I'm not sure if it survived the new site, but we had an interlinked set of pages for recipes on here. Lots of amazing stuff, and the first post was wiki-style editable. Let me see if I can track it down...

Edit: http://www.gamerswithjobs.com/node/16130
Post all the recipes you can

My wife picked up a book some time ago, "Top Secret Restaurant Recipes", with a ton of recipes for creating home-made clones of popular restaurant food.

Now the guy has a second book and a website.

Anyone tried any of these? I'm eager to give his Little Caesar's Crazy Bread a shot.

Zing!

Pharacon, making recipes up on the fly is the best kind of cooking in my book.

Let's see: If you have an old parmigiano cheese in the fridge (the really hard one), just go and buy a leek. Throw it onto olive oil and let it fry until it lets out juice, you can salt it a little to help it. Pour in some water and put in the hardened pieces of cheese. Let it simmer. When the leek is to your liking, you can thicken the soup whichever way you prefer/have ingredients for: make up gnocchi from flour and water, just add flour or mix in one or two eggs. Cheap, tasty and you can almost smell the Mediterranean Sea from your kitchen table. If you don't like leeks, replace them with e.g. carrots. Or peas. Or even lentils. Or put every leftover vegetable in and voila - minestrone.

Maybe for you. When I improvise things tend to get a little weird. I am slowly getting better.

A few years ago I tried to make a traditional chocolate cake leavened with egg whites instead of baking soda or baking powder. My consistent flaw in cooking is over boiling things, and I over boiled what should have just been standing hot water. So my "cake" came out like brownies. Sort of. But not in a good way. I also failed the one time I tried to make risotto, although I'm pretty sure that was because I didn't have the right kind of rice.

Usually my experiments with cooking turn out well. Everyone that has tried my white and dark chocolate bread pudding with bailey's irish cream sauce loves it. I don't remember the last time I followed a recipe exactly. I always change something. More spice than something calls for, or leaving out olives in another recipe. Other than aesthetically I think I've perfected omelets.

I recently tried making a wasabi pea crusted tuna, that would have been good if my steaks weren't too thin. They ended up getting overcooked, while the wasabi/panko crust was just right. That's typical of when I try and invent when cooking: I get 85% of the way there, but screw up something crucial and end up with a not terrible but not great meal.

Re: my earlier comment about chain food: in retrospect it was pretty obnoxious. I should have been clearer: most the sauces and such (and those places tend to drench their food in sauce) as well as most everything else just tends to taste overly processed and artificial to me. It wouldn't surprise me if corn syrup was used in just about everything from any major chain restaurant. So if you're cooking for yourself, you can be sure you're using good ingredients, so why try and emulate cooking that's designed to be cheap, fast, and easily mechanized? I do like that sort of stuff sometimes, but it's a bit of a guilty pleasure, like having dessert for dinner.

Re: a roux. Those are not too hard, but do depend on the quality of the butter. Cheap American butter tends not to hold up well in cooking in my experience, and is really difficult to get to a nice brown, which is sort of what you want. I get lurpak (some hoity-toity european butter: it's the only import brand my grocery store carries) butter for using in sauces, and just use regular butter for less demanding uses.

I can definitely see that. Every time a commercial comes on for the Super Duper Triple Butter Blue Cheese Melted Steak of the week at one of those places, a cow somewhere throws itself into the wood chipper rather than being turned into that. Why people would rather have a cheap, heavy sauce than the natural flavor of an expensive ingredient like steak, lobster or shrimp is a mystery.

And corn syrup is the devil, especially the high fructose variety. It's gotten to the point that even a poor palate like mine can taste the cheapness in commercial baked goods. Blecch. In addition, there's mounting evidence that it's played a significant part in America's obesity problems. Awesome job, Insane Government Subsidies!

I love my garlic mill. And my sea salt mill. I also have two pepper mills of which I am not as fond.

Everything Rabbit said is right. Us old people think alike.

The trick with food is to know a few basic principles that apply everywhere and then use those to play around. Chinese stir fry is like this. The technique is almost always the same, all that changes is what goes in the pan.

Knowing the basics also lets you know when a recipe you are reading is bullsh*t. At this point, you can take the ingredients and make the food the right way.

It is also a basic fact that if you really want to learn how a dish works, watch someone's mother cook it. The recipes themselves only get you so far.

Oh yeah: learn how to make demiglace. Nowhere is there anything so simple that can make you look so brilliant.

The first time I attempted to make Baklava, the recipe said to brush each layer of phyllo dough with the butter/sugar syrup mixture so I did. I peeled each and every individual piece of phyllo pastry apart and brushed it. The recipe should have said that after unrolling the phyllo dough, each stack of phyllo dough should be brushed with the mixture. Instead of the light flaky pastry, we had Greek hardtack candy.

Try swapping out your batter with an egg wash (egg and water) and seasoned Japanese panko bread crumbs. The panko turns wonderfully cripsy and golden brown when you fry it. If you cut your chicken breast into strips, you'll have some of the best darned chicken tenders you've ever tasted. Try it for fried fish as well.

Panko is what's used for tempura, if you want an idea of the type of crust it makes. Alton Brown has a great mac & cheese recipe that has a panko crust. If you want to make some comfort food, I recommend it.

This is based on 2 whole breasts(multiply proportions in accord with your needs)

If you like pasta with your chicken parm, start the water boiling long before you begin, toss the pasta in just as you finish browning the chicken breasts.

Simple, naked, Chicken parmesan
Medium heat for all
What you want to do is cut pockets into the chicken breast halves. You stuff in cheese into this. Now, I like to either tie or skewer them closed(like when making cordon bleu). This helps keep the cheese in there, adding moisture, flavor, and not leaking out. Lightly pepper and salt the outsides of the breasts, garlic salt works very well

Brown these in a pan, then place them in a baking pan, cover(do not dry these babies out).

In the pan you just browned the breasts in, add a few tablespoons of olive oil. Into this, you will want to saute half an onion, per 2 breasts. This will add some great flavor to the sauce as well as be great in the initial deglazing with the oil.

Now you can either finish the sauce by just simmering some Ragu or such in the pan, or, you can go with my preferred method.

Grab a 16 ounce can of stewed tomatoes(Italian style are a plus as they are stewed in great herbs), and 2 whole garlic cloves(peeled), toss them into a blender, all together. And lightly blend for a few pulses. You can get a chunky or smooth texture, your taste. I prefer a smooth sauce. Simmer the sauce in the pan(having a splatter cover is nice).

In all this time, your chicken has been in the oven, probably for 10 minutes, maybe 15. Check their tenderness, to see if they are done. If not, back to the oven, if so, cut the oven, and let the breasts rest for a few minutes(it is important to let meat, poultry, pork, fish rest so that the natural juices settle in, cutting into a freshly cooked anything is a recipe for dryness disaster). The sauce does not have to simmer long to get tasty. Stir occasionally, add salt and pepper to taste.

I prefer this style to a traditionally breaded chicken parmesan, because no matter who makes it, the breading always ends up soggy under the sauce. I also find that this helps to bring out more chicken, and parmesan flavors, rather than an overpowering herb flavor from the breading.

I was in Kyoto once and went to a restaurant that was particularly well known for their tempura. This stuff was some magic fried food where they managed to get that deep fried texture and taste with absolutely no oil. Or at least that's what it tasted like. Not a hint of oil, anywhere, at all. Amazing.