Culinary genius is nice when it happens, but that’s not every day, and it isn’t on schedule. Great ideas come and go, and hopefully you have the time and resources to pursue your dreams, but Wednesday is on its way, and we need to eat. I like the term culinary cleverness. Hacks, shortcuts, upgrades that make home cooking better and easier. One way to go about it is to take prepared foods and upgrade them with fresh ingredients. I picked up a box of rice pilaf, mushrooms, and shallots at Whole Foods, followed the box directions, added chopped mushrooms and sliced shallots, tossed the whole thing in my 5 quart rice cooker and moved on to making coffee and fixing breakfast. It was done before I left for the office, and I put it in the fridge for a microwave reheat when I got back to the house.
Here’s another upgrade:
A Red Baron Four Cheese frozen pizza topped with shallots, capers, and anchovies. Frozen pizza takes about twenty minutes in the oven. Plenty of time to heat up whatever toppings you want to add.
I’ve also found that when you have a leftover rice dish, adding scrambled eggs makes for a nice breakfast. Or lunch. Or dinner. I think I got the idea from the eggs included in some of my favorite versions of Chinese fried rice. And there are many other combinations that work well with leftover rice. Any canned soup just begs to be upgraded. So, three meals based on mushroom rice pilaf, maybe twenty minutes prep time all told. Good eats, not a lot of time or effort to produce–that’s a win in my book.
