Fuller on Food: Experimenting puts fun into cooking (and sometimes a grated finger)
Tuesday, June 3, 2008 10:32 PM PDT
By Don Fuller
For The Daily News
Printable version
E-mail this articleWhile we were flying back from New York, I spent some time reading Southwest Airlines magazine “Spirit.” I was attracted to an article about Peggy Grote, who specializes in creating meals out of overlooked items in the refrigerator and changing leftovers into appetizing dishes.
She advocates that in your refrigerator you need to have a few basics like eggs and cheese. With some leftover vegetables you can make omelets. Frozen chicken breasts are highly versatile and relatively cheap. Prunes — marinated in port wine and orange rinds and then aged — make a sauce that works on almost any kind of meat.
You get the idea that when Grote opens the refrigerator, she sees a meal. When she’s short of an ingredient, she makes small portions and serves them in small dishes. For example, when making appetizers she would treat a single shrimp like a cocktail and simply put it and a little sauce in a shot glass.
She offers guidelines for improvising. For example, use the ingredients that are commonly found in an ethnic food as ways to combine ingredients with other ingredients. Think of a taco. The ingredients you will find in a taco — ground meat, fish, pork, chicken, cheese, sour cream, lettuce, cornmeal shell, spices, salsa with tomato, mango, tomatilloes, onion, and cilantro.
With these items as your basics, move on to creating your own version. Perhaps a bed of tortilla chips substitutes for the shell. A layer of chopped chicken mixed with spices and tomatoes forms another layer. A topping of crumbled cheese and sour cream may finish the plate for a small luncheon dish.
Grote sees an eggplant and she begins seeing ingredients and mentally testing and tasting them and then deciding that this ingredient may be better than that ingredient. So goes the process of improvising.
This article came to mind because Judy’s friend Karen told her that she made a Moroccan carrot dish that guests enjoyed at a recent potluck. With that as a signal for trying it, Judy began the process of making the dish.
First of all, grating the carrots was really an unpleasant task, and in that process she managed to also grate her finger.
As she looked at what I had told her was cilantro, she discovered that it was flat leaf parsley. At first, she thought she would have to go to the store. At that point, I said if it already has cumin in it then the parsley can substitute for the cilantro, so in went the parsley.
When making the dressing, she forgot to add the orange until after she poured it on the carrots so she added the orange juice after the fact.
While we enjoyed its flavors, the carrot salad lacked crunch, so I begin playing around with other possibilities. Not having the creative powers of Peggy Grote, I searched the Web for carrot salad recipes, particularly those with a Middle East flavor, for some possible additional ways of making the salad. Below is the original recipe and following it are my list of possible additions and substitutions.
I’m already looking forward to trying the recipe again — and improvising.
The second recipe is another one that Judy came up with when she was looking for a quick and easy dessert. She looked at recipes until she found one that matched her available ingredients and time. The dessert she found freezes well and is one she can have for a quick improvised dessert.
These kinds of experiences are adventures for me. Some people find that watching cooking shows is about all the cooking they need, but I think it’s more fun to be in the kitchen, experimenting on my own.
MORROCAN-STYLE CARROT SALAD
1 pound carrots, peeled and grated over large holes of a box grater
2 medium oranges, peeled and segmented over a small bowl, juice reserved
3 tablespoons reserved orange juice
3 tablespoons minced fresh cilantro leaves
1/4 cup extra-virgin olive oil
1 tablespoon lemon juice
1 teaspoon honey
3/4 teaspoon ground cumin
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/8 teaspoon cayenne pepper or to taste
1/8 teaspoon ground cinnamon
Toss the grated carrots, orange segments and cilantro together in a large bowl. Whisk the reserved orange juice, oil, lemon juice, honey, cumin, salt, cayenne, and cinnamon together, and then pour over the carrots mixture and toss to coat.
Let the salad sit until liquid starts to pool in the bottom of the bowl, about 3 minutes. Transfer salad to a fine-mesh strainer set over a large bowl and let drain for 2 minutes. Transfer to serving bowl or platter, discard the strained juices, and serve. (The salad can be refrigerated in an airtight container for 2 days.)
— Adapted from a recipe found on www.cookillustrated.com/ (5/14/2008)
Thoughts for adapting the recipe:
For regular carrots, substitute baby carrots that have been partially cooked in olive oil until barely tender and then drained, saving some of the oil for the salad dressing. Or at this time of year buy young new carrots, and scrub thrm instead of peeling. Use the whole carrot, and do a light sauté. (This approach avoids peeling and grating—unpleasant tasks) Or make the mature carrots into carrot sticks and cut into 2-inch lengths and lightly sauté.
For oranges, add or substitute pineapple tidbits, raisins, chopped dates, almonds, pine nuts, or black olives.
To make the dressing, cook down the orange juice, lemon juice and honey to make syrup then add the spicing and olive oil to avoid draining the carrots before serving. The whole point of draining is to eliminate excess liquid, but draining too long will eliminate all of the liquid and flavors. Olive oil used in sautéing carrots and then drained might be enough oil for the salad.
For the flavoring, substitute parsley or mint instead of cilantro. Increase or decrease the cumin to taste. Eliminate the salt and substitute some crumbled feta
If not draining the liquids and discarding them, serve the carrot salad over couscous, wheat berries or small pasta like orzo. Combining the salad with pasta eliminates the need for rice or potatoes as a side dish.
To avoid cilantro developing a soap-like flavor, add it just before serving. Crumbled cheese is also better added at the end, so that it maintains its shape and doesn’t become mush.
DATE NUT TART
(Serves 12)
1 (9-inch) pie crust
1 1/2 cups coarsely chopped walnuts
1 cup chopped pitted dates (do not use sweetened dates)
2/3 cup dark corn syrup
1/2 cup sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1/2 teaspoon salt
2 eggs, at room temperature
Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
Place pie crust in 9-inch tart pan. Place nuts and dates in crust.
Combine corn syrup, sugar, vanilla, salt and eggs in a large bowl; whisk well. Pour over dates and nuts.
Bake about 50 minutes, until puffed and brown. Cool on a wire rack at least 15 minutes before slicing. Serve with a small scoop of vanilla ice cream.
— Adapted from Relish (newspaper supplement), November, 2007
Don Fuller, an avid cook, retired as dean of instruction at Lower Columbia College in 1998. Readers can reach him at The Daily News, P. O. Box 189, Longview, WA 98632 or by e-mail at df1013784@uid.onemain.com
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