Gordon Ramsay might think he's got the rebel-chef thing down, but what about the professional cook in her home kitchen? I'm talking about not using recipes, FBSP cooking—Flying by the Seat of Your Pants. I love to cook at home and especially enjoy cooking for friends and family. Sometimes, I'm asked for the recipe to a particular dish I've made, and I'm hard-pressed to give one. Perhaps this is a result of being a cook in the Gourmet test kitchen. At the magazine, we test recipes within an inch of their lives, down to the weight and size of the shallot used, or the number of cloves it takes to get a tablespoon of minced garlic. So when I cook at home, it's with an unbelievable feeling of freedom and rebellion that I pull my ingredients out of the fridge and start cooking without regard to weights and measures. These experiments can fail, like the broccoli soup I made recently that tasted more like dishwater and nutmeg than its namesake. Fix it with a splash of cream? Not bad, not great. In the end, I settled on eating it with a really good baguette to mask the soup's weaknesses. But did I need to tweak it? No. I was on my own turf and not in a test kitchen, and sometimes for this home cook, it's the journey, not the destination.
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