Magical Kitchens Need Magical Foods
Once I started work, with a place of my own (rental, of course!), I got into cooking big time. I shopped weekly, starting with the butcher and fishmonger, before schlepping around the supermarket for a bunch of veggies, fruit and staples. Being single, I did not need much, but somehow I still found myself ending the week with a mishmash of wilting, shrivelled and rubbery fruit and veg. I also found myself dashing out late in the evening mid-way through a recipe, for which I had forgotten one of those annoying ‘essential’ ingredients.
Back then, my ability to pair and combine foods into tasty and flavoursome dishes wasn’t that great. Recipes helped, but some proved disappointing. Spotting the good recipes from the ‘dud’ ones proved challenging. Over time, I learnt the fundamental ‘rules’ for combining different foods and how to use up the foods I bought in different ways. Beetroots were my first breakthrough. Sweet and earthy, I could turn out five different dishes in a flash, to go with cheese, yoghurt, citrus fruits, nuts, vinegar and, amazingly, chocolate to make remoulades, salads, tartins and chocolate and beetroot cake!
The trouble with recipes is that each one revolves around a main ingredient – to which you add a bunch of other ingredients that complement. Not just other foods, but also scents (herbs and spices), condiments (oils, vinegars, mustards, sauces and pastes) and maybe some booze for depth. If you rotate through very different main ingredients, you need a large range of other ingredients to go with them. That gets expensive.
Unless you are an oligarch, stocking your kitchen with every ingredient that you might need to dream up one of your own recipes alongside those that you have discovered.
“Magical Foods” is simply an organising principle for stocking your kitchen.
For every Magical Food, there are known and tested combinations for creating tasty and flavoursome meals, to which you add enhancers as appropriate: herbs and spices, oils and vinegars, sauces and pastes, and an occasional splash of booze.
Variety comes from taking those Magical Foods into different culinary directions, for example, African, Asian, Caribbean, Chinese, European, Indian, Japanese, Korean, Mexican, Middle Eastern, Nordic and Peruvian.
In lockdown, cooking 24/7, you will be doubling or tripling the number of meals you need to make. Following the organising principle of Magical Foods, you can keep your food budget down, reduce wastage and introduce more variety.
Chicken is one of my Magical Foods, so next week, I will be buying a far bigger chicken than I would normally do and then:
Roast it for Sunday lunch;
Shred the leftovers for a warm salad mid-week; and
Put everything left (bones included) in a pot, chuck in some veggies (possibly on the turn), herbs and spices to create a spicy chicken noodle soup and freeze it for another day.
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