Tasty Tuesday: Recipe Dilema

I've often wanted to post more recipes on here. I love to cook. L-O-V-E it. But I have a problem posting recipes on here for a reason: I rarely use recipes. Even when I do use recipes, I rarely follow them. I use recipes as helpful suggestions, rather than instructions. I don't even follow the directions on the box of mac and cheese... I usually "doctor" it up. :) For this reason, it is very difficult for me to reproduce my results or pass them along to others.

For example, I made Turkey Soup on Sunday. Here was my basic cooking process:

1. Realize I have guests coming for lunch tomorrow and that I should prepare something
2. Open the freezer
3. Dodge the avalanche of frozen food from my "booby trapped" freezer
4. Find a weird block of cooked, shredded meat I believe to be turkey
5. If there's turkey, may as well use some of the misshapen bags of turkey stock in the freezer
6. Place turkey and stock in the fridge knowing full well they won't thaw in time for lunch tomorrow
7. The next day, around 10AM I realize I should do something about the impending lunch
8. Pull out still very frozen turkey and stock
9. Melt a hunk of butter in a large dutch oven
10. Chop an onion and stir it into the butter
11. Add garlic. It's already minced in a jar and I don't measure it (just to be wild!)
12. Find week old bacon in the fridge, chop it and add it to the pot
13. While the onion, bacon and garlic are partying in the pot, I try to chop up frozen turkey hunks without cutting myself or damaging my knife
14. Pour the half thawed stock into the pot (watch out for splashes from the hunks of frozen stock falling in)
15. Scrape the turkey into the stock
16. Search for fresh vegetables and find celery. Chop 3 stalks and add to the pot.
17. There are no more fresh vegetables to be found, so I search the freezer and find corn cut from the cob and frozen last summer. Not bad, add it to the pot.
18. Consider adding frozen scallions, but decide I have enough oniony stuff already
19. Decide I have enough vegetables after all (because I don't think frozen broccoli will be a very good addition)
20. Dump in what looks like a reasonable amount of little alphabet pasta I got for Christmas
21. Add 2 bay leaves, Italian seasoning and (as an after thought) some salt
22. Realize the pasta is soaking up all the stock and go in search of some canned stock. Find chicken stock I keep on hand for just such a situation and add some to the pot. Then add more. Then add a little more. Finally, dump the rest in.
23. Make some *amazing* grilled cheese sandwiches and serve with the Turkey Suprise soup

And that's how I made lunch that day. Luckily, it wasn't a flop and ended up being a great way to use up some of the things I already had on hand. Plus, it was a fairly healthy recipe. If you can call it a recipe. Wish I had pictures, but I was so busy not following a recipe I forgot to take some.

Do you follow recipes? What do you think of my Turkey Soup instructions? :) Linked up to Tasty Tuesday, Tempt My Tummy Tuesday, and Tuesdays at the Table.