I don’t particularly enjoy cooking, and would describe myself as a merely competent cook, but I make up new recipes on a fairly regular basis. Part of this is *because *I don’t like to cook: when I have X and Y ingredients, instead of looking for a recipe that would use them, I make one up. They’re not all winners, but I’ve come up with a few good dishes over the years.
The latest:
twickster’s stuffed chicken breasts
6 skinless, boneless chicken breasts
1 can black beans, drained and rinsed
1 can diced tomatoes, drained (plain or with jalapenos, as you prefer)
8 oz. cheese, shredded (pepper jack, jack, cheddar, or a mix, as you prefer)
Flatten the chicken breasts.
Take a casserole or baking dish big enough to hold three pieces of chicken flat, (I used an 11x7 Pyrex baking dish). Place each piece of chicken in the dish, throw on a handful (or spoonful, if you’re squeamish) of beans, and a handful (spoonful) of cheese, and fold the breast in half. Don’t worry about trying to keep the innards in.
If you’ve got extra beans left over when you’ve filled all six breasts, sprinkle them over the chicken. Spread the diced tomatoes across the top of the chicken. If there’s extra cheese left (or if you want a supercheesy version, you could shred some more), sprinkle it on top of the tomatoes.
Bake at 350 for an hour.
Share recipes that you’ve made up! (Preferably the successful ones. )
Hey! That sounds great! I’m keeping that one in mind.
I do make up recipes, mostly when I either don’t have the ingredients on hand or if I really like a recipe except for one or two things. Tonight is a good example - work was busy, I didn’t have much on hand for dinner, and at the last minute a friend stopped over. Must create something for dinner. I had leftover pizza dough in the fridge, but not many fixings. Dug out some marinara from the freezer, diced some red bell peppers, carmelized some onions, threw it all on the dough along with some pepperoni, sun dried tomatoes, and feta. Turned out better than if I had gone to the store to buy stuff for it. Yum!
A more formal recipe that I made up was a variation on potatoes au gratin. I loooove potatoes au gratin, but I mostly try not to eat things based completely on white carbs and fat. So I have a variation I made on them where in addition to potatoes, I add celeriac, parsnips, and ham, and layer the baking dish with spinach sauteed in olive oil and garlic. It’s amazingly good - better than simple potatoes au gratin - and much healthier as well.
I don’t really make up recipes but I did make an outstanding soup out of left over Chili Verde and white beans. Here’s what I did:
1/2 bag of White/Navy Beans, rinsed and sorted.
Baby carrots (as many as you want, my SO doesn’t eat any veggies but carrots, corn and green beans so I used lots)
1/2 onion, chopped
2-3 cloves of garlic, minced
5-6 strips center cut bacon
2 cups leftover pork chile verde (homemade and another recipe I made on the fly, so I will share that one too :)!)
7-8 cups chicken stock (low sodium is best)
Cook the bacon in the bottom of a dutch oven until crispy. Remove the bacon (set aside for later) and then saute the onions in the bacon grease. When onions are translucent, add the garlic and cook briefly (don’t burn the garlic!).
Add the chicken broth to the onion/garlic mixture, then add the beans and simmer for two hours or until the beans are tender. Add chili verde mixture and simmer for another 15-20 minutes. Right before serving,crumble up the bacon and serve with cornbread and sour cream topping if you wish. I advise salting only after you stir in the bacon, just to avoid over-saltiness. Use extra pepper, cumin, oregano, cilantro or whatever to your taste.
For the Chile Verde- not really an original recipe but it’s a very forgiving type of thing so I just wing it:
I cut a pork loin (2-3 lbs) in to 1 inch cubes and sauted with fresh jalapenos from my friend’s garden along with some garlic (3 or so cloves) Use as many jalapenos as you want, I usually go with 4-5. She also gave us anaheim peppers, so I roasted about 6 on my cast iron skillet and then peeled those babies and chopped them up. Throw into a crockpot with about a tablespoon of cumin, two cans of crushed tomatillos, a tablespoon of dried oregano, salt and pepper to taste and then cook on low for 8-10 hours. I serve these wrapped almost burrito style with pepper jack cheese inside and the sauce is very sauc-y, so there’s usually plenty to throw on top with more cheese.
Both of these recipes made my SO go nuts and he’s very picky in general.
I had pork chops and I was tired of apple-based sauces so I poked around a little and came up with:
Cranberry Marmalade Pork Chops
You will need:
Some pork chops
Fresh cranberries
Orange marmalade
Ground cloves
I seasoned some chops with salt and pepper and then browned them in a pan with a little butter. Then I moved them to a glass baking dish. I mixed up the cranberries and marmalade in a bowl - I didn’t measure anything, I just put as much as I thought I’d need to put a blob of mixture on each chop. It was more cranberry than marmalade, though. The marmalade was mostly to hold the cranberries together. I mixed in a pinch of cloves - not too much because I didn’t want that to be the overwhelming flavor.
After spooning a blob of this mixture onto each chop, I baked them in the oven at 325 for about 15-20 minutes (check the temp with a thermometer to know if they’re done).
And they were SO good.
I plan on trying this with big fat pork chops, and using this as a stuffing instead of a topping.
I do make up recipes sometimes, but more often I’ll be trying to make a real recipe and start going “hm, no lemons in the house, guess I’ll see if an orange works…” and end up tweaking and substituting things so much it’s a whole new thing that barely resembles the originally intended product. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.
