Share your great moments in culinary improvisation

Cafe Society
1

You know the situation - you’re in the middle of cooking up a big meal and suddenly you burn something, or you’re missing a critical ingredient, or some such. And you spring into action and find a way around it, and once in awhile, it works.

The last few days i’ve been craving a sloppy joe, so when I did my shopping last night I bought everything i’d need to make a batch - hamburger meat, buns, Manwich sauce, onions and peppers for that extra zazz, etc. When I got home from work tonight, I threw some fries in the oven, chopped my veggies, and browned and drained my meat when I opened the kitchen cabinet and discovered that i’d forgotten to buy the Manwich sauce.

Disaster!*, I thought to myself. But wait, there’s still hope. I know how to make sloppy joe sauce from scratch, I don’t need Manwich. I’ll just grab that can of tomato sauce I keep around for emergencies and… oh, drat, I used that for lasagna last month. What now?

Then I remembered something i’d read about on Wikipedia years ago - loose-meat sandwiches, a Midwest entree esssentially defined as “sloppy joes without tomato”. I’ve never eaten one before (being some 2,000 miles away from the Midwest), but I had a pretty good idea of how to season the beef to make some. I went tearing through my spice cabinet and threw some salt, pepper, beef broth, Worcestershire sauce, vinegar, and mustard powder in with the drained meat and boiled it for 15 minutes until the liquid cooked off and the fries were done, and tossed it on a bun with some pickles and a schmeer of mustard.

End result? Pretty damn tasty. In fact, better than the sloppy joes would have been. I may have made it a little too spicy (my understanding of Midwestern food is that they’ve never even seen a pepper in those parts), but I like it enough that i’m going to have to write the recipe I used down and refine it for future use.

Anyone else got a similar tale of wrenching culinary triumph from the jaws of defeat?

2

I worked with another woman who said “that’s called making magic” in my family. I’d made something with no recipe; I just throwing spices in there and noodles. It was tasty. I couldn’t do it again at gunpoint.

And I live in Texas, so that’s an option. (I joke b/c I love.)

3

I’m constantly making hodge podge dishes because I’m too damn lazy to go to the store.

Every once in a while I’ll make something really awesome. But then when I try to reproduce that meal again, it never is the same.

I need to learn to start writing these things down.

4

The loose meats sounds good! On the Roseanne show, that was one of her specialties in the eps where she ran a diner. (She’d lost a tooth and joked to her boss, ‘it must be in here somewhere!’ while he was eating some loose meats.)

There’s a trick to making chopped bell peppers, hot peppers, onions, garlic, tomatoes, basil, and zucchini, sauteed in a little olive oil, can of diced tomatoes thrown in and simmered till its all just tender to put it over the top. From healthy-but-just-OK to not-bad-I’ll-have-some-more. That’s some parmesan and some grated mozzarella sprinkled on at the last minute.

5

You didn’t have ketchup around the house? That would’ve made a sloppy joe lickety split. But the loose meat sandwiches worked out, so cool.

I improvise all the time, but don’t really keep track of things. There was a homemade chicken sausage I made a few weeks ago that I really liked, but didn’t bother writing down the recipe for. It was basically a hot-link style thing with hot peppers, sage, salt, pepper, garlic, chicken fat, and some gelatin to help retain moisture.

6

Ketchup is the devil’s semen, my friend.

7

I thought that was Miracle Whip. Anyhow, ketchup is pretty much the base of sloppy joes, my friend. I’m not a huge ketchup fan, but I use it for a couple of things: sloppy joes and some types of barbecue sauce. You can make it from tomato sauce, and then add your sugar, vinegar, Worcestershire, etc., but, for me, that’s just a waste of time, and it doesn’t end up tasting like a real sloppy joe in the end, anyway. Manwich sauce is essentially just watery ketchup with some spices in it. But, at any rate, that would explain why you wouldn’t have ketchup around.

8

My sloppy joe recipe is something like 12 cups of tomato sauce, 3 cups of ketchup, 3 cups of brown sugar, and 3/4 cup of mustard. So, while there is some ketchup in it, it’s not the main ingredient.

