a good dish for me
I like cooking, but very seldom use a recipe.
To me, there is always a point where following recipes become too much faff. Generally, it is the point at which there are ten different things to do involving a multiplicity of pieces of equipment (which will need washing up), four different stages of cooking separate things before you are ready to then cook (or 'assemble' all the things), or it involves resting something for twenty four hours and actually completing the dish tomorrow.
That's too late! I want to eat! Today! Or in as little time from now as we can get!
It's not that I'm particularly lazy (although that may be a factor), it's just the inattentive ADHD thing I think. Too many stages and something important to the integrity of the dish will get missed and forgotten. Or I'll get bored reading the recipe's long list of ingredients and zone out somewhere along the way.
Same if the method gets too much—my brain has now opened a new tab and is probably now thinking about an article that I read earlier discussing the conservation of the snow leopard, or the other one about quantum physics and entangled particles which I might have to think about for very long time indeed before I really get it but I probably never will.
Ideally, I want one pot or pan, and a spoon to stir it with.
So soups and stews (or any international variation of same, currys, tagines etc.), are right up my street. Pasta dishes, one pan to cook the sauce, one to cook the pasta, are manageable too.
Baking? Measuring ingredients out precisely? Nope.
I can multi-stage it, if one thing can be roasted or baked before adding it to the one pot, but getting many different elements of a dish to be served at the same time is liable to leave me too mentally exhausted to even eat when I'm finished. I leave roast dinners to J.
Fiddly, faffy cooking is for going to the restaurant, where some else professional does the fiddle and faff and it just arrives at your table on a plate done. Also, they take the plate away again when you're finished, and that's it, you ate it and your part is done.
Anyway, the dish I did this week that spurred me to do a 'this was good' blog post was a pasta dish.
Here I have to admit to something... I do a bit of faff for it. It's fine really, because I do the faff a day or two before, when we had a veg box delivery. They sometimes do 'bunched carrots', so they arrive with the greens still on. I make a pesto out of the green leaves, garlic, toasted hazelnuts and olive oil. The faff is that the stalks are too tough for the blender to get through, so I have to manually remove the leaves to get them ready to pesto.
After that, the rest of it is just shove it all in the blender and give it a damned good whizz, then put it in the fridge until cooking time.
The good bit about this is that it's a process that past me has done already when I get round to using it for my pasta dish a few days later and I've forgotten doing the faff, just like I had when I wrote the opening paragraphs to this post describing how I hate faffing.
Also, I did another bit of faff that took weeks—I grew the courgettes.
So bacon rashers cut into little strips crossways, and courgettes (that I grew!) cut into thin ribbons using a madeline. Cook in a pan together, knob of butter, grind of pepper, add a couple of table spoons of the pesto I made earlier and have forgotten what a faff that is in, grate in some parmesan, cook and drain tagliatelle or linguine pasta, reserve some cooking water, chuck the pasta in the sauce, add a couple of ladles of the reserved cooking water to loosen, stir and mix it all about thoroughly to mingle and be coated with the pesto and get the bacon and courgette all tangled up in it, bam, it's done, serve.
(Now would be a good time to have a delicious picture of this dish completed and ready to serve. Unfortunately I've eaten it, so this is a place holder just in case I ever get round to taking a photo of it before eating it.)
And that is as close to a recipe as I'm going to get.
Written by a real person who completely ignores red wavy underlining and uses perfectly legitimate brand new words that just haven't made it to a dictionary yet.
Post Link: https://skryblans.com/a-good-dish-for-me
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