Learning to Cook

[jenk]

"It's easy once you know that sauces are made in only a few different ways. One way is to reduce a liquid till it's syrupy and then add the cream. What you get is essentially pineapple-flavored cream, or wine-flavored cream, or beer-flavored cream, or whatever. Hell, you could do it with Coke, but who'd want to." - Spenser on sauces, from Early Autumn

My parents taught me some basic recipes, but I think I learned to actually cook from Robert B Parker's Spenser novels. The pages shortly before the above quote includes a lot of what I learned. Spenser creates dinner out of what's in his client's fridge. (Lesson: Sometimes you make up a dish to match what you have, not matching ingredients to recipes.) He cut the eyes out of the pork chops and throws the rest away. (Lesson: It's okay to trim meat and only use what you want.) He browns meat and adds garlic and pineapple juice, lets that cook down, then adds cream, and some pineapple and orange segments. (Lesson: One way to make a sauce; also, this was a flavor combination I'd never considered before.) He cooks rice in chicken broth with thyme, parsley and a bay leaf. (Lesson: You don't have to cook rice and then mix it with things, you can use broth or what-have-you to flavor the rice while cooking.) Finally he makes a salad out of half a head of lettuce and a dressing of oil, vinegar, mustard, and garlic. (Lesson: You can make salad dressing! Without a mix!)

I was reminded of this tonight as I went to make dinner. My initial "food" thought was spaghetti with clam sauce and mizithra at the Old Spaghetti Factory, but the drive time was prohibitive for me. I do have a couple types of clam spaghetti in my repertoire, but usually if I want a specific dish then a close dish is just going to be more frustrating. I considered mac & cheese. I remembered we have some fresh green beans I should do something with, and considered stir-frying them with garlic and maybe some bacon. Or doing a cheese sauce with bacon. Eventually I made bowtie pasta with a cream sauce that had green beans, some chicken, some bacon, and some mushrooms that were almost gone. And the cream sauce was made by sauteing the mushrooms and garlic, adding a can if chunk chicken (with its broth) and a handful of bacon bits and spices and the green beans, letting that cook down until it was a bit syrupy, and then adding cream ;)