Sometimes after a long day at work, the thought of facing down the early-evening crowd at the grocery store is just too much, so you decide to forage at home, and throw together what you can based on leftovers, bits and scraps, and pantry items.
Last night, I managed to whip up a very nice dinner of brown rice and black beans with random stuff found in my refridgerator and pantry. Rice and canned beans from the pantry, and onion and garlic, some carrots and celery from the fridge leftover from a previous meal, and some oregano and parsely from the freezer from the herbs I froze last fall. Very tasty, but not particularly original. However, it also got me to thinking of my greatest improvizational culinary triumph:
Teriyaki Scrambled Eggs, Yum Style
What I had leftover from stir fry last week:
1/2 of a Chinese cabbage
2 scallions (somewhat limp)
1/2 package of mushrooms
What I had laying around the house:
2 eggs
Ebara Ginger Teriaki sauce (highly recommended!)
What I did with it:
Chop scallions (including the green parts) and saute in sesame oil. Add mushrooms. Throw in some teriyaki sauce for the heck of it. While they cook, chop cabbage. Scramble eggs, adding a generous amount of teriyaki sauce. Throw eggs into scallion-mushroom mixture and stir vigorously. When eggs are fully cooked, removed from heat. Add chopped cabbage and toss briskly to coat in oily teriyaki juice. Serve.
Years ago a friend of the family turned us on to “plate tacos.” You cook some Minute Rice and heat up some canned chili. Spread the rice on a plate and sprinkle Fritos corn chips on top. Then pour the chili over that. Cover with grated cheese, chopped onions, lettuce, tomatoes, and whatever else floats your boat (salsa, guacamole, etc.). It’s a great ten-minute meal, and can be altered easily for vegetarians – just use veggie chili and leave off the cheese, if necessary. (I don’t know if corn chips violate vegetarian diets.)
Don’t get my Mom started on meals I’ve improvised. The woman thinks I can make food out of nothing. I have nightmares about unexpected company dropping by and her handing me a can of sardines and a coupla slices of stale bread- and a clay jar full of water.
Anyhoo, I’ve made some very nice potato soup out of instant mashed potatoes, milk, dried chopped onions and garlic powder, salt and pepper and maybe a little butter. Allso some very good potato patties.
Once I made rice balls out of some leftover brown rice (Mom won’t eat the white stuff, I barely tolerate it) Anyhoo, it was glutinous brown rice, which is easier to work with than long grain. I mooshed it together into balls, fried it in olive oil, sprinkled on a little sea-salt. Wasn’t so much a meal as a snack, but it was tasty and filled our tummies.
Nearing the end of a caravan holday and an inventory of the cupboards and fridge turned up:
four or five slices of white bread
a dozen small potatoes
some milk
three Laughing Cow™ cheese spread triangles
half an onion
two eggs
I parboiled and sliced the potatoes, hard boiled and quartered the eggs, sliced the onion.
Then I heated up some milk, melted the cheese triangles into it, added two slices of bread(crumbled up - I’d normally have used flour to thicken it, but being on holiday, we didn’t have any) and simmered it until it started to thicken - it made quite a nice creamy sauce.
I put layers of potato, onion, sauce, egg etc into a dish and baked it in the oven until it bubbled and went crispy on top.
We ate this with some fried mushrooms that we bought that day from the local farm shop. It was lovely.
My best ‘invented from scratch’ recipe is a cauliflower cheese variant; you cook the cauliflower head whole(being careful not to overcook), then you turn it over and carefully fill the inside (amongst the branches) with the cheese sauce, leave that a few minutes to set, then turn it back over and coat the top with cheese sauce and apply a thick layer of flavoured breadcrumbs (2 slices of bread, 1 red pepper, 2oz cheese, fresh herbs, pinch salt, whizzed up in the food processor) - bake it and the crumbs form a thick crunchy crust.
When a desperately poor student, me and about 9 other desperately poor friends - and one tent - hitch-hiked to the Gower Peninsula in Wales for the weekend. We pooled our money together, and found that between us we had less than £3… so we bought a cauliflower and some cans of plum tomatoes. On the beach we found an old pot, and a spoon that we suspected might have come from a heroin addict ‘cooking up’.
Nonetheless, we washed everything in the sea, then made a campfire, boiled the cauliflower in seawater, drained it and added the cans of tomatoes. We then passed the pot round and ate the cauliflower in tomato with the heroin spoon. It was delicious, and the memory of the food and the atmosphere of that weekend will remain with me forever.
My SO and I came home one evening, we were starving, and all the shops were closed. In my kitchen cupboard I found one small tin of tomato puree, one tin of sweetcorn, half a packet of rice noodles, some cumin seeds, q chicken stok cube and some tandoori spices. I heated up a small amount of vegetable oil, and fried the cumin seeds, added some tomato puree and tandoori spices, made some chicken stock up using the stock cube, added it to the tomato puree mix, tossed in the noodles to cook, and serve
Practically everything I cook is grab-whatever’s-around… but some tasty, easy recipes are: Fried Pasta
Grab your container of leftover pasta- spaghetti’s best- and heat some olive oil up in a frying pan. Chop and saute a couple cloves of garlic, and maybe green onion and cauliflower if you have it. Throw in the pasta and fry it until it turns into a noodle-y pancake. Flip it and fry on the other side. Serve with salt, hot pepper flakes, and parmesan. It’s wonderful.
I almost always have homemade cheese sauce around. It’s easy to improvise a meal with it. Cheese sauce straight with bread- fondue. Cheese sauce and cubed cooked chicken on rice. Cheese sauce thinned with some milk and broccoli- cheese and broccoli soup. Don’t ask about my cholesterol count.
Not really a meal - Once I was making bacon butties. I usually kill two birds with one stone and make some fried bread. This time, I didn’t feel like eating the fried bread on it’s own so I put it in the middle of the bacon butty. So it ended up the Big-Mac of Bacon Butties.
Top - White bread, as soft as humanly possible.
Next layer down - bacon
Middle - fried bread -
Next layer - bacon
Bottom - White bread.
Both white slices buttered of course.
I sometimes put salt and vinegar on too.
Simple, and deeply unhealthy. but might be a good idea. I certainly liked it.
