Valerie's Vernacular

Before we do anything, let me first clarify one term in particular that I will undoubtedly use as I blog:

how much you like it.

This is something that my great-grandmother used to say and it is a term that has stuck in our family generations after she coined it. I suppose it is similar to what some people mean by a "pinch" or a "dash." But in my family it is always how much you like it.

Family legend holds that my great-grandmother left Poland on the last boat out in 1914 before WWI. The only thing that kept her alive on the boat over were bananas, which she ate peel-on. In the poor village she came from, she had never seen a banana and didn't know that she was supposed to peel it. I can't imagine she much enjoyed them...but I digress.

For my great-grandmother, English was something like her third or fourth language, so it left a little to be desired.  Her cooking though - that was something else.

Like many home cooks, my great-grandmother cooked by sight, smell, and taste, not by recipe. This method of cooking led her to coin the term how much you like it.

Whenever she was asked how much of any ingredient to use, her answer was always the same: 

how much you like it. 

Cooking in this manner means that you can cook without a recipe. You can use whatever you have on hand or you can modify a recipe based on your own preferences.

I make this point so that you understand that I will post a lot of recipes and I fully intend two things:

I will use this term whenever I plan to modify a recipe or when I simply do not follow a recipe at all;

I expect that you will further modify my recipes by varying the amounts of each ingredient.

I hope you'll feel as comfortable using the term as you do modifying recipes.

Happy eating!