Improv Cooking Principles

Sometimes, I like what I cook. I mean, really like it. Enough to write it down! Might as well share it.

I'm just a guy with some time in the kitchen every now and again. Food is good. Food is fun. There's lot of great stuff out there. Recipes are just guidelines, usually. Don't take them overly seriously.

The basic ideas of my kind of improvisational cooking are:

• Look around your kitchen -- what's there?
• But try to keep seasonal, fresh, and high quality staple ingredients lying around. I mean, really. You can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear. Luck = preparation plus opportunity.
• List the available ingredients in your mind. Free-associate. Quickly re-arrange, kind of like Scrabble. What would go well together? What are you in the mood for? What was that thing you had at that little place last week that was so good?
  
• Drawing a blank? Pick a cookbook off the shelf and flip through the sections relevant to your main ingredients. Don't sit down while you are doing this or dinner will never get finished. Those cookbooks are pretty darned interesting sometimes.
• If it's going to take more than 30-40 minutes to make on a week night, it's not going to happen. An hour and a half on the weekend is about right.
  
• Even if you do find something close and tasty sounding, you'll be missing some ingredients. Think about what the core of the dish is, and make sure you have those, more or less. Otherwise, move on, hombre. Make a note to stock up on the next food run (that's what the notepad on the refrigerator is for).
  
• Found something close enough? OK, start cooking. Don't think about it too much.
• Leave out the really hard parts. Is there a sauce that takes like 3 hours to make? Well, shoot, don't you have some tomato sauce and spices, or some pesto, or some chiles or some salsa? Close enough. Dump some in. Look around the spice closet. Try stuff, but think through the implications. How will that taste? What have you had that was like it? What are you missing? What would be a close substitute?
  
• For goodness sakes, don't measure all that carefully. This is cooking, not brain surgery.
• Make a bit of mess, it's part of the fun. But clean up as you go, you don't want to fritter away karma.

Here is the most important point of all: no fear. I mean, it's only dinner. If it's really terrible, there's a pizza joint around the corner and better luck next time. But if you want to make discoveries, you have to risk a little something each time.