If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, it should be no secret that I am a sucker for well-constructed mashups. Find a clever way to combine previously available elements, and I’m your new best friend.
Although my audio/video manipulation skills are amateurish at best, I’m a regular Danger Mouse in the kitchen. It’s one thing to prepare a enough of a recipe so that it can be served again a few night later, it’s a whole other skill to look in the fridge and combine disparate bits into a new — and tasty — meal.
For example, here is what I made from extra salmon from this meal, morel mushrooms from this meal, and hollandaise sauce from this meal:
Voilá: pan-seared salmon with morel mushrooms, haricots verts, and hollandaise (with an extra piece of duck roulade as an appetizer).
What to do with frozen quail, extra asparagus salad (an upcoming post), some pomegranate jus, and the last of the black truffles?
Serve black truffle risotto (also an upcoming post), followed by grilled quail in pomegranate jus with asparagus salad. Dessert for this dinner was also a mashup: chocolate idiot cake with red beet ice cream and candied walnuts.
Cook enough of your own meals and you can’t help but wind up with a fridge full of new meal components. So, the next time someone complains “leftovers again?”, you can tell them “It’s not leftovers, it’s a food mashup. It’s art.”
Now if I can only figure out what to combine with the extra Bacon Explosion…