Food as grub
I got to thinking about my food post from last night, and in particular the recipe I improvised. That recipe will continue to transform, BTW. Today with the leftover rice/kale stuff, I’ll add a chopped yellow bell pepper, about 3 oz chicken breast cut into chunks, and a splash of red wine, and cover and simmer that, stirring occasionally, for 10-12 minutes, then let it sit a bit with lid on.
That will get another meal, but there will be some left. Probably I’ll add a little more liquid (stock, for example), cauliflower and carrots from the CSA share, and curry powder and end with a curry with chutney topping. If the curry is too thin (I like thicker mixes), I’ll just add 1-2 Tbsp chia seed and simmer a bit: that will firm it right up plus add some fiber, protein, and omega-3.
I got to thinking about this, and how I now view food as “grub,” in which preparation is less important than content. (Let me say at the outset, though, that the results of this approach are judged just as with any recipe: if I like the aromas, tastes, and flavors, the result is good; if I don’t, it’s bad. The issue is not the pleasure the food provides: I get plenty of that from what I cook, as The Wife will testify.)
The usual approach is to look for recipes that represent a particular style or cuisine: to make a meal that can be placed in a specific place on a culinary map, whether it’s American Southern or Mexican or Italian or French or Chinese or Greek or whatever. One typically uses combinations that have been worked out in a traditional context, such as the “holy trinity” of Cajun cooking (bell pepper, onion, and celery) and the mirepoix of the French (minced onion, carrot, and celery) and the various salsas of Mexico.
When you approach food as grub, those traditional combinations and ingredients are still available, of course: no reason why you can’t exploit them in your own cooking. But in the meal-skeleton approach I described, I focus mainly on the primary content (protein, starch, veg, and fat), looking at what I have on hand, and then once I find the components I will use, start to think about how to combine and cook them—will it be a stir-fry? a casserole? a stew? a soup? roasted separately and then combined? as a salad—and if so, tossed? or composed? And how can I increase its appeal with the various condiments I keep on hand?
As I work out in my head what the meal will be, I may well indeed use some traditional combinations from this particular cuisine or that, but the point is that I also consider cuisine-independent choices such as adding chia seed to curry. I feel free to improvise the content and format of the meal, so long as I meet the distribution requirements I mentioned above.
This is sort of a low form of cookery, unschooled in the principles of a particular cuisine, and it will never reach heights of refinement. But for day to day eating—and eating a soundly balanced diet in the right amounts—it works quite well. And it tastes good, too. But I do recognize that this is grub, not cuisine, haute or basse.
