What is a Menu?

A menu for the purpose of this site, cooking @ home, it is a collection of separate dishes which together to form a meal. So then, why not say “meal”? Well, what if we’re having, say, a Super Bowl party, would a bunch of seperate snacks collectively form a meal? That’s argueable. What’s for certain is they would form a menu. And so the use of that term over the other. But, having said that: eh, “meal”, “menu”, doesn’t matter when it comes down to it.

What I think is more important than the term used is the concept, and that is to bring some cohesion, to say hey, these dishes go together very nicely, or better yet, they are a fantastic combination. Think of this also as the way they often do dishes on a television cooking show, where they tend to do the episode in one of two ways, as a theme which all the recipes follow for that show, or as a collective meal or menu.

So, everything here links to an already published, existing dish I’ve made. If there’s no link, it means it’s a dish I haven’t made but that I think would go well with the rest, or that in real life I did serve but there’s no recipe (maybe because it’s fresh lima beans or a box of prepared rice, something that doesn’t required a recipe per se.)

Hope you find this concept useful. I’ll keep adding new ones over time. As always, enjoy your food, and when you can share it with others!