Saturday, October 08, 2011

Cooking With The Genius: Back to School Night Scramble

Ingredients:
One (1) yellow onion from the farmer's market a few Saturdays ago
One and a half (1.5) cherry tomatoes that were 24 hours from the mulch pile (cut off the wrinkly-looking parts)
Two (2) green peppers from your landlord's garden
One (1) yellow-skinned cucumber from the same garden (whatever it is, it tastes and smells like a cucumber, but looks like a squash)
Olive oil
Sweet chili sauce
Hoisin sauce
One (1) can of baked beans because you're out of couscous, rice, and all other bland starch bases
One (1) package of Jiffy corn muffin mix because it is the best, but you can skip this stuff if all of your milk is from August and went bad a few weeks ago, but you haven't thrown it out because you're playing chicken with your roommates/NotWife

Toss some olive oil in your wok, click away if you're some sort of foodie poseur and don't own an actual wok, and get the heat going.  Dice your onion, green peppers, tomatoes, and what not.  You can throw in mushrooms or other veggies if you want, that was my intent until I checked the mushrooms and other veggies.  They had gone around the slimy bend.  I don't even know what one of the bags had in it, but it had brown skin before it went putrescent.  So dump the bad stuff in your compost heap, that's the trash can for you city-folk, wash your hands, and stir the wok.

Keep the wok going while you hunt for something to put this mess on.  While you're looking, you might want to spice the stuff.  I threw on some provincial herbs, ground ginger, and then found my sweet chili sauce in the fridge.  Toss some of this on there, say three tablespoons or so.  That gives it some serious flavor, and nice color, too.  I prefer to cook colorful foods.  I'm not alone in thinking that color means flavor, but those similar-thinking other people aren't always perceived by other human beings.  I couldn't find a decent starch, no potatoes, no rice, no bread, but I did find some baked beans.

After settling on baked beans for my starch, I thought about flavor profiles for a moment.  This pondering lead me back to the fridge, wherein I found hoisin sauce I thought this would go well because I think of hoisin as Asian molasses.  Baked beans and molasses shouldn't need an explanation, but some people aren't lucky enough to have experienced the majesty of baked beans so I will explain.  Baked beans are often cooked with molasses.  Two tablespoons later, the color was really blending.  Everything was well and evenly cooked, and the beans were about ready, too.

After putting the bowl of corn meal back in the fridge with the greased and now useless pan I had intended to use to cook the corn bread, I settled on a corn bread-free meal.  The milk was thoroughly unusable, either of the two cartons in the fridge, but you don't really need to hear more about that.

I threw both items into a bowl, and was surprised that I didn't need to work at eating.  Unlike my fried rice experiment a few weeks ago, this was surprisingly edible.  It was both flavorful, and mushy, both of which are great for ease of eating.  Kind of like baby food, but yummy.  The NotWife refused to even try it.  This didn't hurt my feelings, no it did not.  You can't prove anything.

This may just be baloney pie with vegetables, but it was still tasty.

No comments: