My respect for cooks and chefs is less their ability to
follow a recipe. A recipe is simply instructions, and people follow those all
the time. Instructions allow us to put together Ikea furniture, to get to a new
restaurant, to take care of a new plant. Instructions are simple. The artistry
of food comes not in recipes, but in the ability to deviate from recipes…or at
its height…to never consider a recipe to begin with. To look at a heap of potential
ingredients and to see a masterful plate there. The culinary version of Michelangelo
lore –Every block of stone has a statue inside it and it is the task of the sculptor to discover it.. The meal is already in the
ingredients so to speak.
To that end, it seems I am calling myself a chef or an
artist, but more accurately I am someone who rarely has all of the ingredients
on hand, or who has a distaste for a particular ingredient being called for. Up
front, anything calling for asparagus is immediately replaced with…well, almost
anything. I loathe asparagus and there is no disguising the taste, smell, or
texture. Most things I’ll try out but I’m most reticent to put asparagus
anywhere near me. But I digress. This isn’t about asparagus. This is about my
almost recipe.
My CSA box arrived on Wednesday filled with dill. Dill? My only
experience with dill was back in high school when I tried to make a potpie with
a dill crust. I over-measured not understanding that unlike other seasonings
that a little is good and a lot just as good, dill, in its dried form, is
strong. I don’t remember what was in that potpie but I sure as hell remember
the dill.
So potpie crust rushed to my brain when I found the willowy
stems of dill in my box. What the heck was I going to do with that?
Google of course. I google any ingredient and add recipe to
the end all the time, a useful trick my sister shared with me. Of course I scrolled
through pages of pickle recipes but finally I landed on this recipe for Persian
rice. It called for a fair amount of dill so that was a win, but it also involved
rice…and I don’t really deal too much with rice. Mostly I use quinoa these
days, versatile enough for rice and bulgur dishes, as well as cous cous dishes.
Still, skimming through the recipe, it called for jasmine rice – a rice that
has a subtle aroma and shape.
I did a fair amount of shopping and scrounging for this
recipe – even as I didn’t purchase everything on the ingredient list. For starters,
there was no zucchini and I don’t like it enough to warrant purchasing some. My
box did have dino kale though, a darker healthier green and readily available. Double
score. I sautéed it quickly with some garlic and set it aside.
I had, oddly enough, an abundance of cinnamon sticks but not
cardamom. Cardamom had been on my mind for a while though, given how much Indian
food I try to cook so I purchased that. The pistachios I almost substituted for
cashews (boy am I glad I didn’t, the texture would be all wrong). I bought goat
cheese, a lemon, and a can of chick peas. Most everything else I pillaged my
pantry for, even managing to scrounge up a packet of dried apricots from my
Machu Picchu hike some months ago (dried apricots are like $12 a packet!).
I followed the instructions…mostly. There was no roasting of
zucchini of course because there was no zucchini, but I did throw in the sautéed
greens. There was no parsley because…who really misses parsley?
When I finished, what I was left with was pure and vibrant deliciousness.
Already I am plotting to recreate it, a handful of fresh dill remains, as does
an extra lemon and half a thing of goat cheese. Really, the pistachios and
apricots are the only thing that would require replenishing.
Of course I’m also thinking about how I can step it up a
notch…stuffing the rice into raw sweet peppers seems the perfect complement
(although it might fight too much against the sweetness of the apricots) but I’ll
have to try that out next round. For the moment I have to be contented with
anticipating lunch…I love it when I anticipate lunch.
Fatigue strangled a great deal of my weekend, I didn’t do
nearly as much cooking as I had intended. I discovered late today that I didn’t
have the whole cumin seeds necessary for my roti recipe so that will have to
wait but I did have beets idling in my fridge. Beets, something I eat when
presented but never seek out. The original plan had been to make a carrot beet
and ginger soup…but that made me nervous for some reason I can’t exactly
explain. Instead, I allowed myself to be persuaded by my sister to pickle the
beets instead. Apparently pickled beets count as a fermented
food and fermented foods are good for you.
Once again I found myself without the complete ingredients
for any one recipe. Some called for actually canning (never gonna happen!)
some, special vinegars, some special seasonings. What I settled on was a
relatively simple recipe, but even in its simplicity I was missing ingredients.
Still, I roasted my beets, skinned and sliced them. I soaked the steaming root
in a mixture of apple cider vinegar, sugar, salt, mustard seeds, and fresh
dill. It wasn’t exactly in keeping with the recipe but I did what I could. For the
moment they taste like..well…pickled beets. Nothing particularly special. I am
curious to see how they fare as the days progress.
Next up…dhal
puri roti and some kind of carrot ginger soup and fresh bread.
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