I enjoy searching the web, magazines and cookbooks for new recipes. I love to cook and am always on the lookout for the next yummy dish to try. Over the past few months I've noticed that a lot of copycat recipes for popular restaurant dishes have popped up all over the place. There are recipes for Outback Steakhouse's Boomin Onion, Red Lobster's biscuits and even KFC Chicken (Whatever happened to the "secret" herbs and spices? Not so secret anymore I guess).
This has gotten me thinking about why these recipes are suddenly so popular. After-all people have been enjoying these dishes at the various restaurants for years. So what has changed? The amount of money we can spend on non-essential things like eating out. The recent downturn in the economy has many of us cooking at home instead of eating out and it is no wonder that we still want to enjoy some of our favorite restaurant meals. We're just no longer willing to spend restaurant prices for them.
How do you go about finding these "secret" recipes? I like to start my search at google. I do a simple search for the name of the dish and then add copycat recipe. For example KFC Chicken copycat recipe or copycat recipe for KFC Chicken.
There are of course also quite a few cookbooks on the market that cater to the copycat cooker crowd. Visit your local library to check them out, or browse through the selection at your favorite bookstore. A glance through the table of content will usually tell you right away if your favorite recipe is in the book.
Once you've come across a promising recipe, give it a try and see (or better taste) how it turns out. You won't always get it on the first try. Pick another recipe or make some changes to the one you started out with until you get it just right and the way your favorite restaurant served it. Then plate it up, light some candles and enjoy your favorite dish "restaurant-style". It's well worth the effort.
by Marie-Claire Arceneau
0 comments:
Post a Comment