Unrepeatable
"Winging it with what's to hand can be so liberating - flinging in this or that with the joyful abandon that comes from not trying too hard or expecting too much." Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall
Last night, as most nights now that I think about it, we had a fridge-raid meal concocted from a number of different elements from here and there. Some of these - spring onions for example - are eminently reproducible. Others, made from an assembly of ingredients cooked in a specific way are repeatable in themselves - just make the recipe again - but the entire collection of this and that is never going to exist again. Well of course it could but you never would. Or would you? If, as last night's effort turned out to be, the result is pretty delicious if not quite wow, couldn't you write it all down and contrive a recipe that would be the same?
This and other related questions are what I'm going to try and unscramble here - partly by analysing what I actually cooked - and for which - of course - I have no photograph.
In summary it was a chicken dish - cooked in a frypan with various vegetables, and sauces and then served with rice. Even the rice - cooked in a rice cooker - was not quite repeatable because instead of water I had used the leftover whey from a ball of mozzarella. So let me deconstruct it for you.
The fresh, uncontaminated and therefore easily reproduced ingredients first - celery - one stick, sliced diagonally. Asparagus also sliced diagonally - and you would have to be doing this at the right time of year for asparagus. Like now - and it's on its way out I think. Spring onions sliced in the same way. A couple of mushrooms, sliced. Some fresh coriander - stalks chopped and added at the beginning, leaves chopped and sprinkled on at the end with the spring onions. Lime juice - a half leftover from a salmon dish that I shall come to. Oh and a couple of spoonfuls of fresh yoghurt.
The combination leftovers. Things from previous meals - mostly our Monday lunch.
First the star ingredient I suppose. Two chicken thighs left over from Alison Roman's Braised chicken piccata, which had been our main dish. Skin and bone in - and herewith an aside. Coles and Wooloworths seem to have at last woken up to the number of recipes out there that specifiy skin on bone in chicken thighs, for you can now buy them. Not free range yet, just RSPCA approved. Maybe the free range ones will follow. And Coles is also selling packets of cut up chickens, skin and bones intact.
The dish also included lemons, garlic, capers, parsley some chilli flakes and wine. A simple dish, and apart from the capers, a pretty classic combination. It was good but not wow, although I have to say that because I cooked it the day before, the next day's reheated version was much tastier than the day before's. And the cold leftovers were tastier still in a subtle kind of way. There was a fair bit of sauce, some of which still clung to my chicken thighs, along with some capers and garlic.
For my dinner dish I cut the chicken from the thighs in chunks, skin and all which produced quite a lot, so I did not use it all. So the dish was a gift that keeps on giving for I had a chicken sandwich for lunch today from half of the leftovers - the other half is for tomorrow.
The second leftover dish was some of Ixta Belfrage's gorgeous Garlic yoghurt with crispy herbs (Lady Maria Blake/Instagram) which is what it says it is, except there is some mascarpone mixed with the yoghurt and garlic. And you are supposed to sprinkle toasted black sesame seeds and Urfa chilli flakes on top - which I forgot to do. I served these as something to nibble on whilst we gathered and drank bubbly. There was some inevitabley left over. The herbs were no longer crispy of course, and some had merged with the yoghurt mixture, but that didn't matter. It was going to be the basis of my sauce.
Then there was the leftover pesto from Ottolenghi's Salmon and apricot and coriander pesto which I made for David and I last week. It was a very simple recipe - the oiled salmon was simply grilled and served with that pesto which was really more of a salsa than a pesto. It consisted of dried apricots which were quickly blitzed with plenty of coriander, red chilli, pumpkin seeds, EVOO, Tabasco & lime zest/juice. And some of this was left over so that was thrown into the mix as well. Finally there was leftover oil from Alison Roman's Perfect oil roasted tomatoes which was used as my base frying oil.
So how did I put it all together. First I fried the chicken pieces in the tomato oil, and then set them aside. Then I cooked the fresh vegetables in the oil for a bit, before stirring in the leftover pesto - there was only a spoonful of this. Back went the chicken, with the yoghurt and crispy herbs which were no longer crispy, the lime juice and the extra yoghurt. It was then sort of stir-fried until it was all mixed together and the right consistency. Just before serving the spring onions and coriander were stirred in. Thus a lot of containers were removed from the fridge and some vegetables from an overcrowded vegetable drawer. It was great, but we shall never eat it again.
How did I know how to concoct this dish? Well I think the method mostly came from curries I have cooked over the years. The combination of the celery, asparagus and spring onions came from the Coles Black pepper beef, celery and asparagus stir-fry which I have made a couple of times now. And I guess many years of reading recipes and cooking gave me the knowledge that these particular leftovers might go together.
It was a spur of the moment thing. Not something tried and tested over and over, tweaked and reimagined over a long period of time. I remember reading on one of Ixta Belfrage's Facebook or Instagram page that she had taken two years to develop a particular recipe. It must be getting increasingly difficult to produce new recipes these days, something never done before. I know, for example that Ottolenghi has a whole team of people whose lives are spent developing recipes - bouncing ideas off of each other, testing them out, adjusting before getting approval from their tester over there in Wales, which might mean they have to go back to the beginning - or at least halfway if she doesn't give them approval.
Nigel always gives the impression that he, like me, has just looked in the fridge, had a go, thought it was OK so wrote it down - all in a couple of days. But I bet it isn't like that. He always acknowledges James Thompson - sometimes as a collaborator, sometimes as a buisiness partner, sometimes just as a friend. And I notice in the Tender volume 1 acknowledgements he thanks various people for 'technical help'. Does this mean they tested out the recipes. Does James Thompson fulfil the same tasks as Ottolenghi's test kitchen colleagues? The whole process has certainly been responsible for the new career as a recipe developer - the people who write recipes for magazines, websites and TV shows. The people who aspire to be social media influencers and/or celebrity chefs.
Is the difficulty of all of this why so many cookbooks still churn out endless versions of dishes such as lasagne, pizza dough, coq au vin and chocolate cake? Or are these intended for people who have never cooked before? Elizabeth David et al. had it relatively easy I think. Mostly back in that particular golden time for cooking they collected recipes from here and there, rather than creating them themselves. They may well have tested them or had other people test them for publication, but they didn't spend their lives in kitchens inventing new and fabulous ways with old ingredients, or new ways with new ingredients - new to the western world anyway.
Tonight I'm fridge-raiding again - frozen pancakes, home-made ricotta, frozen spinach, the whey from the ricotta perhaps - it looks more like milk than whey - mushrooms and cheese. It won't be quite such an eclectic collection of ingredients, but fun nevertheless.
YEARS GONE BY
November 4
2023 - Nothing
2022 - A tablecloth
2021 - Missing
2020 - Missing
2019 - Tarragon
2017 - Nothing
2016 - A small miracle
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