill, I always plug the oil, partly because it’s a pain to try to handle a large bottle of oil and a measuring spoon (need a third hand). If I don’t have an ingredient, I’ll improvise. We prefer spicy foods, so I usually vary the spices and amounts. My recipes are full of notes of how I changed the recipe, so I’ll remember next time.

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