I’ve been making an effort lately to prepare meals without using a recipe. Cooking feels easier if I’m not following a recipe and dirtying-up all my measuring spoons. Besides, I feel like I come up with great flavor combinations (at least in my head they’re great), and creating something on my own helps me learn more about the ingredients I’m working with.
So for dinner tonight I made salmon (I did use a recipe from Light & Tasty for this – Sensational Spiced Salmon. It’s reliably great!), used up some leftover corn in corn cakes and fried up some potatoes. Sounds like a nice meal, right? Wrong! It was a borderline disaster.
I thought I was whipping up a stellar creation as I combined fresh sweet corn, a banana pepper (it’s all I had), some green chili salsa, salt and pepper, cumin, sugar, flour and 2 eggs. My goal was to end up with delicious corn cakes. I couldn’t wait to try it. Joey cooked them up because he’s much better at flipping things than I am. I dove in before it was even on my plate, excitedly anticipating the delicious bite filled with sweetness and a hint of savory. Bland! Bland! Bland! My typical problem of underseasoning thwarted my efforts again! Dipping them in maple syrup helped a bit, but I was so disappointed.
On to the potatoes…they were red potatoes. I rinsed them, chopped them up and threw them in to a pan with olive oil, rosemary, thyme, lemon pepper seasoning and some salt. I thought it was going to have a lovely fresh flavor. Well, maybe you already see where my first mistake was. Joey came into the kitchen just as I was mixing the potatoes in the pan with the seasoning and said, “Did you boil those at all before frying them?” I paused, quietly absorbing the fact that I might have made a small, yet distinguishable, mistake. I hate it when he seems to know more about cooking than I do. “No,” I answered him. “But I suppose that would’ve been a good idea,” I reluctantly said. “Besides, this worked fine the last time I did it this way,” I said matter-of-factly and then remembered that those potatoes had turned out incredibly dry. “I’ll put the cover on them and they’ll be fine.” Dry! Dry! Dry! And underseasoned.
Don’t you hate it when you think you’re going to create a wonderful meal on your own, no recipe needed because you have learned so much about food that you no longer require a step-by-step guide to cooking, just to have the entire meal fail miserably and highlight the fact that you do, indeed, require a step-by-step guide to cooking? What a waste of effort and ingredients. But, I will not give up! I am determined to become a cook who can whip up a great meal in a moments notice, with or without a recipe. But probably with a recipe for the time being...