Vague cooking

[Ian H]

Anyone else find that the meal they're preparing changes direction? The other day I started preparation for an omelette and ended with a stir-fry.

[Elleigh]

My grandfather used to make a cake batter and whilst putting it in the oven, he would claim that if the mixture rose, it was a cake and if it didn't it was a pudding.

[Mrs Pingu]

Only if I start making something only to find out half way through that an important ingredient (such as rice for special fried rice!) is missing....

[tiermat]

I usually start with a fixed idea as I am going to the shops then change direction completely when I find I can't get what I want.  Last night was a case in point, I knew were having fish and I had thought that a nice piece of Barramundi with garlic, ginger and coriander would hit the spot nicely.

We ended up having sea bass cooked in cider and herb sauce!

[clarion]

I get everything out the fridge, start chopping vegetables, and see what I end up with*





* actually, these days, Butterfly gets home before I do, so there's often something on when i get in

[goatpebble]

The title of this thread made me think of other ideas, rather than Ian's thoughts about the changes of direction that happen when you get to the kitchen!

Some years ago I submitted a short piece to the Guardian, in response to an article about Elizabeth David. The writer in question had done a very thorough job of demolishing some of her simplest recipes. If I remember correctly, his argument was based on a failure with a dish of courgettes and tomato.

He argued that David was 'vague'. Interestingly, several years later, Chris Patten wrote a similar article, and worried endlessly about cooking the said tomatoes.

My response was a short discourse on the nature of food writing, the intelligent audience that David would have hoped for, and the skills and instincts demanded by good home cooking. At not too much length, I tried to discuss David as she stood for a contemporary reader.

I bloody wish I still had a copy. It took a lot of late night irate thoughts!!!

Edit: it's that word, 'vague'. It still makes me cringe and shudder! Is there someone on the staff of the Guardian who remembers stuffing my earnest response in a file, or a bin?

[fiendish]

I think I prefer the term random cooking, rather than vague.  My cooking isn't vague, it's quite definite, but the direction it's going to go is random; there's too many variables for it to be predictable.

[goatpebble]

I think I prefer the term random cooking, rather than vague.  My cooking isn't vague, it's quite definite, but the direction it's going to go is random; there's too many variables for it to be predictable.

I suggest that cooking might often depend on not only a simple failure to plan, but a changing mindset in the face of the reality of the resources available.

In this sense it is not really random, but merely a confrontation with the fact that reality presents us with real choices, rather than the fantasy.

This is why the cook is so fortunate. 'Variables' are the stuff of invention and surprise. You do stuff, and supper happens.

[clarion]

Creative cooking.

Elizabeth David isn't governed by the rigid discipline of the exact recipe.

She explains the nature of the combinations of food, and evokes a taste, a flavour, a whole ambience.

[Cudzoziemiec]

Son says "We haven't got spaghetti, so let's have tomatoes and cucumbers and pasta and rice."

I tell him pasta and rice together will not be good. He chooses rice.

I cook rice. We practice chopping tomatoes together. He practices peeling garlic. I decide to add turmeric to the rice. He eats dill which is lieing on top of the work surface (actually the top of the washing machine!) so I add that to the tomatoes. But it seems he prefers dill "raw". The same goes for basil leaves.

He says yellow rice is good. 

[Valiant]

I usually have no idea when I start, I sorta improvise. Most of the time I works out brilliantly.