Credit…Linda Xiao for The New York Times. Food Stylist; Hadas Smirnoff. Prop Stylist: Megan Hedgepeth.
Good morning. Recipes are sheet music. Cooks are musicians. They interpret the notes differently; they play the chords differently. Arrangements can change on the fly. My Boston baked beans taste different from Amanda Hesser’s now that I’ve made the dish a gajillion times. They’re both excellent, though. They’re both the same recipe.
That is very much to the good. It’s what makes cooking a creative act rather than a rote one.
Take my recipe for oven-roasted chicken shawarma, which lots of people make. (More than 17,000 readers have given it a rating on New York Times Cooking.) I’ve been making it for friends and family for nearly a decade. The other night my daughter made it for me. It was utterly fantastic, and utterly her own — more lemony than mine, a little warmer in spice, the meat cut a little differently — even though she followed the recipe exactly. I loved it. I’d love to taste yours.
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Oven-Roasted Chicken Shawarma
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