Dinner without a Plan
Over winter break, dinner was much less about cooking exciting, wonderful meals and more about filling our bellies during this off-schedule time period. I chose to make my life easier while the girls were hanging around the house. It’s not that they are so difficult to have around the house. No, it’s simply that their sense of vacation inertia was contagious. On top of that, the long holiday weekend kept me from planning and shopping for fresh meals. And then there were the Christmas cookies and other sweets around the house. When you spend your days grabbing nibbles of holiday goodies, who really cares about fresh meals?
Therefore, when I found myself with ground beef but no other meat in the freezer I debated making meat loaf for dinner one night. I thought, this is probably how most people approach their meals, without the compulsive meal planning exercise I put myself through each week. I can do this. I can make my life more spontaneous and easier. I can toss together a meat loaf and some frozen vegetables and call it dinner without following a recipe. This will be a perfect dinner for my cookie-haze, inertia mood. And then I spoke with my mom who came up with a better idea. Make meatballs instead. I love meatballs even though mine are never as good as hers are. So dinner morphed into an easy Italian meal of fried meatballs accompanied by pasta and peas. Nothing fancy, but it did the job considering this was dinner without a plan.
This week I plan to return to planning my dinners because a) I don’t like standing in my kitchen scratching my head and feeling confused. It really wasn’t any easier for me to cook without a plan. And you just never know what will end up on the plate. Maybe nothing if I stand there and scratch my head long enough. And b) Inertia can become a very bad habit – a bad habit that doesn’t lead to something good to eat.
The Highs and Lows of Dinner
As I was preparing my shopping list earlier this week, I made a small blunder. I selected the recipe but forgot to list the ingredients I needed, so when it came time to cook it, I was out of luck. I could have called Joe to bring home a pizza, but that would have been cheating, you know? There was plenty of food in the freezer just waiting for a little creativity.
So I turned to my trusty computer and threw a few ingredients into search to see what I came up with. I wanted to use up some tater tots that were sitting around in the freezer, some fresh peppers in the produce drawer, and a bag of frozen shrimp. I really didn’t like the casserole dishes that popped up, but I did like this sophisticated, tasty recipe for shrimp with almonds and amaretto.
Turning back to the tater tots and peppers, I decided it was unnecessary to use a recipe for these ingredients. So I sauteed chopped onion in olive oil, added the chopped peppers until they softened, and mixed in a bunch of tater tots, seasoning with salt and pepper. I covered them and popped them in the baking oven to soften up. Once they were heated through and soft, I mashed them all together, for this very down home side dish that received more attention and yums than the shrimp.
Spontaneity can be a good thing.
Ignoble Sustenance
After my recent post about failed bacon, Mike wrote a comment saying that he’s had some kitchen failures too. I invited him to write a guest post telling us about his failure so that I didn’t feel quite so bad about mine. He graciously accepted the invitation, so today’s guest post comes to us courtesy of Mike. Thanks Mike!
In a response to one of my recent comments on this blog I was invited to write a post (I also find it interesting that I was invited to talk about one of my cooking failures.) I’ve accepted this invitation and here it is. This dish is forever referred to as the infamous “Meatball Casserole”. To this day it is the ever present nadir for critiquing all of my cooking efforts. It was and still is a superlative of ignoble sustenance that would raise charred, planked bacon to gourmet stature.
A few years ago my wife took ill but has since recovered. During that time I was responsible for feeding the family. Many years ago I worked as a fry cook but soon the family got tired of hamburger. When my wife was recuperating several friends would help by bringing over casseroles every so often. To me these casseroles looked easy to make and that gave me the opportunity to use this big box under my cook top. This blind ignorance was the innocuous first step of the impending disaster.
The second step towards the precipitous plunge was a flaw in my character. I am incapable of following step by step written directions and cast them aside when I see them; this includes recipes. I like practicing and applying techniques. This is probably why I have always shunned the oven as there is not much technique to putting food in a hot box, or so I thought.
On the fateful night I was pressed for time and figured I could throw some ingredients together in a few minutes, bake for an hour and have a casserole for dinner. I chose a casserole dish, the only right decision of the night, threw in uncooked egg noodles, frozen meatballs and covered it with tomato sauce from a jar. I can see the experienced cook cringe; I can hear the faint utterance of “you fool”. With more care than I had used to prepare the ingredients, I placed a piece of aluminum foil over the dish and positioned the casserole in the center of a cold oven. I pondered what temperature to use for the next hour. By my figuring, 450 degrees would bring the sauce to a boil, thawing the meatballs and cooking the pasta thereby blending all the flavors in a wonderful combination. What could go wrong?
Imagine a casserole with savory, succulent, silky smoothness. “Meatball Casserole” was totally devoid of that. Think of all the words you have read to describe the best of the best food you’ve ever eaten. Take the exact opposite of all those words and apply to my casserole. Contemplate the meaning of an oxymoron like soggy crunchiness, burnt under doneness, or an empty fullness. The only good thing I can say about the meal was I set the bar low for future successes.
Since that catastrophic debacle I’ve learned that good casseroles are cooked slowly with care and casseroles need a binding ingredient or two. If someone is on the quest to find something good to eat or to become a good cook, education and experience is the road map. The path to food utopia is paved with failure and it is for that reason culinary successes are such memorable gems. I would like to end by paraphrasing a recent statement I heard. “…education is learning that a tomato is a fruit and experience is knowing it doesn’t belong in a fruit salad…”.
Final Note: If any other reader would like to submit a guest post for this site, I’d be happy to consider it! It’s always helpful to hear about other experiences so we can learn from and laugh with each other.