Years ago, when I was at Food & Wine magazine, I worked with a brilliant recipe developer named Anne Disrude. She had the same intellectual curiosity about food and recipes as I did, and we were constantly toying with ideas (like the time she decided to make her own onion powder. . . an idea that turned out to be better in theory than in practice).One day Anne came up with an idea for a magazine article on soups. She created a basic recipe template and then made a mix & match chart of all the possible ingredients, inviting the readers to choose their own combinations.
I have carried this idea around with me ever since, wishing I could figure out a way to get the concept across to other people. I've tried once or twice to sell this as a book idea, but I mostly get polite, slightly puzzled, nods.
So here I am on my blog, and no one can stop me from trying my experiment. What I have created is a template for Fruit Salsa. If you go to the fruit salsa template page, you'll be able to choose your own ingredients and create your own recipe. It's really hard to explain. Just give it a try: Fruit Salsa Template.
And by the way, here's the math that goes with this recipe: The number of unique combinations you could put together with this template is 150,000. (Well, that's not completely accurate. The real number is 158,760. Seriously.)
