How to be fearless in the kitchen

Organizing your cookbooks and clippings
If you are like most enthusiast cooks, your shelves are probably laden with an ever-expanding collection of cookbooks, recipes copied from websites, and others clipped from magazines. How do you organize all this and capitalize on this wealth of ideas? In my world, the cookbooks get spiked with sticky flags that mark the appealing dishes, the online recipes are kept in a file on my computer, and the clippings are sorted in a cardboard folder. But organization is a personal thing, and you should devise a system that works for you. Whichever you choose, the idea remains the same: to map out the scenery of your collection, and make it easy for you to find your way around.

While it's tempting to hoard a huge amount of recipes, it's best to keep or tag only the ones that really inspire you, the ones you think you'll get around to trying someday -- no, really. And, of course, it's not much use to file recipes away if they never see the light of day. But if you go through your cookbooks and folder on a regular basis -- when you're planning a dinner party or have to take a dish somewhere -- their content will live someplace fresh in your mind, ready to be called upon when you see something unusual at the market: "Sea spinach? Aha! I have a recipe for this!"

Cooking from the pantry
As a little exercise to flex you creative muscles, try this: open the fridge, look through your pantry, and improvise a dish -- or better yet, an entire meal -- using only what you have on hand. No shopping allowed. You can refer to existing recipes (that's when you'll be glad you've kept your cookbooks and clippings organized), but you will likely have to adapt them, and this is where it gets interesting.

This approach, focusing on available ingredients rather than a finished product, is the best way to let loose, unleash your own ideas, and make the most of your food supplies. If you've never really cooked like this before, it may seem a little daunting, like riding a bike without training wheels. You may fall and scratch your knee every once in a while, but you will always learn something from it, and most of the time you will be surprised, and oh-so-proud, to see how well you do on your own. (Don't forget to write down the recipe then.)

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Excerpted from Chocolate and Zucchini: Daily Adventures in a Parisian Kitchen by Clotilde Dusoulier. Copyright 2007 by Clotilde Dusoulier. Excerpted with permission from Broadway Books, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced except with permission in writing from the publisher.