Cooking is creative and therapeutic. I love to cook once in a while. My motivation to cook is to try different ingredients, mix them in unique ways and experiment. In fact, I call myself an (amateur) “Fusion” Chef. That’s euphemism for just trying different things. Both in cooking and in life. I love to see what comes out. I’m never even 80% sure how things will turn out but by and large, various audiences I’ve tried this seem to like it. Ok, there were a few disasters :)

There are two types of cooks in this world - those that follow the recipe to the dot and those that experiment. I am in the latter camp. I think both kinds are great cooks and it is also reflective of your life philosophy. The "organised" kinds of people look for facts and proven ideas and execute them to the tee. The "feeling" cooks are into sensing whether ingredients would go with each other.  One would make a great engineer; the other an artist.

I am one of those who can’t stick to the script. For most improvising cooks, you start with - what ingredients do I have to work with? Which of these might go together?

So, just this morning, I had my wife's latest creation: multi-grained Raagi-Chana-Oats-Fenugreek dosa (crepe in case I'm offending any purists).

All the ingredients in the cover picture of these post were ground into a ghol and then cooked into a dosa. It was just delicious! My own recent experiment was Thai Bhel Puri (combining Thai with a traditional Gujarati Snack). I have never tried this before and yet I was quite confident people will like it. It was inspired by  another recipe that my wife & I have come up with over the years which is Asian Italian fusion peanut pasta.

Don’t get me wrong. There have been plenty of times where things have turned out to be a disaster. However, more often than not, it has worked out for me. I started pondering about why that is. Here are a few reasons:

• Cooking is a lot about the senses -  taste, smell and texture. You are also 'training' your intuition not by being brilliant but just by experiment a lot. This is no different than in any creative project.
• Since most people’s “food senses” have been jaded by “standard” stuff, anything interesting and unique that you do will immediately awaken their “food” sensibility. If you notice why you love certain restaurants compared to others because they offer unique  things that are delightful and yet refreshing to the palate.

There is no recipe for success - it is as unique as you are.
- Natalie Massenet

• Since what are you doing is one of a kind, it is both impossible to “compare” to anything else people have had anywhere.  On the flip side, it may be difficult to "replicate" it exactly as it is.

The quality of the ingredients is as important as the element of surprise. If you have great quality ingredients and some basic “foodie” (aka Jughead) sense, you can’t go too wrong.

If you are struggling with inspiration, now there's amazing technology such as IBM's Chef Watson (AI and Machine learning applied to recipes). Effectively, you open your fridge pick out any two or three random ingredients and let Chef Watson guide you for the rest! I also recommend the 4-hour Chef (its about much more than cooking) by Timothy Ferris.

What’s the worst that can happen? The recipes turn out to be a disaster - well, have a safe accompanying dish (lemon rice, anyone?). If all else fails, order some pizza! On the other hand, in the likely event it turns out well, besides having a delighted audience, you will have kicked off a great conversation!

Cooking is like improvisational comedy. I would even go as far as saying it’s a proxy for any creative endeavour.

There will be those who will follow the playbook for building a product, or a shipping software, maybe even designing a dress; and there will be those who will go ahead and surprise you. Unlike other creative projects, the cost of trying out cooking experiments is modest.

So, go ahead and spin the wheel. You have little to lose (beyond an hour or two of your time)! In the best case the world would have seen a new recipe and a brilliant new Chef. In the worst case, it will still trigger your creative juices for other parts of your life!

Happy Cooking and Bon appetit!

p.s. The easiest starting point is to toss interesting, unique salads!

p.p.s. When all else fails, use generous amount of BUTTER :-)

About the Author -

(Amit Somani is a Managing Partner at Prime Venture Partners, an early stage Venture Capital firm based out of Bangalore, India. Prime VP invests in category creating, early stage companies founded by rock star teams. Prior, Amit has held leadership positions at Makemytrip, Google and IBM. He is also deeply engaged with the early stage startup ecosystem in India and actively volunteers with iSpirt, TiE and NASSCOM. He tweets at @amitsomani)

This article was originally published on Linkedin