Well, I’m about 2 weeks beyond the need to go grocery shopping so I am scraping the bottom of the culinary barrel.
Looking foor something creative I decided to try making a grilled PB&J. It didn’t pan out too well. I overlooked the fact that both the PB and J will become quite fluid when heated up. Also its hard to butter one side of bread and PB&J the others. It tasted OK, but i ended up basically swabbing up the PB&J sauce from the plate with the grilled bread pieces.
Anyone else try something lacking culinary foresight in the past?
Well, when I was living in the residential detention center, they once made macaroni and cheese from scratch, but didn’t add milk. The result was sort of ok right at the beginning, but then it started “setting up” like plaster or concrete.
We actually made a lot of jokes for the next several weeks about using it to mortar bricks together or to pour a slab, etc.
I once followed a dreadful, Lileksesque recipe that involved rolling mashed potatoes in breading. Mashed potatoes do not stick to anything but themselves, nor allow anything else to adhere. Breading can be mixed in, but not applied topically.
I don’t cook very often and when I do cook I don’t use a recipe. I use the “that sounds good” method. Sometimes it comes out wonderfully, like my baked spaghetti. Other times, though, my mind thinks things like “Hmmm, these potato slices frying in the cast iron skillet need something. How about cinnamon? Cinnamon tastes great on anything and smells wonderful, too!”.
Gad, I’ve created quite a few culinary lindmines in my day.
For instance, once I tried making my Grandma’s recipe for Perrogies (a cheese and potato mixture cooked in a pasta shell), but when I mixed up the pasta wrappers I unknowingly used self-rising flour instead of regular, so when I started boiling the perrogies they started puffing… and puffing… and puffing up, until the my whole cook pot was a mass of huge, bloated puff-balls.
Another time I was really hard-up for cash and my cupboard was miserably bare. Luckily I have a photographer friend who does product shots for advertisments and will sometimes drop off entire boxes of things like potato chips and soup packets. This time she dropped off an entire box of…
“Pokari Dried Cuttlefish snacks?”
“I undersand they’re very popular in Japan!”.
So for two weeks I lived on Progresso powdered soup, Cuttlefish jerky, and crackers swiped from a local salad bar. Then one day I have a brainstorm: why not combine them? So I unwrapped a few cuttlefish fillets and left them to soak while I went to work.
I cannot properly describe the unique smell that greeted me when I got home.
You might give this another try. A friend of ours who was a wonderful cook would fry wedges of red potato and then give them a very light dusting of cinnamon and salt. The trick is not using too much cinnamon. You just want a faint whiff of it. These go really well with roast chicken or pork chops.
Got another, although it wasn’t exactly an experiment, but just a horrible mistake.
So, I got a decent Chili & Bean recipe, and had altered just enough to make for an excellent football season treat. I was still living with my parents at the time, and I’d offered to whip it up for Sunday Football. Since its a Crock Pot recipe, I needed to get it started at about 6AM for halftime of the Bears game at about 2PM. Of course there is absolutely no way in hell I’m waking up at 6AM or staying in one a Saturday night, I just resigned myself to making it when I got home from the bars at about 5:30AM. This idea seemed to work out nicely, I had all the ingredients laid out the previous evening, and all I had to do was toss them all into the pot and stir together. Now, keep in mind that I’m pretty well along the tail end of a serious drunk - you know that wasted, but stayed up a few hours after you typically should have passed out and have started to sober just a little feeling? So the house is filled with this odd smell around 11AM when things really got to cooking together well. WE note that the chili smells a bit different this time, curious I give it a taste…lets just say I kept it down. My mom noticed a full shaker of chili powder, asking if I forgot to add it. Certain that I did add it, I shake my head, but wonder where this extra shaker magically appeared from. Suddenly I franticly dig through the garbage to find the empty shaker I had used…I turn it over to read “Nutmeg”.