Cooking Without Recipes

Living outside the U.S. these past several years, I've gotten into the habit of cooking without recipes. It was a necessity, rather than a choice, when I lived in Kyrgyzstan as I seldom had access to even half of the ingredients required to complete the most basic dishes. So, for most meals, I would jump on the culinary high wire and take whatever ingredients I had and would make the best-tasting dish I could conjure up, inventing as I went along.

Though my current home in Indonesia has wider access to ingredients, because of COVID I cannot wander to the grocers at a moment's whim if I suddenly discover I am lacking something, as I try to limit my trips out. Tonight I was contemplating making Chicken Biryani until I realized I was missing a few ingredients, including one of the two essential ones: proper rice.  To make Biryani without basmati rice, using the organic brown rice I had in my cupboard, would have created an unimaginable culinary atrocity. So, what to do?

I cut up a sweet potato, a carrot, some onion, and red cabbage and combined it with two tablespoons of biryani paste for a strong kick of spicy goodness and three tablespoons of coconut cream for a bit of sweet richness. Added some leftover baked beans, red quinoa, and lentils to make it a substantial dish, then cooked it gently for a couple hours. Had a Zoom meeting during my usual dinnertime, so it stewed and simmered another hour more. When I finally was able to sit down to eat my "Biryani Stew", though not a visual triumph, I realized that I had created one of the most delightfully tasty dishes I had ever cooked in my recipe-less universe.  

As I savored the warm richness of my Biryani Stew, I realized that cooking without recipes was really what life was all about too. We seldom have most of the necessary ingredients needed to follow recipes for happiness and fulfillment. Instead we are left precariously on life's high wire searching for ways to create masterpieces from our insufficient pantries. How often we find ourselves needing to live without recipes, making something from our sorrows, scraping together the ingredients to construct meaning where we see little, creating something palatable from the bitter greens from life's garden, along with the times we discover mountains of honeycomb to bake desserts of celebration too. There are times when life-recipes are useful in our existence to guide us along the way, but so often we must be prepared to take what little we have on hand to improvise as best we can. 

May you have full nourishment tonight and always, at your dinner table and throughout your universe, even when there are no recipes in sight.