Generally I am suspicious of food recipes online (and the same goes for homebrewing recipes) because until you try cooking the dish you never know how good it will turn out. That is especially true of ethnic recipes where I have seen very incorrect or very bland recipes receive excellent ratings on sites like AllRecipes.com. Part of the reason I started this blog, which I haven't kept up with, was to write out my versions of recipes I found and tweaked for my preferences. I think every home cook tweaks recipes but sometimes I find myself really doctoring up a recipe because I find it too mild on the spices. I'm not one for salting a meal down. I'd rather taste the herbs and other spices rather than some sort of generic salt and fat flavor that I find in a lot of online recipes. They resemble my mom's cookbooks from the 1950s and 1960s that are dripping with butter, shortening, salt and oil.
As I said, ethnic recipes are probably the biggest gamble online. Sometimes the recipes have been reduced to blander flavors to accommodate the typical American palate rather than the bold flavors often associated with foods from non-white parts of the world. Other times the recipes have been modified to fit ingredients easily available at American supermarkets. I get it, you can't always walk into Kroger and find bird's eye chiles or fenugreek. However, just be honest about it. Don't say the recipe is just like the version you were served in a Thai home deep in the jungle. Just say you adjusted it for the ingredients you could find. Dumping ginger and soy sauce on some chicken isn't the "authentic #1 best stir fry recipe on the whole internet OMG please share on pintrest".
As a result of my suspicions, I often research a dish to find multiple versions until I either reach a consensus on what should be in the recipe and how it should be cooked or I find a version that seems legitimate on its own. I try to search out sources of recipes that should have honest versions of that kind of food. Generic recipe sites like allrecipes.com and epicurious.com are last ditch resources unless I am looking for something really basic. Always, always read the comments. You can learn a lot about how the dish turned out and what people thought it was missing or where it was wrong. I also find websites for product manufacturers highly suspect. They are typically bland recipes that demand using an excessive amount of their products. Not good.
My recipes may not be to your taste. You may not like cooking the way I do. That's cool. If you are pulling ideas from my recipes you should know that these recipes have been tested in my kitchen and tweaked without fear of delivering big flavors when they should. Not every dish needs to punch you in the throat with flavor but when it should give you an avalanche of flavor it should deliver. Where possible I will continue to offer some suggestions on how to tweak the recipe for other preferences.
