The joy of cooking for close family is that they understand. They understand that not every meal is spectacular. They understand that I experiment in the kitchen. They understand that a meal doesn’t necessarily need to impress. They understand that sometimes I throw random ingredients together and the result may be surprisingly scrumptious if we’re lucky.
Weekend is the time Little Brother and I share our family meals. Those are often busy days so preparing a meticulous supper over an afternoon is not the norm. Instead, I have an arbitrary challenge for myself to put food on the dinner table within an hour. This definitely calls for quick recipes using whatever ingredients I can easily reach. Welcome to the strange world of fusion home cooking.
What you see in the photo is a bowl of warm Israeli couscous with hot smoked salmon and cucumbers. I cooked the couscous in dashi (Japanese stock) and dressed the dish with grated ginger, Aleppo pepper, and toasted sesame seeds. The flavour was faintly Japanese but the ingredients were all over the globe. What I can tell you though was how much we enjoyed the one-bowl meal. I highly doubt that it would be on offer at any restaurant menus but it was exactly the kind of nourishing dinner we love at home.
Sometimes our dinner makes much less culinary sense. The other night we ate soba noodle bowls topped with salmon cake, pan fried tiger shrimp coated in panko, and spicy green bean stir fry with smoked tofu and garlic scapes. Everything tasted wonderful on its own but piling them into the same meal was absolutely incoherent. It was an off-night for the chef but the cook did her job to satisfaction.
As food blogger, dinner easily turns into a platform for future writing material. A well-planned menu certainly is more fun to ruminate but I equally enjoy off-the-cuff cooking which reflects the more intimate nature of cooking for loved ones. In case you’re curious, I save all my brown/beige recipes for such occasions too. Sometimes, it is more important to just enjoy the moment, the company, and the food than worry about making my dinner look photogenic.