While it wasn’t a great moment of culinary inspiration it was a good one and a timesaver last week when I realized that I didn’t have enough meatballs for a catered lunch of pasta and meatballs. I ended up making one pan of pasta and meatballs and one pan of pasta and italian sausage. I didn’t figure that my client would care and it saved me from having to make a hasty trip to the store.

9

Doesn’t involve meat, but my best moment of culinary improvisation involved some cannolis and a dinner party for 12 people.

For some reason, my cannoli filling just came out too runny. And to add to my problems, my shells kept breaking after I fried them.

So, I just went to the store, bought some pound cake, and sliced it up. I poured the good-tasting but improperly textured cannoli filling over the cake slices, and garnished them with whipped cream, chocolate chips, and bits of the broken cannoli shells.

People were actually asking me for the recipe :smiley:

10

I was on Maui, making a red wine steak sauce. I had most of the stuff I needed, but I was missing something, mushrooms I think. But the farmers’ market had some basil I couldn’t pass up. I added it to the recipe and it was AWESOME.

11

And then thrown under the broiler for 5 minutes to get the cheese all brown and crusty!

(I just made a similar dish last week, and mine included eggplant)

12

Other that the aforementioned veggie fry-up, I also had a good one on Sunday.

I had one of those pork roasts that is all trussed up with a net and wasn’t sure what I wanted to do with it, I came to the conclusion that I would stuff it. With what? Well, what do I have? A couple of apples, some crystallized ginger, onions, carrots, bacon, and fresh herbs from the garden. I chopped it all up, and gave it a quick saute just to meld the flavors and get the bacon bits a little crispy.

I took my biggest knife and pierced a big X through the roast and then jammed it full of my stuffing mix, the trussing helped hold it all together really well. Then, looking at that netting, I realized it would do a great job of holding some bacon slices in place on the outside of the roast, and it did!

Turned out pretty amazing. Not bad for having no idea what I was going to do with it earlier in the day!

13

Bolding mine.

I hate to break it to you but your recipe is essentially nothing but ketchup, just slightly grainier. Honestly, at that point, I probably wouldn’t bother with the 3 cups of ketchup.

14

I had three chicken half-breasts that I was going to simply pan-fry for me, the fiancee, and her kid. I figured I’d serve it all with rice and simple salads (lettuce, tomato, one of the dressings in the fridge). While I was moving raw chicken from the cutting board to the skillet, the kid bumped me and one of the flattened breasts got knocked off the plate. It fell on the kitchen floor and I immediately stepped on it while regaining my footing. I couldn’t have washed off the piece and applied the “Five Second Rule” even if I’d been so inclined.

So, one full breast of chicken for three people? And chicken needs more flavor than just olive PAM. What’s the first thing within reach?

Quick! Grill the breasts and toss in lemon-pepper before dicing it all up. Dice instead of slice the tomatoes, shred the lettuce instead of arranging leaves. Find some shredded cheese in the fridge and dig for some forgotten tortillas. Toast the tortillas, throw everything into separate bowls, pull the Ranch dressing out of the fridge to emphasize its utility, and say, “It’s make-yourself-a-chicken-fajita night!”

Every other week that summer, one of them would ask, “Can we have the chicken-ranch fajitas tonight?”

—G!

The kid never understood my answer, “I’m not allowed to get anything from the Chicken Ranch any more.” :smiley:
Her mother would have slapped me silly for such an answer. :eek:
Either way, I’d make the lemon-pepper chicken fajitas for them.

15

Making Chili con carne then finding no beans and no chili seasoning. So I used paprika onions tomato soup and corn.:smiley:

16

I’ll improvise with what’s on hand. One thing that turned out better than I thought was making a Florentine dish, finding out I had no spinach left, and using kale instead. I’ll make dashi, the base for miso soup, and use that for any kind of soup broth. I’ll switch up yogurt and sour cream in many dishes just to see what I get. When I make Indian dishes I’ll make my own curry mixes using whatever I have available. And in general I’ll throw Old Bay into anything to see what I get.

17

Next time, and if you have it, replace the beef broth with chicken gumbo soup. It’s yummy!