I often come up with recipes trying to copy ones I like from restaurants. Here’s my husband’s favorite:
Yellow chicken
4 chicken breasts
1 onion, sliced
4 cloves garlic, sliced or minced
1 inch ginger, minced
1 bundle of bean thread noodles (if you can’t find 'em, use rice sticks)
1 can coconut milk
1 bunch green onions, cut into 1-inch lengths
1 handful cilantro (optional)
Any other veggies you want (I often use red bell peppers and broccoli)
about 1/2 to 1 cup chicken stock
soy sauce
brown sugar (about 1 tbsp)
1 1/2 tbsp curry powder
salt
pepper
Cut up chicken into 1-inch chunks and brown in a wok or pot (I use a dutch oven because my wok’s non-stick lining started coming off; I need a real wok that’s not non-stick). Set aside. Cook the noodles in a separate pot according to directions. If using bean threads, after cooking, when you drain them, it’s a good idea to run cold water over the noodles, then cut them up in smaller pieces - they’re very, very long.
Heat up some oil and sizzle the garlic and ginger for about 30 seconds, then toss in the onion and fry 6 minutes or so. Put in the other veggies (if you use bell pepper, put it in with the onion) and the chicken, then put in the chicken stock and coconut milk. Mix in the curry powder and brown sugar, put in about 2-3 tbsp of soy sauce and grind in some pepper. Cover the pot and simmer for 10 minutes, then salt or use soy sauce to taste.
When you’re satisfied with the taste, toss in the green onions and cilantro.
You can also add a handful of peanuts to this dish toward the end of the simmer time - it’s really tasty that way.
I tend to take recipes and tweak them. Sometimes I change whole elements in it but for the better of course.
I recently concocted a vegetable soup that I got from a website. I tweaked it with some spices and meat (it’s just as good without the meat) and it came out tasting very much like an Indian dish. Each time I’ve made it I’ve been given rave reviews.
I make up recipes, but I’m never sure of the proportions of ingredients. I search the internet for something similar to what I have in mind (and there always is) and I adapt theirs to my idea, or vice versa.
I tend to cook from the ingredients I have, instead of picking a recipe and then buying ingredients. Most of the time it tends to work out, but I get nervous cooking for a crowd.
Recently I made butternut squash and chickpea curry. I chopped and onion and cooked it in oil until it turned translucent. Then I dumped in a butternut squash, chopped into pieces about a half inch square. Right after that, a can of coconut milk, a cup of water, and a few teaspoons of red curry paste. I simmered until the squash was cooked and then added a can of chickpeas. Served topped with crushed peanuts.
I think it would work with any combo of veggies and protein (see overlyverbose’s curry recipe), but the squash made it extra warm and filling.
I have a number of set and relatively consistent recipes in my head, but a good portion of the time it’s a trip to the store to see what looks good and what I have a taste for (I shop almost every day for dinner–it helps that I have a supermarket one block from my house.) So, most of my cooking is riffing on whatever catches my eye (or what’s on sale) at the supermarket.
Hee! I think I need to come up with a more esoteric name for the recipe than Yellow Chicken. I wish I could remember the name associated with it from the Vietnamese restaurant I got the idea from.
1 bag of spinach (about 12 ounces of fresh spinach)
about 1 1/2 cups of tomato, cut into large chunks
about 3/4 cups of red onion, in strips
1 package of feta cheese (about 6 oz or so)
about 1 1/2 cup of extra virgin olive oil
about 1/2 cup of balsamic vinegar
2 or 3 pepperoncinis
1 clove garlic
1 box of linguine (1 lb)
Start water boiling for linguine. Put 1 cup of olive oil into saute pan along with oil and chopped garlic clove and sliced pepperoncinis. Sautee over medium heat for a little bit until onions are slightly softened. Once water comes to boil, add linguine and cook al dente. When onions are soft-ish, add tomatoes and balsamic vinegar. Saute for a while until liquid from the tomatoes and the vinegar reduces a little. Add the spinach just before serving and toss for a very short while until spinach is softened a little, but not mushy. Add last 1/2 cup of oil and feta. Toss immediately with pasta and serve.
Goes well with fish or chicken, prepared as you like.
For me, the start of learning to cook was when my late sister gave me a copy of James Barber’s ‘Fear of Frying’ and ‘Ginger Tea Makes Friends’. It was in my university days, and I think she was worried about my tendency to live off bread, cheese and scrambled eggs for days on end. Anyway, one of the biggest things that rubbed off from his style of cooking was his whole attitude about ingredients. Many of his recipes derived from situations where he had to cook with what was at hand, stemming back to his days in the army - ‘Chicken Calvados’ was invented in his days in Normandy when the army provided crates of canned chicken. Cooking it with apples and Calvados, an apple-based liqueur readily available from the locals (“I could never tell if that meant they were for us or agin us!”) rendered it delicious. Cooking it with real chicken was a great treat. Actually, that website is full of anecdotes from friends and fans, as well as a collection of his recipes.
So, like him, I will often improvise recipes based on what is at hand. Sometimes it’s a flop, sometimes it’s worth improving and sometimes it’s right on the money.
Penne Victoria.
Onions, mushrooms, grilled italian sausage and asparagus. Sauté until al dente, add chèvre cheese. Serve on penne, or what ever other pasta you have.
Asparagus rolls.
Set the chèvre out a couple of hours before hand, so it’s soft. Take some fairly thick sliced prosciutto; bacon or deli hame if you don’t have prosciutto. ‘Butter’ one side of the prosciutto with the chèvre. Take two fresh pieces of asparagus so that the heads are at opposite ends and sticking out from the stalks. Roll the asparagus at a 45 degree angle to the prosciutto so that the asparagus is completely wrapped. Grill or broil on high for about 7 minutes, until the prosciutto is crispy. Slice into 1" pieces so they look like sushi maki. Serve as hors d’œuvres.
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