Cooking outside the lines

When I'm in the kitchen I tend to follow a certain paradigm, and I'm not sure if I am part of a small minority or if everyone does the same thing. I usually check several recipes for a given dish and then, without writing anything down, I prepare to bake or roast or saute using whichever of the necessary ingredients I might have on hand and substituting for whatever I don't. And I don't measure anything.

Now some refer to my methods as "half-assed," while I'd like to suggest "adaptive" as a better term. There have certainly been occasions where my attempts have floundered and ended up nothing like what I was hoping to make, but more often than not, the entree or breakfast or dessert comes out just fine -- even providing a new twist on something. Isn't that how the art of cooking moves forward?

For example, for the past couple of years I have made pancakes with various substitutions, most notably prefering apple cider as the primary liquid ingredient instead of milk or buttermilk (which generally don't agree with me). The result has usual been excellent pancakes, despite my never reading or hearing of any fruit juice being used in such a recipe.

Until last week, when the Globe had one for orange cloud pancakes. I bought orange-pineapple juice (instead of straight OJ, and I used much more than in the recipe -- of course, because I wasn't looking at the recipe at all). I didn't have cottage cheese, so I skipped that all together. The pancakes came out great. Bon apetito.