Is this weird food behaviour?

[Nefarious]

I have a friend who claims himself to be a bit of a foodie, and to be fair, he has some pretty good kitchen skills and eats a pretty braod range of often quite exotic stuff, but I just can't get my head round his attidute to food:

He buys/gets given recipe books and religiously works his way through then cover to cover. He never cooks the same thing twice, and will absolutely NEVER deviate even one iota from the precise stipulations of the recipe (e.g. Chervil will never be replaced by parsley, if the recipe says Thai Basil, then regular basil just won't do etc).

Odd, or am I just being too judgmental?

[dcw@pr]

a bit anal perhaps, but most people (like me) buy a cookbook and only use a fraction of it. That's pretty odd too

[brum]

That's pretty odd.
I buy cookbooks to look at Nigellas norks mainly. My wife cooks the recepies from them sometime - but mainly they are for looking at Nigella's norks.

[Nefarious]

For me, its the never cooking anything twice thing. Nothing ever gets improved on and you never get a chance to add anything of yourself into the food (not literally, of course!), or tailor it to your own tastes.

[bazking69]

Cooking is all about trying, liking, experimenting, improving, perfecting and enjoying even more IMO.
I use the net or cookbooks for ideas. If I haven't got something I'll substitute or go with something similar.
While I love doing new stuff, I also love doing something you know inside out and enjoy.

[Plotloss]

Its odd.

If he never deviates from the recipe he is not understanding why a dish is prepared the way it is, the science behind the art if you will.

If he is serious about food he will knock the recipe books on the head.

[L4MBOLUV3R]

sounds a little OCD to me but each to there own i guess. least he isnt one of those people that will eat a steak and onion pasty but hates onions or likes chips but not potatoes?? those odd sort of things.

[Tanguero]

Strikes me he has good cooking skills but no creative ones. Sticking so religously to recipies is fine for producing decent food (usualy!!), but unless you are prepared to develop a dish and experiment with it I think you are likeley to end up with outstanding food.

[Pferdestarke]

He has no 'feel' for food if he's doing that. Tell him that we think he's an idiot when you next see him.

[Carpie]

Better than sticking a ready meal in the microwave every night though isn't it?

Personally whenever I cook from a recipie it goes out of the window pretty quickly as I discover I don't have ingredients or I decide I know better

Quite often chuck something together and just add flavourings like curry power, stock etc until it tastes ok!

[Cotty]

Nefarious said:

He never cooks the same thing twice,

I can't believe that. Just take curry as an example, are you saying he has never eaten the same curry twice. There can't be that many variations to last someone a lifetime.

[spikeyhead]

Cotty said:

Nefarious said:

He never cooks the same thing twice,

I can't believe that. Just take curry as an example, are you saying he has never eaten the same curry twice. There can't be that many variations to last someone a lifetime.

I'd guess that I could come up with several hundred different ways of cooking curry without any research.