electrochef

I love to cook. Sometimes just pizza with interesting vegetables on top (steamed cauliflower is surprisingly delicious!) and sometimes I like to experiment. I've played with truffle oil, aged balsamic vinegar, used blueberries as a garnish for baked chicken, and added green chiles to seared, sliced polenta. I discovered that cooking without salt lets out a whole spectrum of new flavors (and I looooove salt!).

After years of cooking on gas stoves, I've been learning to cook on electric. It was not a delightful beginning (you mean I have to figure out how hot Medium is, I can't just look at how high the flames are?!), but after some weeks or months (I'll not be telling you exactly how long) I've finally gotten the hang of it. Water continues to boil on my 1970's stove top just below Medium, Warm means Hot, and High means "I'm coming to kill whatever it is you're trying to cook."

I've cooked in restaurants using exotic 12-burner tops and even one-burner camping stoves, learning from great chefs who taught me some of their secrets. One thing I learned was to deviate from the recipe and try an extra pinch of this or that, to use the recipe as a guideline but mostly as an inspiration for new culinary creations. This can come in handy when you happen to be missing one or two ingredients...

And so I come to the point:

In life, it's easy to follow what's written down and make something delicious. What's not so easy is when we encounter something missing, such as a key ingredient and are still expected to have something edible and perhaps even wonderful in the end. I like to think that as I look back on all the meals I've shared, that I can sit happy knowing I made the most delicious dish I could with what I was given, and with what I happened to find sitting around in the bottom drawer of my fridge.