If you read cookery sections in your paper, visit Facebook or other social media regularly, you can’t help coming across people’s posts about food. Nutrition is important of course, but if most of your food is fresh and includes a good portion of veggies and fruit before cooking and serving, your nutrition should be fine. Food has always been an avenue by which people can shine, shall we say.
The pandemic largely dispensed with those ‘We’re out at xyz restaurant, and look what just arrived at our table’ kinds of posts, coming as they often did with additional (boastful?) comments on an anniversary, a cruise or some fancy new something. But – they have been replaced by photos of whatever’s been cooked at home for lunch or dinner, often asking us to respond to their question ‘So what are you having tonight?’ This is Competitive Foodyism, and often sounds a bit superior. I do quite a bit of scrolling.
But just occasionally I do read what people write about the lunch or dinner they’ve just made and posted, and it can be very educational. For example, just last week I learned (no, I knew – it just confirmed) that I must be way behind, just not keeping up, as I’d never heard of black garlic !! and got out the googler. Even after reading about it, I feel no need to try it in my own cooking, even if that sounds a non-sporting attitude 😉 For a start, to make it the way someone described it, the house (or garage more likely) would be filled with garlic odour for several weeks before it’s ready to use ! So, no thankyou – fresh or fresh/frozen garlic’s just fine…. no, really, it is, thanks anyway.
Mike and I both cook, so though we don’t have a roster for whose turn it is to put lunch or dinner on the table, I’m sure it works out about 50-50. He likes to follow recipes and I only occasionally follow one, typically when I’m trying something new. I’m more likely to check what we have in the cupboard/frig/freezer, and take it from there. With many people working at home and now eating three meals there, many are looking for support and advice on how to manage the shopping for ingredients, cooking advice, and examples of recipes that have gone down well with the writer’s family, partner or flat mate.
But even the most careful providoring could lead to a situation of finding a bunch of ‘single’ apparently non-related ingredients on the pantry shelf, you wondering what the heck to do with a small can of diced jalapeno, a tetrapak of pumpkin soup, three cloves of garlic, a cup of beans, a can of diced tomato, an onion, a packet of dessicated coconut, a packet of potato flakes, several sticks of limp celery, a bunch of aging fresh cilantro, two slices of processed sandwich cheese, and a 300gm packet of dried dates … but if I do come across a suitable recipe for all that, I will publish it here 🙂
In the meantime, some of those ingredients will make a wonderful chilli bean dish that I wrote about last year:
- Note that actual quantities are not given in this recipe – it’s flexible. Start out with roughly equal quantities of everything except perhaps the garlic (!) and adjust according to your taste. It’s a recipe I doubt you could get ‘wrong’ if you use the photo for reference 😉
- Chopped onions – saute in a little oil with …
- A lot, a huge amount, of garlic. Then add the rest:
- Green chilis (or substitute a small can of diced jalapeno)
- Chicken stock.
- Hot sauce – live dangerously with a good splosh, or add gradually, and carefully, to taste.
- Cream
- Add cans of white, great northern, pinto black or any other kind of beans (preferably several kinds)
- Butter+flour or cornstarch with a bit of stock (or the juice from the can the beans were in) to thicken the sauce.
- Very tasty grated cheese should be sprinkled on top after serving.
- Brown some diced or minced chicken or beef in a little oil in a pan – and add a spoonful or two to the carnivores’ serves.
Lacking as it does the hottest exotic ingredients from SE Asia, outer Mongolia, Morocco or wherever the most recent must-go travel destinations were before the pandemic, it’s not at all trendy. But it’s easy to make, tasty, nutritious – and hearty enough to stick to the ribs on the cold winter’s nights which have arrived in the southern hemisphere.