3.019
24 (Tue ) January 2012
Spaghetti with Shrimp & Shiitake
3.0
by me
at home
-Oksu, Seongdong, Seoul, Republic of Korea-
with W and DJ
The vast majority of the dishes that I make don’t involve set recipes. It’s usually improvisation flowing from a few fundamental ingredients. With Italian, for example, my pasta sauces are some combination of olive oil, butter, garlic, onions, and a dried herb blend of oregano-basil-thyme-parsley-bay. Beyond that, it all depends on what I happen to have on hand, a bit of this, a bit of that, tasting at every step, adjusting at every step. This is why I tend to describe the dishes in general terms, while promising on occasion to post a recipe in the unforeseeable future, even though I probably never will because my impromptu process isn’t particularly amenable to documentation and subsequent repetition.
Perhaps I’m approaching what food writer Mark Bittman, in his piece “Finding Myself in the Kitchen,” which appears in the anthology Man with a Pan, a book that I mentioned in a prior post (see 2.353 Lemon-in-the-Ass Rosemary Roast Chicken with Roast Potatoes and Pan Gravy), refers to as the final stage of home cooking: “Stage four is that of the mature cook, a person who consults cookbooks for fun or novelty but for the most part has both a fully developed repertoire and – far, far more importantly – the ability to start cooking with only an idea of what the final dish will look like. There’s a pantry, there’s a refrigerator, and there is a mind capable of combining ingredients from both to Make Dinner.”
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