Served With Rice

The food diary of a time-poor salaryman. Nutrition conscious, and meal prep friendly.

Why aren’t there any measurements or specified amounts?

… I imagine you’d think, scrolling through the Dramatis Personae of each of the recipe posts. To give you the short answer, it’s because I don’t know what the amounts or measurements are.

One reason is because of the way I learned to cook. I recall being a wee lad, standing over the ancestral rice cooker at home watching my mother prepare dinner. I had just asked her how much water to cook the rice for that night. She squinted at the dry rice in the pot, poured in enough water to cover it and then some, squinted again at the water level and said, “About this much.” She stuck her finger into the water to see how much it came up above the rice and added, “Yep.”

And that’s how I learned to cook. I guesstimate. A splash of soy sauce comes straight from the bottle and ends when it looks about right. Whatever size a dollop of oyster sauce is dictated by the whims of the heavens (or, I guess, physics) is what goes into the pan. Add sugar until it is sweet. How much water for that much rice? Enough. Taste as I go and adjust on the fly. With time, intuition became a reliable measure.

This is not the approach to take for baking, where precision matters. But for home cooking, it’s much more quick and convenient than breaking up the scales and measuring spoons every time. While it might not be perfect, most of the time it will be good enough. And the random variations that it brings can sometimes surprise you with different results that change the way you cook in the future.

Another reason is that ingredients, as well as individual tastes and preferences, can differ by a wide margin. Fresh spices and old spices are miles apart in terms of potency. Or maybe the ingredients you have access to come packaged in different sizes, or are different to mine in some particular way. Even things like atmospheric conditions, weather and altitude can change how recipes work – room temperature can mean very different things depending on where you are in the world.

Maybe you like something with more pepper, or more acidity than I do. Maybe you like things more, or less salty. Or spicy. Or sweet. Maybe you have health conditions that means you need to make substitutions, or use less of some particular thing. Maybe you are cooking with different equipment.

In any and all of the above cases, it wouldn’t make much sense for me to list precise numbers that don’t mean much to you, the dear reader. Even I never make the same recipe twice in the exact same way. It’s much more important to make food that tastes good, than to follow a recipe to the T. Get your inspiration, but make it your own.

And finally, the way I cook and the proportions I use may not fit your needs. I am a small guy who is trying to become a bigger guy. That description is more likely than not to fit you poorly, seeing as at least 50% of people are not guys, and some guys are big and/or are trying to get smaller.

Some folks want high protein, some folks want low protein. High or low fat, high or low sodium, gluten free, low FODMAP, I could go on forever. I could suggest specific portion sizes and ratios if I was talking to someone I know, but here on the internet there’s no way I can prescribe one specific recipe and have it fit the (often contradictory) needs of everyone.

I remember going through hours and hours of Chef John videos during my formative years, and noticing how he keeps stressing that he is showing techniques, not recipes. His repeated admonishment that “you are, after all, the X of the Y” also reminds us that at the end of the day, it is the cook who has the power to decide how a dish tastes.

It is therefore my aim on this website to show you the broad strokes of what I do with a particular recipe, to give you an idea of what I do and why, so that you can go on and adapt it to your needs and preferences.

I will document the quantities I used and the number of servings I made, where I remember. When specific amounts (or more likely, specific ratios of ingredients) are important, I will list them. And wherever suggestions or recommendations for where to begin may be useful, I will describe them.

Thank you for reading my rant. Have a look around the rest of the site! I hope you find something you like.

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