Improv Cooking: What to make with what you have
Sometimes you don’t have a lot of things in the house, and you want a quick meal that’s still going to taste delicious. How do we improvise an entire dish when so many dishes and recipes take an exorbitant amount of prep? In an ideal world you’d have plenty of ingredients on hand, but life happens, paydays are a little further apart than usual, storms can make it difficult to get groceries, and sometimes you just forget to buy food on your way home from work. Learning to break the rules of recipes, and create something new is a skill that serves you forever.
Some key points that allow you to break from the mould are things like:
Learning to make some staple sauces
Learning what substitutions can be made
Remember to keep it simple
Don’t overthink the measurements, cooking is all about feeling
Depending on the style of food you like the sauces can be different, be they simple pasta sauces, curry, stir fry sauce, salad dressings, anything. I like to have 5-6 simple sauces that are quick to put together that go with almost anything, because it gives me choice and variety. My personal choices are:
A simple Asian style barbecue sauce
A Marinara sauce
A Cream pasta sauce
A burger sauce (I like mine with lots of diced gherkins)
A teriyaki style sauce
A simple Mac and Cheese sauce (Sauce Mornay, also known as a Bechamel with cheese)
Of course there is no right or wrong, I will have recipes coming for quick and basic sauces that can be used, and modified however you want. At the end of the day the most important thing is that the sauce works with the dish you’re making.
Learning what substitutions can be made in terms of ingredients is a life saver, because you never have to think to yourself “I can’t make that because I don’t have this”. To give you an idea of the types of substitutions I’ve made in the past, here are a few examples of ones that have worked:
Swapping Pork Belly in when I didn’t have any Chicken Thigh
Changing the pork cutlet for a striploin steak in katsudon
Using venison instead of beef to make a sukiyakidon with beef fat and brown sugar
Again, these aren’t steadfast rules, just try and keep the proteins to what can work with the sauce, for example, I wouldn’t personally use white fish in place of beef. In this case it all comes down to personal preference.
Keeping it simple is very important, for example, you can make a lovely pasta dish with just some garlic, butter, parsley and pepper flakes by cooking the pasta, emulsifying some cold butter into some of the pasta water, and sauteeing the garlic with the pepper flakes until fragrant and mixing in with the sauce, toss the pasta in the sauce, and then mix through the parsley and you have an extremely simple dinner in less than ten minutes.
Letting go of the teaspoon measures is difficult at first, but when you manage to measure through feeling, you will notice a boost in not only your creativity, but also the quality of your food. Freedom from the recipe as written lets you make the dish your own, and you will never go back once you get to experience the flavour that you have made your own.