News You Can Bruise for 2004 May 28

The book is called (are you ready?): "Cooking Without Recipes: A complete cooking course designed to change beginners and recipe-followers into creative cooks, including 300 recipe patterns and exciting variations." With a baroque title like that you'd expect it to be from the hand of the learned Dr. Johnson, but it is instead from the hand of the learned Helen Worth. There's an updated 1980 version which I should probably get as well if I decide to seriously do this design patterns cookbook thing.

Other cookbooks I found that have similar ideas: "How to Cook without a Book" by Pam Anderson (no, not Pam Samuelson); a completely different "Cooking Without Recipes", by Cheryl Sindell and Joachim Splichal; "The Blue Strawbery Cookbook" [sic], by James Halle. I've ordered them according to my guesses as to where they fall on the continuum that travels from Recipe Refactoring Metropolis to the Random Improvisation Olde Tyme Country Farm.

Honorable mention goes to similarly-named Cooking Without a Kitchen, which, aiming for the MacGuyver wannabe niche market, features gourmet recipes you prepare in the hotel coffeemaker.

Man, this is pretty good:

arizona,and he accompanied,audrey,he went down,meadowland,some inexplicable loathing,checkmate,ratslayers mutilated face.

I kind of wish I'd written it.