The Andy Scale

When it comes to food, there’s really only one person I’m trying to impress. Yes, it’s great if my friends and coworkers like what comes out of my kitchen, but really, it all comes down to what Andy thinks. He is, after all, my number one fan and the man who puts away the dishes after I use every single bowl, measuring cup and spatula in an afternoon. Plus he’s the financial backer of the grocery budget. 😉

To keep track of which recipes are good enough to repeat (and which ones should never, ever see the light of day), we instituted the “Andy scale.” We rate dishes on a 1-5 scale, with 1 being the lowest and 5 being the highest. Typically, a dish has to score higher than a three to make it into the rotation.

In my mind, here’s how the scores break down:

1. What a waste of ingredients. Do we have to eat the leftovers? (Thankfully, we both can only remember a couple dishes that fall into this category!)
2. No one wants to take these leftovers to work.
3. Not terrible, but not great. May have potential to move up on the scale with enough tweaking.
4. Good stuff. We’ll make this again.
5. Amazing. We’d fight over the leftovers, but there probably won’t be any.

We’ve been rating dishes for several years now, and I’ve gotten a lot better at gauging how something will score just from looking at the recipe, which has helped reduce the number of low-ranking dishes. And while we try to stick to whole numbers, sometimes Andy will use decimals when the situation “needs” it. He recently rated this ice cream a 4.99999, just so he wouldn’t have to give it the same 5-star rating as his favorite, vanilla bean ice cream.

Ice cream is almost always a five for my taste-tester.