"86", for those who never had the fun of working a job that required peeling 50 pounds of shrimp or making vats of salad dressing, is a restaurant term for when you're out of something. I'm trying to 86 my fridge before a long trip, and it's getting more and more challenging. Last night I had some chicken stock, so I cut up any slightly-shrivelled veggies I could find and threw them in. I also did a little research and found a recipe for an Italian soup that's thickened with cream of wheat, and since I had less than a serving of that left, I threw it in. A couple beaten eggs, some Parmesan cheese, and now you have a fancy dinner! I must admit, I thought at the outset that this one might require a trip down to the local Vietnamese place for take out, but it was actually really good.
Now if I can only figure out what to do with a potato, adobe chilies and applesauce.
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well, the spuds and the adobe chiles are a natural combo (mashed with a little smoky cream?), but the applesauce is another matter...
i've never been good at looking through my fridge and just whipping up a meal from what's in there. so much for that 'cooking without recipes' class that bon and i took.
This kind of cooking is truly an art...one that I practice quite a lot since I am not quite the gastronome or champion food shopper Ethel is.
It is a big part of how I learned to cook, though. When I lived in Holland and really had to cook for myself for the first time, I became addicted to this BBC show called "Ready, Steady, Cook!" The premise was that two chefs had 30 minutes to make something out of whatever the audience members brought them...and these people couldn't spend more than $15 on their bag of stuff. All pre-Iron Chef, and much funnier, since people would bring the most random possible things like a tin of tuna, baked beans, cherry pie filling and capers. The chefs did have a basic pantry at their disposal of the necessaries such as flour, eggs, and a few spices, but the rest was left to the imagination.
So, Melanie, if you want to polish those skills, you might want to see if you can find this show online somewhere!
thanks for the tip, kate! sounds like my kind of show. my boyfriend is always baffled by my need to use recipes for every single thing i cook (aside from stir fry and steamed kale, that is), and says, 'just cook from the heart!'. but i'm always worried that my heart will come up with some sort of disgusting curdled crap that no one wants to eat... but, really, if a dish has good ingredients, how can the end result be that bad? ;-) so, here's a toast to tuna/baked bean/cherry tapenade!
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