Why Some People Should Stay Out of the Kitchen

I found myself revisiting an old thought this evening. It's a time of the year when people have to think about making many foods without ingredients they normally have available. A while back, Kevin and I had a similar thought.

The idea was that Egg, Sugar, and Oil were sort of like primary colors and that many recipes are somewhat like color mixing, manipulating the contributions of each primary. The idea develops by next looking at the secondaries, the product of mixing each of the primaries.

If you've followed the lunacy so far you might be seeing something like this in your head:


Egg and Oil make Mayonnaise. Egg and Sugar make Meringue. Sugar and Oil make Frosting.

The thought was that if you were in some very bizarre kitchen where you didn't have eggs, but you did have mayonnaise and meringue that you could still complete a recipe that called for eggs by carefully mixing the adjacent secondaries.

I'm not sure it would work, and really what kitchen wouldn't have the primaries but would have the secondaries?

But it might make an interesting cooking contest.