Recipes I'd Never Write

I couldn’t have exactly predicted Saturday night’s dinner. It wasn’t even close to the kind of dish that I’d set out to prep for, going out of my way to acquire specific ingredients. Rather, it was a confluence of remains from previous similarly improvised meals. A bit from Friday’s leftovers and Thursday’s by-product, grounded by an abundant item already on one of my shelves that brought it all together. Fragments of what was completely something else became instrumental in a greater new whole.

The logic runs something like this. Black kale gets found at the farmer's market. It then gets sautéed with onion, served with black rice, half a roasted pumpkin, and an egg on top. Leftover cooked kale gets blended into a pesto of sorts, for a pasta. Leftover pesto gets swirled into a soup that has cubes of the other half of that pumpkin in it. Leftover soup will be frozen and eventually served with toast on the side. How often I am so satisfied by trajectories like this leaves me with the feeling that my favourite dishes may never be recorded in cookbooks, but will keep emerging from paying attention to what’s already in front of me.

Finding connections amongst it all takes a mix of a diligence about what's left in the fridge, a good memory of a well-stocked pantry's inventory, and a foundational knowledge of techniques to call upon. Once the network of possible dishes emerges, I trust myself to always pick one that fits the moment. I feel everything I have can become this right now! Eureka.

Composing a meal like this is not only driven by economics and practicalities, but primarily by an affinity for creating dishes within limitations. What I have on hand prompts certain dish ideas to come to me, when I know that they otherwise wouldn’t have come so easily. It’s as if I’ve unlocked access to a special repertoire that would ordinarily be hidden to me. Cooking in this way continuously lets me practice being adaptable, resilient, and resourceful.

Leftover cabbage? Let’s try making Okonomiyaki. Cooked beans? How about using a splash of that leftover cooking water, now a rich broth, to smooth out a bean dip or to elevate a sauce? Got a cheesecake in the oven that’s left you with egg whites? Let's make financiers, using up the rest of that almond flour in the cupboard too. Crusty ends of a loaf of sourdough bread? Let’s tear it into chunks, smother them in olive oil, and make some croutons for a Panzanella. And whatever’s left from that, breadcrumbs. I continuously revel in the cascade, wherever it leads me.

This type of arithmetic isn’t something cookbooks normally account for. Maybe they mention it, or allude to how to consider it, but their design does not prioritise it like I do when I’m cooking. Most recipes are written as isolated events, while we know home cooking is sequential and cumulative. The reality is, each meal is a continuation of the last, whether that means literally including ingredients from a previous dish or relying on a skill or confidence that it taught you.

When was the last time you saw a recipe call for, “What was leftover from the recipe on the previous page.” Or when you held a cookbook with a series of interdependent recipes? Are cookbooks really there to help someone who is standing in their kitchen looking at everything they have, wondering, what can I do with it all? Or give them a clue that if they only had this one other ingredient, they'd hit the jackpot? Is this the problem we expect smart fridges to solve? Or is there a way that this wisdom can flow through a cookbook? I’m fascinated by how recipes meander into each other like this, by the pattern that transpires between them. I want to write these kinds of recipes…