I do it all the time and will come into this forum if I run into any problems to ask questions of those who actually know what they are doing. Since I’m home from work today and all by my lonesome, I decided to experiment again.
But this thread isn’t about this particular experiment. Hopefully it’ll be about your experiments. Please tell me what you whipped up. Did it turn out the way you expected? Was it good? Did it fail? If it was good, tell us what you did so I can copy you.
P.S. I don’t know if this experiment will be good or bad because I’m in the middle of it. I guess we’ll see.
I made pillow (aka dropped) dumplings in the microwave because I didn’t have broth. I only had leftover crockpot chicken. I used what little stock jelled around the leftovers, and didn’t have enough for anythign else. I had planned on using canned chicken broth, but I couldn’t find it.
So, when it came time to squirt the dumplings out of the plastic bag, I had nowhere to put them. I felt bad that I had just wasted so much stuff, but then I remembered Alton Brown saying that microwaving cooked similarly to steaming. I squirted out everything in a bowl, warmed it up for 2:30 total, checking every 30 seconds, and got the firm texture of dumplings in a large mass. I chopped it up, added it to the chicken, and it was divine.
The recipe itself is modified from Good Eats. I thought I’d messed up and added a little water, so reduced the eggs to 1, and I mistakingly mixed everything over low heat.
I have a little plot of rhubarb. I like rhubarb. I usually just stew it or make a pie, but I experiment a bit. Typically rhubarb experimentation = fail, although I still eat it.
I always tinker. Never met a recipe I couldn’t change on the fly (which is why I am a terrible… TERRIBLE baker! Oh well…)
For you other mad scientists, let me recommend you take a look at the Flavor Bible. I LOVE IT. You just flip to the ingredient like… oh I dunno… Rhubarb? What goes with rhubarb? Butter, caramel, almonds, brandy, blue cheese, chives, foie gras, ginger, grand marnier, oatmeal, peanut oil, raspberries, etc. Just the most fascinating book and it lets me whip up some unplanned masterpieces.
Dinner tonight is going to be a total experiment. My boyfriend wanted meatloaf. I’ve been trying to help us eat healthier so I used two carrots, an onion and a package of baby bella mushrooms all ground up together and mixed with the meat. I also didn’t realize we were out of eggs until too late so I used a package of instant mashed potatoes I had in the cabinet as a binder. I also made the meatloaf in the crock pot for the first time (using the foil-ball suggestion from another thread). It’s been in on low for about 1 hour 15 minutes and I have no idea how long to cook it…we’ll see how it turns out.
Pretty much everything I make that’s not directly out of a box is an experiment. I mix together whatever ingredients I’ve got on hand at the moment and come up with something, with generally (not surprisingly) mixed results. The biggest problem with this approach is that if something turns out great, I can never make it again because I’ll never remember what I did.
I do make a good spicy eggplant and tomato pasta sauce with (mostly) consistent results, after my GF really liked it and forced me to write down what I did.
I play around all the time with whatever ingredients are available to me, but my favorite experiment–one that I would put on a permanent menu as a signature dish if I ever was crazy enough to own an establishment that served food–was chicken (or veal) paprikash pierogi. Basically, you start with a standard paprikash recipe. This is my recipe.. I spent over five years in Hungary and I’m pretty picky about what I consider a paprikash to be.
After you cook that up, you de-skin and shred the chicken and mix it up in a bowl with a bit of the paprikash gravy to give it moisture. Make a pierogi dough, stuff it with this mixture, and boil them up. Serve with a generous portion of paprikash gravy spooned across. If you want to be fancy, you can fill one ketchup/condiment bottle with the gravy, and another with sour cream and make nice little red and white stripes across the plate.
Tonight was experimental. Very large portobello mushrooms stuffed with a mixture of canned dressed crab, tonnato, chilies, spring onions, garlic and shallot, topped with breadcrumbs and smoked cheese. Served on a bagel with baby watercress. Worked out nice.
That’s unripe mango, halved clementines and clementine peel without the pith boiled in a half a cup of water and 3/4 cup sugar. Under that is ricotta, powdered sugar, clementine zest and some vanilla all whipped together.
Who am I kidding? There’s no such thing as too much powdered sugar. The down side of the experiment is that I made enough dough for about two dozen cookies but since I had to double them, there are only 10 cookies for 4 people.
For the office xmas party (almost six months ago now) I offered to bake a chocolate cake. Well… in the cupboard I have a box of cocoa puffs and I thought they would make cool crunchy nuggets in my cake. Didn’t happen. Somehow during the baking process they floated to the top of the batter and got soggy on the way there. Conclusion: Don’t put cocoa puffs in the chocolate cake.
I’m still searching for the formula for butterscotch flavor, but discovered a few years ago that by mixing artificial butter flavor, artificial rum flavor, confectioner’s sugar, butter and just enough milk to dissolve the sugar, I can make a fudge-like confection that tastes like butter-rum lifesavers.
My meatloaf looked fine but when I tried to lift it out it comepletely disintegrated. It ended up looking like taco meat. But it tasted very good so instead of serving it with mashed potatoes I served it over them. It was very good.
The best part was that the kids ate it happily and loved it. Had they known there were carrots and mushrooms in there at least one of them would not have touched it.
I made caramels by boiling down apple juice to the hard ball stage, then adding butter.
I created a pasta dish by chopping a potful of onions and baking them (uncovered) until they had reduced and browned, then adding chopped ham and Dijon mustard and tossing the whole mess with some penne.
I sort of misread the title,and came in to say I am NOT an experimenter, at all. I love trying new recipes, and cooking, but I rarely if ever just make things up. I guess the “do not waste food” thing ingrained in me from my Depression-Era-raised mother is just too strong to overcome, and I’m not well-off enough to be able to just throw food away if it comes out horrible. So I’m chicken to try things that aren’t a tested recipe. And I don’t substitute ingredients very often either, after reading all those admonitions about people who complain to cookbook authors that the recipe didn’t work, and then it turns out that they substituted nearly everything!
Boring, I know. Maybe in my 60’s I’ll get bold and carefree!
One time I had a package of ground chicken, a bag of rice, a bag of frozen green beans, and lots of Asian-type condiments, and I whipped up the best spicy ground chicken-and-green-beans-over rice we ever had. I was asked for the recipe, and I was embarrassed to say there was none, it was a little of this, a pinch of that, some garlic, some sherry, some of that stuff in the short jar, some of that stuff in a tube…it remains the Great Lost Recipe. Speaking of paprikash, I bought a packet of, I guess, paprikash gravy in the import store (hard to tell as directions are printed in 5 languages but there was a sticker over the English directions!) . But I am no moron and figured it out all by myself, hooray for me. I’d like to make it again using a lot more ingredients than just meat.
I fry things. It’s amazing what you can do in a frying pan.
My two principle creations are:
The all-purpose stir-fry. Usually consists of at least some of the following ingredients: garlic, onions, mushrooms, peppers, tofu/rice/pasta, white wine, oil/butter, maybe tamari sauce, chopped nuts, random bullion cubes, and spices (oregano, thyme, salt, pepper, dill, zatar, whatevermix).
Fried bagels. Heat one pan of oil/butter and misc spices (see above). Put in the bagel. Periodically flip the bagel over so both sides get cooked.
I also sometimes play around with pasta wine sauces. Again, I usually use the spices and liquids above (and frozen cubes of cruched garlic count as a spice). Plus sometimes tomato sauce for balance.