So as I laid out in my first blog, I’m really about spontaneity and working with whatcha got. The thing about it is that sometimes it works out and sometimes you just have a terrible mess. Friday night was the latter for me.
I was heading toward an “oh-yes-I-need-to throw-this-away” type of mess. This was particularly discouraging to me as I’m just launching this food blog. But it’s not a show stopper.
We were staying in for the night and we didn’t really have anything to eat at the ready. I had already made up a yummy cheesy, gooey appetizer of melted brunno cheese on toast with an apricot jam-balsamic glaze served with apples. That part was the best part of the evening. Savory, sweet, simple.
Then it got weird.
So with my thinking turned towards working with whatcha got and seeing a half full jar of kimchi, thoughts went to something exotic. At first, my husband, John, and I discussed having kimchi jigae soup. But as I was going along, I remembered a mushroom version of bi bim bop (Korean rice bowl dish) that I had in Koreatown of Toronto about two years ago. I remembered this to be an odd but delicious dish, the presentation of which really struck me; elegant, traditional, Asian aesthetic.
We had rice noodles in the pantry; I would use those instead of rice. There were mushrooms, onions, green peppers and garlic already chopped that I was going to stir-fry with some soy sauce and mirin. I was going to then lightly stir-fry the noodles, placing them at the bottom of the bowl, then add the mushroom stir-fry on one edge, kimchi on another. Then the pièce de la résistance – an egg. From the little I know about Korean food, it is often accompanied with a cooked egg. I thought that would be a fun, protein-filled addition to dinner.
That’s again when it got weird.
All of this together in the bowl looked very interesting as you can tell from the photo. That’s where the upside ends.
At first taste, I thought, ok, this isn’t too bad. That quickly turned to, “is it me or is this gross?” My husband confirmed my suspicions. He likened it to something you might find at a “Korean truck stop”. Perhaps harsh words but they were very true. Something was not right. I think the noodles got mushy when stir-fried, then the texture went even further south with the addition of the sunny-side up egg blah and the salty, cold brininess of the kimchi. It was a recipe for disaster.
Now I am not one to throw out food. I don’t like to be wasteful. But this shit was bad. We thought mixing it all together would made it better. It didn’t. There was one thought of puréeing it into a soup. That made me puke in my mouth a little more. Nothing was saving this dinner. And that was ok.
So as I was scraping the bowls in to the garbage, I had to have a talk with myself about this misadventure: Not every dinner is going to be a hit. Not every dish is going to be a smash. But you have to keep trying. You have to keep experimenting.
And that’s what I hope others get from my experience. Keep trying. Experiment. Have fun!
This morning I was back on that proverbial horse making a cheesy potato soup for a work lunch on Tuesday. Albeit safe, it was a recipe I had never used and once I got into it, I realized some of the measurements were off. So I totally had to improvise and work my way through it. And you know what? So far so good. It’s already creamy, velvety, yummy. Now all its goodness is congealing in the fridge.
So I say keep cooking! #workwithwhatchagot.