Regular readers of this blog will know that I love discovering new emergency dinner recipes – for my purposes defined as something quick and straightforward to cook that can be made easily out of things already in the cupboard and will prompt me to cook when either I don’t have the energy for something more complex or when the something more complex has crashed and burned – and especially examples of that genre that can be upgraded to something a bit more fancy or filling as energy or inspiration allows. I’m also greatly in favour of the kind of pre-prepared ingredients that you can keep in the cupboard to use as a base or a jumping off point for cooking something more adventurous or nutritious. I much prefer to buy one pre-prepared item – fresh pasta parcels or a jar of sauce or paste, or frozen dumplings or frozen veg – that I can then base a whole dish around than buying a complete ready-made meal to put in the oven or microwave. (Which isn’t to say that I don’t use them – they serve a purpose, I just wouldn’t want to get dependent on them.) Strangely the older I get the more I resent meal kits, which seems like they should be the perfect half-way house between those two things but in reality almost always turn out to be more trouble than they’re worth, a false economy.
The other night, I saw a gentle and, well, I can only call it an extremely appetising film. (The Zen Diary) The film centred around a widowed author, who’d been a novice Buddhist monk in his youth, writing a book about the food he’d learned to cook there. There’s a lot of food in this film. Lots of cooking, growing, foraging and preserving vegetables. This is a film to eat well ahead of seeing, because I was absolutely ravenous by the time it finished. I was supposed to be having the rest of a packet of popcorn cauliflower that I had in the fridge, but whatever I’d originally planned to eat with that just wasn’t going to cut the mustard. It did occur to me that battered popcorn cauliflower wasn’t a million miles away from how you’d prep veg for making Katsu curry, and that I had a couple of packets of katsu curry sauce that needed used up. So I made some rice – just enough for one – and cooked it with a handful of frozen edamame – I was too hungry to make proper Japanese sticky rice, but it did get both boiled and steamed – cooked the cauliflower in the oven, and heated the sauce. While looking for the sauce in the cupboard a wee jar of Japanese pickled cucumbers – bought after several failed attempts at pickling my own cucumbers in an attempt to confirm if it was my skills or just a thing that lots of people liked but that I didn’t – so I plated it up neatly and served it with some pickles on the side. It was ridiculously good. Obviously I was both hungry and in the perfect mood for the kind of food that I’d made, but even so, there was no logical reason for it to be as good as it was, clearly it was just a combination of factors coming together perfectly. I’m delighted to have found a new dish to make that is a nice half-way house between something I find delicious to eat but really fiddly to make, and something shop bought that tastes comforting but uninspiring. Also I was pleased to discover that it was my own pickling technique at fault – it could have gone either way, I don’t like gherkins – but as I enjoyed the pickled cucumbers I’m going to take another run at making my own. I was planning on having another go at growing my own cucumbers this year, and if that goes well, I’ll have enough to justify faffing around with pickling!
Cupboard Life 