My spouse wants me to do more of menu planning. I already do a good state of the cooking, but I typically cook things I already know how to make, or at least things I've eaten before. She would like me to read cookbooks to find new ideas, and she's got over a hundred, many for cuisines I'm familiar with and enjoy.
The problem is I can't read them. I mean, I can physically pick them up and read the words but that doesn't give me any information about what the dish is or how to prepare it. I can pick up a programming manual and read it just fine, see what a function does, its inputs and outputs and use cases.
I know some of if the obstacles:
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Ingredients listed separately from directions, so when I read "Add the tomatoes and stir" I have to leave my place in the directions to find out how much tomatoes.
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Directions not always chronological: A full paragraph about preparing a sofrito will be followed by one starting "At the same time..."
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Ingredients that are added at the same time are not always grouped together (some books are better about this).
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Many recipes discuss how long to cook something but linear time is an illusion. Some rare books will tell you what color, translucency, texture, or aroma and ingredient should have before the next step, and those ones are easier to use.
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Lack of narrative / lack of flow / lack of reason or purpose for individual steps. I can remember easily that to make mac'n'cheese richer and more indulgent you can brown the butter you use to make the cheese sauce, but cookbooks rarely tell you why you're doing any individual step and if they do, it's in a paragraph of text above or below the recipe where it's easy to miss.
Recently I was able to cook something new from a cookbook (albeit something I've eaten from restaurants and know that the final result should be) by copying everything down onto notecards, and rearranging them into chronological groups, and then copying that onto another piece of paper that I could refer to while cooking. But A) that took over an hour and 2] it was only possible because I already knew the finished dish. I seek to be able to read a cookbook and find new dishes to cook, the way I can pick up a new programming language by reading it's function documentation.
Any tips?
You know how some people are bad at reading technical documents, find coping skills that make it tolerable, but ultimately need to have the information presented in a different way? You might be one of those people, but for recipes.
I don't find most recipes easy to follow, but taking a long time to learn them and getting familiar is a big help. Sounds like you already tried that, but if you haven't tried it long, you might find that you will gain more of the "recipe reading skill" if you keep trying. (Not necessarily, but possibly.)
How do you feel about reading cooking blogs? I like being able to read more details about how a dish is prepared, and the pictures/videos really help it come together. I find they're able to express more easily when things need to happen concurrently, and they also feel like they have more space to explain why they're doing what they're doing. I like Once Upon a Chef and Serious Eats, personally.
Hit or miss on blogs, honestly. Hank Shaw of Hunter Angler Gardener Cook is one that, reading, I get a good feel for the dish, and Smitten Kitchen is another, though in both cases that is mostly useful for deciding which dishes not to make. I'll check out Once Upon a Chef, thanks for the recommendation.