When our girls were little, bedtime stories were a must. A favorite was a funny story called Cat’s Cake, the tale of a catty (in a good way) chef who wants to bake a treat for his friends. When he runs to the store for a missing ingredient, his pals each decide they know what would make the cake even better. The rabbit tosses in a few carrots, the monkey slips in some bananas, the lion adds meat to the mix, and so on. When Cat unwittingly bakes the altered recipe the result is, of course, awful. That story came to mind recently when I tried a new recipe and opened it up to suggestions.

Our church hosts community turkey suppers every few months. These suppers are well received and typically packed, but recently a church friend mentioned that she and a few others at church don’t attend because there is no vegetarian option. On my first shot at chairing this event, I decided we’d try a different route and offer a vegetarian dish. This past weekend I brought in a large pan of vegetable lasagna prepared in my own kitchen. Spouse helped me peel and chop zucchini, eggplant, onion and peppers while I waited for the water to boil for lasagna. By the time it was all put together with sauce and cheese, I thought it tasted pretty good – but this dish still had to pass inspection.

After services on Sunday, I invited folks to give it a try and let me know if they had any suggestions. For the most part the lasagna was a hit and people were kind with their comments, but they had no idea that most of their suggestions went something like this.

It’s really good, but…

You might want to add a little more sauce.

It was just enough sauce.

Have you thought about adding spinach?

The vegetables you used gave it just the right pop of flavor.

You could probably add a little more cheese.

I liked that it wasn’t loaded down with cheese.

It’s perfect.

As I was leaving with leftovers at the end of our coffee hour and fellowship, a friend asked if I would be taking everyone’s feedback into consideration. I smiled and told her if that was the case, I’d be undoing half of what I did.

The same holds true for recipes you find on the internet. Sometimes I get so distracted by the comments that I forget to save the recipe. It’s not unusual to see a whole revamping of the original recipe – for instance:

“My family and I loved this recipe. I used gruyere cheese instead of cheddar, and I didn’t have cayenne so I included a dash of chili flakes. Also, I grilled some asparagus and threw it in, you know, just because I like asparagus. Oh, and I used tofu as a filler because I don’t eat chicken… but this is a perfect recipe.”

When you’re talking about feeding patrons of a church dinner, you want to make sure you please as many palates as possible, so I was wide open to any suggestions and very happy that people gave my first-time veggie lasagna a try. If I had put this recipe on a website, believing everyone would love it just the way I made it, I would probably be less open to other suggested renditions of the original. That’s the interesting part of being anonymous online – you can get away with critiquing the heck out of just about anything. Imagine if you were visiting family, and your mom or your grandmother or Aunt Dee made their special dish, and you burst out with, “This is delicious. I would probably add a little more cheese on top and maybe add some red pepper for color and texture, but it’s good like this also.” Really? Can you say “disowned”?

I’ll probably do one more test run before our turkey supper in April and see what the results are from another taste testing survey. Not every suggestion would work, but hey, a little spinach can’t hurt… until someone says they hate spinach.