Cooking Outside the Lines
Sarene Wallace was editor of Edible Ojai & Ventura County magazine from fall of 2013 to January 2019. She and her husband, Ron, co-owned the magazine and he served as the publisher.
One of my prized possessions is an old, nondescript black-and-white metal box that probably wouldn’t pique your curiosity if you saw it on a shelf. But it holds a jam-packed treasure trove of memories: recipes cards in my mom’s handwriting and favorite dishes shared by friends and family.
There’s tuna casserole made with canned cream of mushroom soup and topped with potato chips before baking. (Didn’t everyone’s mom make that recipe?) Bran muffins, where my mom—who was into healthful cooking before it was fashionable—jotted down reductions to the oil and sugar.
Picking any recipe card from the box yields a story. It’s as though each is date-stamped with the time and place and, when you’re lucky, provides glimpses into the recipe writer’s personality. They also show how tastes evolve over time. I’m talking about you, Cucumber Salad with lime Jell-O, minced onion, ground cucumber and mayonnaise. Or Drunken Hot Dogs with flat beer and “one regular catsup bottle,” which I remember loving as a kid but wouldn’t make today.
As much as I love revisiting these nostalgia-laden old friends and discovering new recipes, I love cooking even more.
For me, a recipe is a guide, not an absolute. I often unconsciously go off script, thinking about what ingredient would be good to add—or to leave out. This free flow of ideas shows up as scribbled notes on the recipes’ margins: “Add bit of orange blossom water” or “add feta, double the spices.”
Other times there’s no recipe in sight; I let the ingredients be my muse. The process involves a general outline and a lot of taste-testing. My husband, Ron, knows better than to ask if the dish he’s enjoying could be replicated. A little-bit-of-this-and-a-little-bit-of-that makes for a one-of-a-kind dish.
This experimental approach is fun for me, though I know it strikes fear in some people’s hearts.
Early in my time with Edible Ojai & Ventura County, I was at a cooking class where the teacher asked how many teaspoons were in a tablespoon. No-brainer, right? “Two,” said someone, and not in a joking way. (It’s three.)
That student figuratively sat on my shoulder with each new issue of Edible Ojai & Ventura County: Our goal was to include recipes that home cooks of every level could follow and successfully complete.
Each time, we tapped into the creativity of local home cooks, subject-matter experts and chefs who generously shared their recipes that connected with our local, seasonal approach.
A sampling of my favorites includes Julia San Bartolome’s Oatmeal Sandwich Cookies with Brown Butter Cream Cheese Filling (Winter 2016 issue); Chef Robin Goldstein’s Grilled Fish Tacos (Spring 2017); and Mini Berry Cheesecakes by Karen Reyes, winner of Edible Ojai & Ventura County’s recipe contest, sweet category, (Summer 2017). Oh, and Fermented Hot Sauce by Michelle Lopez-Dohrn (Fall 2016) … and so many more.
We recipe-tested every recipe—and Editor/Publisher Tami Chu still does so—to ensure they worked and were delicious. It’s frustrating and expensive when you follow a recipe and it doesn’t come out. It can rock your confidence, too. We didn’t want that to happen.
Before stepping into the kitchen, we read the recipes looking for holes, like instructions that skipped steps because the contributor wrote them down from memory. Or ingredients that appeared in the list but not the instructions (or vice versa). We asked contributors how much “1 shallot” was and for visual cues to help cooks know when the step was complete.
Now came the hardest part for me: making the recipe as written, since you know me to be a freewheeling cook. “Trust the recipe” became my mantra. It was a good lesson in self-discipline.
If there was something wonky with the finished dish, I went back to the contributor with questions. Yes, there were times I made a recipe five times to make sure it worked. (Thankfully, that wasn’t necessary often.)
A novice cook and expert taste-tester, Ron was integral to the process. He sampled every dish and proofed the final written recipes. If he didn’t understand something, it sent me back to add more detail. Then it was ready for our copyeditor, Doug Adrianson, to review.
As a cook, you never stop learning; Edible Ojai & Ventura County was my teacher and classroom.
You’ll still see the proof in my fridge, with DIY projects like pickles, fermented hot sauce, yogurt and kombucha. It’s in my appreciation for the structure of a recipe and my confidence to follow it to a T—though you still might see notes in the margin where I did just a wee bit of customization.
