DRMacIver's Notebook
An improvised meal
An improvised meal
Due to a series of communication mixups where different people thought it was someone else’s turn to cook, I got home the other day at 7:15 to discover that dinner had not even been started. We normally eat dinner at 7:30, and the planned meal for the evening (bolognese) takes several hours to cook. So I sprung into action and 45 minutes later we had the following entirely improvised meal for five:
- Rice
- Stir fried mixed greens with garlic and chilli
- Thai omelettes
- Ground pork and tofu with fermented soy beans, garlic, and chilli
- Stir fried peppers with ginger
- SausagesI did think about doing something more interesting with the sausages. e.g. turning them into tiny sausage meat balls and cooking them in something that would flavour match them to the rest of the dishes - they’d have worked pretty well with ginger and chilli and a bit of honey added at the end for example. But that sounded like work and the the child wouldn’t have eaten any.
- A sliced raw pepperMostly for the child who wasn’t going to eat either the cooked peppers or the stir fry green because they had too much flavour and “the texture is weird”.
The rate limiting factor was the rice really - our rice cooker takes about 45 minutes to make enough rice, so the rest was just down to what I could make while the rice cooked.
I think this demonstrates a couple of interesting things about improvised cooking.
The first is that there’s a base meal there that I can just do on autopilot: Rice, stir fried mixed greens, and thai omelettes.
The stir fried mixed greens are actually just from a packet but it’s a genuinely good product to have in the freezer.
Thai omelette is something of a staple dish in our house because the child loves them and everyone else likes them, and because they’re very easy to make. You should probably use the serious eats recipe but ours is an extremely simple one: Take some eggs, add a nonspecific amount of fish sauce, whisk with a fork, and then fry in a hot pan with lots of oil.
I’m sure I’ve written about this before but I can’t come up with an immediate reference,Maybe Seeking out existence proofs in everyday life? but a good general principle is that you should first make sure you can solve the problem adequately, and only then worry about improving on that. Having these sort of baseline meals that you can throw together and then build around is, to me, key to improvisational cooking.
After the base meal, the next important question is “What do we have that needs using up?”. e.g. you might notice that the sausages are a bit out of place in this meal. I cooked them anyway, because they were really on the last day they were still good, and we figured that they’d keep for another day cooked if not eaten and also they would definitely get eaten. They were.
The peppers were there partly because we had a large thing of sliced raw peppers in the fridge from a previous meal where we’d sliced way more peppers than we ended up eating. I dry fried them to get them nice and charred, then added frozen diced ginger, sugar, salt, and oil, then when they were cooked transferred them to a small bowl in the oven to keep warm and moved on to cooking the pork.
This is a pretty easy example of improvisational cooking I think: Take a base ingredient, cook it in a normal way, and add some flavours that would make it good. A lot of vegetables respond well to this treatment, including many you wouldn’t necessarily expect. e.g. I’ve stir fried leftover roast potatoes with ginger and soy sauce before and that works great.Not every vegetable will work this way of course. Some vegetables don’t stir fry well, and some have such a distinctive flavour that doesn’t fit this style of cooking. e.g. I would not use leftover beetroot this way.
The pork and tofu was a bit more of a genuine creation. We had about half a bag of tofu king deep fried tofu puffs left that were going off that day, and about a quarter of a packet (so, I guess, roughly 75g) of pork mince left over from a meal the other day that would have kept a bit longer but didn’t have an obvious job associated with it. I’ve enjoyed Mapo Tofu in the past, which is a completely different dish combining pork and a different style of tofu, and decided that this was worth an experiment, so I stir fried the pork with garlic and chilli from the freezer and some salted fermented soy beans I had in the fridge,A completely normal ingredient to have to hand, right? No, honestly, I picked them up on a whim the other day when passing a Chinese supermarket in Cambridge. But they’re really nice, I recommend them. These are the ones we have. A nontrivial part of the motivation of this dish was an excuse to experiment with them.. This is another appliation of the “Take a thing and stir fry it with some flavours that would be good with it”.
While that was cooking, I cut the tofu in half (as I’d noticed it was a bit chonky to cook well when I used the other half bag), and then added it to the stir fry. Once that was all looking cooked, I also put that in a bowl in the oven to keep warm, and cooked the greens (add a bit more sesame oil to the wok, pour the packet in, done).
In general, all of this was of course only possible because I was in my own kitchen, which has been stocked with a bunch of things that I know I can improvise around. We almost always have rice, eggs,We’ve got so many eggs at the moment, because we traded our fridge for some recently. and stir fry greens available, so there was always a base meal to build around. Similarly, it’s a lot easier to take a baseline and add some flavours to it if you know you’ve got a ready supply of flavours to hand.
In general, preparation seems to be the key to improvisation: You prepare a solid base of skills to improvise around, and a variety of tools and resources that you know how to draw from, and the rest is just elaboration on whatever you have to hand using that.