This old recipe?

Why, I only make it when I don’t care how I cook

A lovely little side effect of recipe testing is I often have nubs of ingredients leftover. And someone’s gotta eat them! Since the point of recipe testing is to follow the recipe exactly as written, in my off-work cooking time I do not want to follow a recipe in the slightest.

At the risk of sounding like I’m bragging, I’m at a point in my life where I can make something reasonably delicious without thinking too hard.

This didn’t happen overnight, though! It’s taken years of reading cookbooks, blogs, and articles — plus actually cooking from them — to learn the basics. (And before that I was the kid who watched her mom and sister cook and must have picked up something from them.)

Once you know the basics, you can go off and do whatever you want. This is why books like Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat are so brilliant while books like New York Times Cooking: No-Recipe Recipes can come off as brilliantly tone-deaf: you might want to improvise your cooking and have fun doing it, but you might not have the building blocks or ingredients necessary to do so. (I wrote that before I re-read this 2021 article by Marian Bull, but something tells me it stuck in the back of my head, even more than a year later.)

Another thing that can get in the way of improvising and “just whipping something up,” I think, is not knowing your own tastes. I’m generally not a person who suffers from plagues of indecision — I want to make a choice and get on with it — but if a bounty of options are before you and you don’t know what you really want, it can be understandably paralyzing.

Or if you “cook in terror of overseasoning” when really you should be adding salt by a “handful the size you might use if you found yourself in a fight with a very large man on a beach and wanted to fling sand into his eyes” — but the terror stops you from doing so — then improvising will be nearly impossible.

All of the above is a long way of saying: here’s a thing I made with some recent leftovers of recipe testing. I’m going to describe what I did but acknowledge that it’s very loosey-goosey and therefore, potentially obnoxious.

I was craving something punchy; specifically, I wanted the fermented tang of fish sauce. Leftovers from recipe testing included a partial can of coconut milk, a few carrots, lots of bok choy, frozen corn, fresh ginger, and most of a block of tofu. I also had half an onion, an avocado, and a lemon that needed to be used; the spice selection remains limited to turmeric and a few others. The result was Thai-influenced — like an an extremely abbreviated version of Kaeng Kari.

Other credit where it’s due: Braeden did all the prep work. When I’m recipe testing he can’t help at all — I need to do it so I know exactly what’s happening — so when we’re making dinner like this, he does all the chopping.

This is what I did, more or less (meaning I don’t exactly remember what I did, because I made this a few weeks ago):

1. Sautéed chopped onion and minced ginger in a little oil over medium-high heat, in a big skillet. Added turmeric and salt.

2. Added chopped carrots, stirred, covered with a lid. Let cook until the carrots were soft-ish and getting brown on some edges. Added ground pepper.

3. Splashed in a bit more oil, then plopped in cubed tofu. Cooked, stirring once in a while, until the tofu was sort of browned on some edges.

4. Poured in a mostly full can of coconut milk, supplementing with a little water because it seemed like it would be too thick. This was a mistake — the coconut milk was merely solidified because it was in the fridge and adding water made it much too liquidy — so I let it come to a simmer to cook down a bit.

5. Once it was more like a saucy dish and less like a soup, I stirred in frozen corn and chopped bok choy and seasoned with what I thought would be too much fish sauce but turned out to be perfect. (A tablespoon? Who’s to say.) It all cooked (uncovered) until the corn was warmed and the bok choy wilted (so only a few minutes). I should have made rice to go with it, but alas, I did not.

6. Once removed from heat, Braeden squeezed in lemon juice. We topped each serving with chunks of avocado, flaky salt if needed (I needed, he did not), and chile flakes.

In my best exaggerated Ina voice: How easy is that?

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