serendipity & improvisation

After an excellent 40 mile bike ride (half with Dave on the way back from his school) on a beautiful autumn afternoon, I arrived home close to dinner time with an empty stomach and a hungry and diligent professoressa waiting to see what would emerge from the kitchen for our evening meal.

In the fridge was a nice wild Coho salmon fillet. What to do with it, other than repeat an old standard marinade for oven planking?

The solution illustrates two of my favorite, and related, kitchen happenings—the serendipity of available ingredients, and improvisation under time pressure. Some of my best dishes have materialized when I had no preconceived plan in mind before setting foot in the kitchen. (Or maybe they just seemed that way because of the frenzied feeling at the start.)

With no idea in mind, I often just start pulling possible ingredients out of the fridge and array them on the counter, waiting for inspiration to strike. (Is this akin to what a jazz musician does in improv?) Sometimes, I quickly search the indexes of trusted cookbooks, looking for recipes that contain an ingredient in my field of view. Other times, I just start chopping an onion to stall for time. Occasionally I just get a favorite old cast iron skillet hot with some olive oil and garlic to stimulate things. Then I just start cooking (playing?) and see what happens.

Sometimes it works, sometimes not. At any rate, the process is fun and it forces you to loosen up and let/get the creativity flowing.

The serendipity of ingredients is also a useful constraint and harmonious with the fresh, local, and seasonal doctrine. (I just read somewhere that it was Alice Waters who first articulated this, at least in the American cooking consciousness.) Another strangely satisfying corollary to the available ingredients theorem is clearing out the leftovers. If you can liberate many plastic containers full of assorted avanzi, so much the better.

Tonight, upon surveying the avanzi candidates, I found a small bit of leftover salad (see the stupendous salad of last night), some roasted red peppers and their charred skins, and tomatillo salsa. I had just read a recipe for mole verde that had ground lettuce leaves in it, so into the food processor went the salad and other stuff. Onto the salmon and into the oven for a baked topping.

It was credible if not wonderful, and maybe even tasty, perhaps even more so for the speed of assembly and lack of planning.

Also topical on the subject of clearing out the fridge, was a wonderful recent article in the NY Times Magazine (or here if you can't access that) about the accumulation of ingredients and using them up, creatively, of necessity.

Comments

this could be a new version of "condensing"