kitchen musings
What are your universal recipes? Recipes that are easy to play with, easy to adapt to fit whatever you have on hand. For breakfast and snacks, I've found a good basic muffin recipe to be an easy base to play with (though I'm still looking for a really good basic muffin recipe). Likewise, oatmeal. You can add a ton of different ingredients to oatmeal (and oatmeal cookies) to get a good variety of flavors. I started thinking about what I do for fallback dinners in the kitchen, when I don't have a specific recipe picked out and I just want to throw something easy together. Apparently I have a process. I'm curious what other people do on those days when you just want to throw something quick and tasty together and move on with your day.
I have four general "bases" that I use in recipes when I want to improvise or when I have odds and ends to use up:
pasta
rice
couscous
tofu
From there, I then decide what kind of flavor I want to aim for:
Indian
Americana
Mexican
Asian
Italian
stroganoff (where does that come from, anyway?) :P
etc.
That determines the spices I use. For Indian, I lean toward ginger, cumin, cardamon, cinnamon, things like that. For Italian, I use basil, oregano, marjoram, thyme, rosemary. For Asian, I might use fish sauce, hot sauce, soy sauce, five spice mix, lemongrass, peanut sauce. And so on.
You can add any variety of beans and vegetables to those bases and spices and get a wide variety of meals, many of which translate well to breakfast or lunch leftovers the next day, too. I've found Indian and Asian dishes, especially, to be good for breakfast the next day with a fried egg served on top. Pasta dishes often translate well to a cold pasta salad the next day. If it doesn't have a red sauce, you can add some salad dressing to it the next day to change up the flavor even more.
I have four general "bases" that I use in recipes when I want to improvise or when I have odds and ends to use up:
pasta
rice
couscous
tofu
From there, I then decide what kind of flavor I want to aim for:
Indian
Americana
Mexican
Asian
Italian
stroganoff (where does that come from, anyway?) :P
etc.
That determines the spices I use. For Indian, I lean toward ginger, cumin, cardamon, cinnamon, things like that. For Italian, I use basil, oregano, marjoram, thyme, rosemary. For Asian, I might use fish sauce, hot sauce, soy sauce, five spice mix, lemongrass, peanut sauce. And so on.
You can add any variety of beans and vegetables to those bases and spices and get a wide variety of meals, many of which translate well to breakfast or lunch leftovers the next day, too. I've found Indian and Asian dishes, especially, to be good for breakfast the next day with a fried egg served on top. Pasta dishes often translate well to a cold pasta salad the next day. If it doesn't have a red sauce, you can add some salad dressing to it the next day to change up the flavor even more.