Freestyle cooking

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I have a confession to make. My eyes are bigger than my stomach. No matter what’s on my mental shopping list, a few extra ingredients always make their way into my basket. It’s not potato chips or sweets I’m after, though. I love ingredients – spices, grains, sweeteners, etc. The quirkier, the more obscure the ingredient, the more I’m drawn to it. Foreign lettering on the package and/or ventures outside of Manhattan to buy the food items are a plus. Doesn’t every dedicated chef need millet, quinoa, Israeli cous cous, wheatberries, farro, bulghur, corn meal, corn flour, hominy and rolled oats to make their kitchen complete?

I never have a specific meal in mind, but rather a fuzzy date in the future when I will wow my friends with ingredients they can’t even pronounce. Every now and then, when the packages are beginning to grow a bit dusty and when opening a cabinet means getting smacked in the head by a package of pomegranate seeds, I know that it’s time for freestyle cooking. This is when I thoroughly examine the cupboard and pick out a new ingredient or two. I throw in a few things from the fridge and maybe a piece of fish or meat and, well, hope for the best.

I’m an amateur, and I don’t claim to be otherwise. Most of the time, I have no idea what I’m doing. But with the subconscious knowledge of food gleaned from many a magazine or newspaper article, along with the tidbits I’ve learned in restaurants, I mix and match my ingredients as I go. I believe that with a little bit of information and a big craving, the results will always be at least passable.

Last week, I broke out two of my ingredients that had been languishing in the back of the cupboard – Himalayan red rice from Kalustyans (a.k.a. the hoarder’s mecca) and Japanese panko bread crumbs. Sort of related, right? Okay, not at all, but here’s how things went… First, I assembled all of my other ingredients – a fillet of wild Alaskan salmon (in season right now), shitake mushrooms, ginger, limes, garlic, soy sauce, grapeseed oil, celery, onion, chicken stock and fresh spinach (yes, it’s in a bag, but last week = pre-spinach-paranoia).

Most of this meal took very little time to assemble or cook. The Himalayan Red Rice was by far the slowest item. It took much longer to cook than ordinary rice, maybe even a bit longer than brown rice. Let’s just say that I was able to answer the final question on Jeopardy, respond to about ten emails, update my podcasts and read the entire day’s gossip on Gawker. Once the rice had thoroughly absorbed the stock, I popped the salmon in one pan, the spinach in a second, and the sliced shitakes in a third. Five minutes later, voila! Instant presto freestyle meal number one.

Lest I forget about the wine, for my cobbled together freestyle meal, I took myself down to the local wine shop to see how far a ten dollar bill could go. In the back of my mind, I was thinking New Zealand sauvignon blanc, because I wanted a crisp, light-to-medium bodied white wine with tropical notes. Unfortunately, the New Zealand shelf contained nothing under $15, so I picked the next logical choice for well-made, inexpensive whites – South America. A torrontes from Argentina flirted with me, but I didn’t want to risk opening a wine that was too floral for my gingery soy sauce flavored salmon. After considering some steel-aged chardonnay, I went back to my first grape varietal – sauvignon blanc—but this time from the Central Valley of Chile, a great place to find very inexpensive, simple table wines with character. Made by Casa Julia Estate, the wine I chose was named “Manta,” a reference to the traditional work apron worn by the indigenous peoples of Chile, according to the label. In fact, the wine is even dedicated to the estate’s harvest workers. Casa Julia Estate also practices sustainable winemaking. Truly, have you ever seen another wine so perfectly marketed to Upper West Side NPR-listening New York Times-reading oenophiles? I wonder how much of the wine the workers actually get to consume… Anyway! The good news for me is that the wine came in at $6.99, well below my target price. As for tasting notes, it was a perfect match for my meal. The wine was light-bodied, with fresh acidity and a multitude of fruit notes – mainly lime and citrus, with undertones of tropical fruit and even some herbal notes. All in all, thanks migrant workers for a tasty quaff!

Oh, and on a final note, since the rice went forth and multiplied like nothing I’ve ever seen, I had plenty for a late breakfast/early lunch the next day – gently rewarmed in a little bit of butter, topped with spinach and a big ole fried runny egg.

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