Back in the day—Eisenhower/Howdy Doody/Roy Rogers era—many Chinese-American restaurants offered mix and match dinners on their menus. The menu had charts of dishes with instructions to "Pick one from Column A, one from Column B, and one from Column C," thus letting the diner customize the meal.
Flash-forward to now-ish, my good friend Sandra Gluck and I were imagining doing a cookbook based loosely on the same principle—creating a collection of recipes with mix and match components. The inspiration for the book's title came from the Chinese menu, but the concept of mix and match is inherent in the process of creating a recipe from scratch. As any recipe developer will tell you, most recipes start with a basic structure that can then be tweaked this way and that to create many versions, each one unique.
We have since given up trying to sell anyone on the idea of this book. The concept is hard to explain and most people just look a little dazed when you make the attempt. So instead here is a mini collection of recipes based on the One from Column A concept. I call them Recipe Templates. They are customizable by you, the reader.
The number after each template name represents the number of unique combinations possible for that template. Give it a spin.
Bulgur Salad with Fresh Fruit: 60,000
Chicken Chowder: 86,400
Creamy Cheesecake: 20,160
Fruit Salsas: 158,760
Fruit and Nut Bars: 1,152
Glazed Pound Cake: 3,849
Rolled Stuffed Meat Loaf: 46,080
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