Experimental Cooking

I just discovered that Cranky Fitness linked to us (woo!) in a post about being healthy while the economy sucks and it reminded me that sometimes people read this little blog… I’m not sure if this should worry me because I do tend to ramble and just type about whatever is on my mind. There’s another tip for surviving the horrible economic times: write a blog—it’s cheaper than therapy.

I noticed yesterday that my cooking habits are very frequently based upon having grown up as white trash. For instance, there is my very favorite method of making soup. It involves taking a pot, throwing in a bunch of vegetables or whatever I need to use, adding liquid, and cooking. I’ve made some delicious soup this way, but I doubt I could repeat them if I tried due to my lack of recipe usage and/or refusal to write things down.

I’m one of those people that doesn’t like recipes. (Interesting fact of the day: the grammar check on my word processing program just tried to convince me that I should be saying “I’m one of those people that don’t like recipes.” Think it wants me to sound as white trash as I am?) Recipes are too constricting. It’s much more fun to just make stuff up as I go—granted this sometimes ends in disaster, but other times it ends in deliciousness. There are some things that I will make in the same basic way each time, but I like the opportunity to vary things just a little. It’s kind of like my grandmother’s recipe for pie crust that my mother has often attempted to teach me (I fail at paying attention, which is why I still couldn’t tell you how she does it). She doesn’t know measurements; she just knows what goes in it.

Yesterday I cooked enough dinners to last me until the end of the month. Seriously, I’m a huge dork. I like to make a bunch of portions of something and then freeze them in individual containers so that when I get home in the evenings I just have to microwave something. It’s like tv dinners (a single person staple) but healthy and much more delicious. Cooking a bajillion dinners at a time really cuts down on my desire to eat takeout. I don’t even have fancy Tupperware because I just use cheap stuff from the dollar store. That’s right, I buy things at the dollar store. Depending on what you buy there, they have some good deals at times. Don’t judge.

The point of this is that I baked a bunch of pork chops and felt like doing something interesting to them. I’m not really sure what you would call them, but it involved olive oil, some Dijon mustard, some garlic… it should be interesting. Again it was the type of cooking that involved me taking stock of ingredients I had in my fridge that needed to be used and voila! Pork chops. I haven’t tried one yet. I guarantee you that I will eat them though, because a girl can’t waste food nowadays.

At the very least, this form of experimental cooking makes eating a surprise, right?