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Failure of Imagination

Every cook has a time in his or her kitchen, of staring blankly at the shelves and wondering what on earth to make for dinner.  Even I, someone who usually has a few ideas burning slowly on my "need to make soon" list, or have a particular protein element in mind, can struggle to wrangle things into an entire meal without condemning my household to endless repetition.

I know that I am susceptible to food jags.  For example, when asparagus is in season, I embrace it to the point where even the baking sheet seems to give me attitude when I lay down its little blanket of foil.  The highly compartmentalized portion of my brain actually enjoys the seasonal nature of food, because I can greet an ingredient with whole-hearted enthusiasm after a long absence, and give myself an enforced reprieve from the weary repetition of things that I will gladly re-embrace again, once sufficient time has passed.

I hear stories, of course, of those people who relentlessly take an identical lunch to work or school every day for a shocking length of time, taking some obscure comfort in the consistency, I imagine.  I, however, live in a house where neither of us really wants to have the same thing more than twice in a row, unless it undergoes substantial reinvention in the meantime.  This is where the freezer and the lunch containers really come in handy, because there will be some point down the road when that unending pot of chili (for which you may or may not have already developed some sort of nickname) or soup that didn't move that quickly (because your plans kept changing) will be a blessed thing to haul lovingly out of the freezer and gleefully defrost for an almost effortless lunch or dinner.  However, when the freezer-stocks are low and the tantalizing spark of creativity remains elusive, you still have to put some sort of dinner on the table.  After all, there's only so much delivery a tummy can take.

I try to plan ahead.  Still, there are times when I realize that I have served virtually no vegetable side-dish other than broccoli, or perhaps salad (green or coleslaw, depending on the season) for weeks on end.  This isn't quite as desperate as it sounds, since it should be noted that I do make a lot of one-pot or two-pot dishes that have the vegetables already incorporated, and there is no actual resulting deficiency in our diet.  However, as much as we like broccoli (and salads), there really comes a time when one has to shake things up.

Sometimes, it is not even that there are few options to choose from: I simply need a side dish, and gravitate toward broccoli.  However, it is not only the lonely vegetable category that suffers from failure of imagination.  Sometimes, it's the main event.  A Sunday family dinner, perhaps, or, for example, the tradition of an established night for a particular dish, summed up best by pre-vegetarian Lisa Simpson, who said "Hm. Thursday. Meatloaf night. As it was, is now, and ever shall be" and, moments later complains of being doomed to Friday pork chop night "from cradle to grave."

I should probably confess that my first reaction to seeing the above sequence (The Simpsons, "One Fish, Two Fish, Blowfish, Blue Fish" Episode 24, 7F11, aired January 24, 1991), my first thought was "why don't I have a meatloaf night? I like meatloaf!"  Actually, when I watch reruns of that episode, I still have that same thought.  But then I remember how long it takes me to finish a single meatloaf, and the idea pales a bit.  Besides, I did once have a regular thing:  Monday used to be "Noodle Night" featuring the only non-fried (and no MSG) brand of Asian instant noodles I could find, topped with spicy baby bok choi, and maybe a few gyoza from the freezer.  This eventually evolved into ditching the packet food (the seasoning packets were always a bit too salty - one packet between two noodle packages was entirely sufficient) and starting from scratch. Shockingly, this didn't take much longer than the pre-fab stuff, but such thin noodles (soba or somen) take very little time to cook.  Eventually, I noticed that I was starting to make the same supper almost any night that I didn't really feel much like cooking (or heating the entire house up by doing so), and had to forcibly remind myself that there were other options for easy, hot-weather dinners.

Noodle Night didn't last past summer, however, which really is the optimal time for such a meal.  We got a little tired of the repetition, frankly, and when autumn rolled around I quickly reverted to my braises, stews, and soups, happily heating up the kitchen with roast chickens and pots of chile con carne.  However, my tendency to rely on repeated side dishes continued unabated.  I discovered a tasty treatment for carrots in Spicy Carrot Coins, and it landed on the table four times in two weeks - just about the entire slate of meals requiring a separate, substantial vegetable. After months where carrots appeared only in salad format, I was suddenly headed for a beta-carotene overload.  I wanted to make something different, I just couldn't somehow think of anything, and every meal that I wanted to make seemed to be a perfect partner for the carrot dish.

This winter, I have started roasting cauliflower.  It's a beautiful thing - golden and crunch on the outside, with a salty hit from a good dusting of parmesan, and tender, almost creamy on the inside, yielding gracefully to the tooth and disappearing down the throat at an almost alarming rate.  I have had to forcibly restrain myself from beating this dish to death with overuse - however, I can think of almost nothing else to do with cauliflower.  Aside, you know, from curry, or minestrone, but those either do not occur to me or are not appropriate to the rest of the meal plan when I'm staring dinner hour in the face.

Sometimes, it's not the preparing that lacks variety, simply the thing itself.  It's true that most asparagus and most Brussels sprouts meet their fates in the oven, at my house (although I branched out at Christmas with Orangette's Cream-Braised Brussels Sprouts). Some of that is because I really like them done that way, and some of it is because it is extremely easy, which I confess are the same reasons that I have toast for breakfast more often than anything else. When you are buying things that are in season, though, it is easy to gravitate to your favourites, and prepare them in your usual fashion as opposed to investigating new and different methods and modes...especially on a rainy Tuesday, when you got home late and would be all for eating something different and delicious, but are not entirely convinced about cooking it.

Even why I don't fall entirely into the trap of identical repetition, I can still struggle with getting enough variety  within a given week, or even month.  At some point, it seems, I've beaten almost every vegetable half to death.  Let us remember in silent amazement, the Month of the Yam.  Orange-fleshed sweet potatoes, actually, because I do know the difference between a yam and a sweet potato, no matter what the store labels say.  I was raised calling them yams, though, so please bear with me.  Yams were at first roasted whole, split and sprinkled with coarse salt and cumin (highly recommended, by the way - no butter necessary). Then they became oven-baked yam fries, spritzed carefully with canola oil and tossed with a variety of seasonings.  Next, they were diced into Thai curries, then pureed with coconut into a Caribbean-accented mash.  They even went into a topping for Shepherd's Pie, if I recall correctly, creating an overly-sweet element that never did firm up the way it ought.  I quite exhausted all the possibilities of the yam, and grew a little sick of the sight of them.

As I mentioned, I do try to plan ahead.  Because of this, I have whole calendars indicating the dinners served on the various nights.  I know how often we go out to eat, and I can tell you at a fairly easy glance, how much chicken we ate in a given month, for example.  I have the data, and I can see the patterns.  Sometimes, in fact, I look back through those calendars to find dishes that I've forgotten about, or neglected, when I am trying to break out of a rut.  However, if those ingredients are out of season, I'm pretty much out of luck.  I'm pretty sure there's a joke in there about being doomed to repeat what we have not learned from, but right now I've got to figure out what to make for dinner.  Perhaps pizza...a veritable catch-all of available vegetables, and nary a side-dish needed.

February 2007