Last night little brother and I enjoyed a dinner that I put together using standard ingredients in my kitchen. What made it special was that I cooked without any recipes. My baking background trained me to follow recipes with precision so cooking by intuition is a big step for me. It was scary and liberating at the same time. We enjoyed a light dinner of black bean cakes with pineapple salsa and jalapeno shrimp served on soft corn tortilla with sour cream.
Although delicious, I had no plans to extract a recipe while I was cooking. It started off with chopping pineapple, red onion, cilantro, and jalapeno for the salsa. A squeeze of lime juice and some salt and pepper made the pineapple salsa tasted right. Then I moved to the black bean cake mixture. I drained the black beans that I cooked in the morning, nicely flavoured with epazote. I mashed some of the beans and tossed them together with fresh bread crumbs, sautéed red onion, garlic, and celery, chopped cilantro, cumin, chipotle powder, salt, and an egg to bind everything together. Each patty was formed by hand and dredged in cornmeal. I pan fried the patties until golden on both sides and finished them off in the oven while I tended to the shrimp. I shelled a bunch of tiger shrimps and was going to quickly sauté them with chopped jalapeno and garlic. However, I eyed the leftover cornmeal and decided to dredge the shrimps too. While the shrimps were cooking, it looked a little dry so a blob of ketchup, a splash of Worcestershire sauce, and a squeeze of lime juice gave them a sweet tangy taste. This is how most people cook, a handful of this and a shake of that until things look and taste right. Hard to imagine it’s taken me all these years to warm up to this cooking style. Perhaps that’s what people meant by the fundamental difference between cooking and baking?
There’s a certain disconnection between the meal itself and the photo you see. This separation really amuses me. At the dinner table, we laid out everything family-style and it was a casual assemble-your-own taco creation that we ate with gusto. While satisfying, it certainly does not make for attractive presentation. When I styled the food for this photo, a completely different mindset took over. Instead of thinking with my tummy, I thought with my eyes. I built the plate up from the bottom with a corn tortilla and a bed of broccoli sprouts to anchor the black bean cakes. The pineapple salsa added colour like confetti and a small dab of sour cream was the perfect place to perch a shrimp. The final touch was a sprig of cilantro and a wedge of lime. While pleasing to the eyes and the plate looks like a meticulous appetizer from a favourite restaurant, it is far removed from my dinner table. No, I do not plate my food artistically even for a Sunday dinner. A romantic dinner for two? Perhaps. I’m more interest in getting food to the table quickly while they’re at their peak of deliciousness.
This is a reason eating out remains a pleasure even though I rarely do that anymore. Obviously there are restaurants serving food beyond my cooking capabilities that I’ll always enjoy. However, even those serving food I can realistically create in my own kitchen, I appreciate the intricate teamwork of the professional kitchen that can successfully present me and my dining companions plates of beautiful and delicious food at their peak. No dried out sauce from sitting under the salamander a little too long. No lukewarm pieces of chicken and pasta. Timing is indeed the name of the game.
