Loosely Creative

Do you diligently follow recipes? I always faithfully follow a recipe the first time round. To me, it is like having someone else's cooking, it is polite to taste it first to determine if it's really neceesay to reach for the salt shaker. Not everyone has the same taste, obviously. I see a lot of people give their 2 cents on bettering recipes in the comment sections.

I haven't used a recipe in a long while, mainly because I am too lazy. Nowadays, I don't usually plan and shop ahead any more. The kitchen in this tiny apartment has little room for storage, or even elbows during cooking or cleaning up. Besides, there are always things in the fridge and pantry (if it can qualify as such) that should be used up while fresh, but together they don't often never neatly map on to any specific recipe. Unfortunately, when I have to cook, there is usually no spare time for running to the shop.

But there is always an upshot to everything. Improvising led me out of my comfort zone of following recipes.

In Julia Child's The French Chef, episode Elegance with Eggs, she taught more than just fancy ways of cooking eggs - baked eggs and molded eggs. She also talked about how to serve food by combining various things you already know how to make, into a presentation of a new dish. She put cooked spinach mixed with white sauce on a sautéd round cut piece of bread, added a molded egg on top, spooned sauce over it and sprinkled with chopped parsley. And, voila! A brand new dish morphed from the hackneyed Eggs Florentine. She went on to suggest a few more ideas with other dishes to inspire the audience to be creative. So, I feel thoroughly encouraged to make dishes up, even if it is strange.

Use of Juicy Water from Canned Beet

The other day I wondered what to do with the juicy water left from a can of beet - that is, rather than drinking it. I looked for ideas on the Internet but most suggestions were to mix drinks or use it as replacement ingredient for its color. So, I kept thinking...

Then, it came to me, if you can mix 2 teaspoonful of tomato paste into a coconut cream curry, why not beet juice? Crazy experiment ensued. Crimson splatter on the walls, orange hued yellow dust circles overlapping various deep brown ones, grayish white smeary drag tracks across counter top and around the hobs... It could have been an incident that triggers a who-done-it investigation. Nah, I am not that messy a cook, really. Really!

The result was a really nice balance of acidity and sweetness with a piquant accent, yet delicate. It has been nice served with chicken, but I can image that it would be perfect accompaniment to crustaceans. If you would like to try this experiment, may I suggest you first try one measure of beet juice to two measures of coconut cream. Play around, and I am sure you will come up with the ratio that is right for you. Naturally, you will want to take into account of any liquid stock you normally use in your recipe, and substitute with stock powder, instead.

Tips:

A good natural coconut cream or milk, without whitening agent, is often slightly grayish.
There is a really good guide to different coconut milk and cream products and even how they are actually made, on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HXzELWHyOAg

Balancing Act

As Julia Child advised multiple times on adding nutmeg to white sauce, add just a few specks but not so much that people can say, "Oh, nutmeg!" (Yes, I have watched quite a few videos of her old cooking shows and learned so much from her.) It seemed crazy but there does actually exist a zone where a quantity of an integral peripheral ingredient is just right, virtually undetectable by the palate, yet without which the quality of the dish would be impaired or incomplete. It's real. It's no twilight zone.

A long while back, before I watched any Julia Child videos, I tried following a recipe to make the South African stew Tomato Bredie. The recipe called for a dash of Worcestershire sauce. I was curious and tasted the stew before adding it, just so I could tell if it made any difference afterwards. And, boy, did it transform the dish! It as a very simple recipe, but it was the best, most elegant tasting of all the ones I tried. Other recipes called for tablespoonfuls of Worcestershire sauce, and while the results of such heavy-handed flavoring were tasty, the periphery upstaged a central ingredient, so much so that nomenclature for those ones would dictate a correction to Worcestershire Sauce Bredie. Also, I think, sometimes subtlety is an enormous factor in elegance.

There are many examples of dishes utilizing the delicate touch of something extra. Some of them are quite surprisingly contrasting too, such as salt in a dessert dish (e.g. custard pie, sponge cake), lemon/vinegar/tomato puree in a creamy dish (e.g. Hong Kong style Portuguese Chicken has 2 teaspoons of tomato paste in its primarily coconut cream base), or sugar in savory dish (e.g. brown sugar in meatloaf, rock sugar in dishes with five spice).

I guess, at the end of the day cooking a tasty dish requires balancing flavors. Lively, prominent contrasts can be a win too. Famous examples are Hawaiian ham, chicken with cranberry and camembert pizza, and sweet and sour pork, just to name a few. Perhaps, not everyone like the combination of pineapple and ham, but plenty of roast meat dishes pair sweetness and sourness of fruit or otherwise and the saltiness of meat. You can find lamb roasts recipes by the dozen that use apricot or balsamic vinegar. My husband cannot get his head around bacon and banana served together with maple syrup on French toast. I love it. Whoever came up with the idea probably well understood about balancing contrasting flavors and definitely daring in his/her pursuit in creating good food.

Let us all too boldly go where no one has gone before ... or least not often ... in creating exciting new flavors.