I am literally the worst experimenter ever. Oh, I’ll add more red pepper flakes than it calls for, or more garlic, but I’ll never totally make something up from scratch. I really admire people who do; I have tried and failed MISERABLY. Like, inedible misery. I’m quite a good cook if I follow a recipe or basic set of ideas eg I didn’t have precise stir-fry recipe, but I got the gist of it: pan, super hot, sesame oil, teriayki sauce, veggies, quick stir it around till hot, dump over rice.
You can make things from recipes?
Okay, snarky. I just tend to read the basics and then glaze over on the actual instructions, and um, not follow directions. friend sent me the recipe for very nice fritter things filled with ricotta and sour cream and vanilla. They looked too complicated, so I mixed the ricotta, sour cream, and some sugar and stuffed french toast with it (make sandwich with filling. Dip in egg and fry). I did totally kickass cheese and spinach enchiladas based very loosely on the Pioneer Woman’s- cheese, sour cream, spinach, cover with tomato sauce and more cheese, bake. This seems amenable to a variety of fillings.
I fried potato gnocchi a couple of days ago and put bolognese sauce over them. Seemed like it would be good. It was. To fry gnocchi you heat oil in a pan, dump in the gnocchi, and fry them on high for about six minutes, stirring occasionally. They’re like a cross between home fries and pierogies, except faster. They’d made a good substitute for the chips in egg and chips.
Oh, I tried your coffee cake - it was amazing.
It’s not that I believe cooking from a recipe is better - it’s just what I have to do to produce edible food.
put in bars, bread, breakfast oatmeal, soup, eat it raw.
Recently, I was pondering what I would put in a Ben & Jerry’s-type ice cream mixture. The answer seemed so obvious to me, I can’t be the first person to think of it: barbecue sauce. I don’t mean one of those ketchup-y or vinegar-y sauces. I’m thinking about the kind that are mostly a kind of syrup anyway.
I tried it with some vanilla ice cream and Sweet Baby Ray’s. It was tasty, but lacked something. Frankly, I think Sweet Baby Rays’ has lost something since it was first introduced – the sweetness is now more insipid somehow, and the spiciness not so sharp. But it’s still basically a spicy syrup, so I’m wondering what I could add to it to make a sharper contrast with the sweet of the vanilla, without actually undermining the syrupyness of the base sauce, because I’m not really looking to build a savory syrup from scratch.
I’m thinking that perhaps I can spike the stuff with that Chipotle Tabasco, but that would water the stuff down a bit. If you’ve actually read this far, maybe you have suggestions? It’s not an actual rule that I can’t start from scratch using honey or molasses or the like.
If you want to make a sweet and spicy ice cream, why not try mixing chile with mango? In Mexico they often put powdered chiles on pieces of mango. You could use mango nectar along with chunks of mango, and add some cayenne.
The one time I actually tried mango that wasn’t prepared in some kind of dish, it tasted like household cleanser. I don’t know if I just hadn’t let it ripen enough, or maybe too much. I have heard of chile mixed with cocoa. It doesn’t exactly sound terrible.
That’s odd. There’s a gazillion different kinds of mango, but the ones I’ve had have always been delicately sweet, with a melon-like flesh, kind of like a tropical peach citrus cantaloupe. I wonder if yours started fermenting or if you perhaps had papaya, which can be stinky and objectionable to some people.