Improv

[Elizabeth Bear]

So I use Chaz's muffin recipe (http://cvillette.livejournal.com/60446.html)as a base for many riffs.

Today, midway through muffin making (lemon ginger walnut), I realized I was out of yogurt AND sour cream AND ice cream, which I use interchangeably with one another to make the muffins moist.

Peering into the fridge, I realized my choices were cottage cheese and silken tofu.

I went with the tofu.

What do you know? Not bad. And hey, Sparkpeople tells me they have seven grams of protein!

What sort of emergency recipe rescues have you worked out over the years?

[HebrewRose]

All I can give you are the failed ones, I'm afraid.

Generally, Tons of Water is not a good ingredient for chocolate cookies. :- ) They came out tasting like burned water. Not chocolate.

[miminnehaha]

MG, you already know I don't really cook or bake or anything. But I do actually make banana bread fairly often, and not from a box! Sugar, flour, eggs, crisco (does crisco count as cheating? Or just modern lard?) well, the last time I went to make some, I forgot to check, and sure enough- no milk!* no milk, no sour cream, no yogurt. So I substituted chocolate Ensure. It was actually good enough that i'd do it again.

*kids are such picky eaters they mostly subsist on cold cereal, so running out of milk from one moment to the next is a regular occurrence.

[miminnehaha]

I may have mentioned my lack of kitchen flair to you as well, Bear- commenting on the not-an-aop while recovering from anesthesia is not the easiest thing I've ever done. My fandom can be a little... Dedicated?!

[DavidG]

My fandom can be a little... Dedicated?!

I think obsessive-compulsive is the phrase you're looking for.

(says the delta who hasn't slept in 27 hours...)

[MadGastronomer]

Crisco is not cheating. It is not modern lard, either. It is simply another solid fat with its own properties and uses.

Ensure is cheating, but improv is for cheating, so that's ok.

[CJ]

"I'm in Poland. I have never tried to bake anything completely without a recipe. I have found what I'm reasonably sure is baking soda. There is no liquid vanilla. What is this? Vanilla sugar? I'll try it. No chocolate chips. Chopping up a bar (or two) of chocolate, no problem. No non-metric measuring devices. No recipe handy. Um. Improvise! Put together ingredients. Mix. Taste. Pretty good, maybe a bit more flour. Maybe some more of this vanilla sugar. Mmm.

Too flat. Maybe add more flour. Nope, still too flat. Tasty though. They'll live with flat. Dang, but that improvisation resulted in a fuckton of cookies"

Several hours later, at the party, after much eating and drinking and drinking and drinking, cookie bag is being passed around the room. Someone asks "What did you put in these things, crack? I can't stop eating them!"

Result: Improvisation was a success! Note that this was in a smallish town in Poland in 1995. And I had never heard of the concept of vanilla sugar. Ah, but I quickly became enlightened!

[tylik]

I don't really cook from recipes, for the most part, so I rarely end up in the situation where the recipe needs X, and X is no where to be found. (When I was writing about food, learning to turn things into recipes was an interesting process, though now I pretty much habitually keep a running log of what's gone into stuff in my head, and can spit out a recipe on demand. It still feels like a misrepresentation.)

When I was a kid, my mother once left eggplants in the over almost an hour longer than intended when making baba ganoush. The baba ganoush was the best ever. My response: hey, that must be how to make really good baba ganoush. (And it is. It's even better in a wood burning oven.) Her response: repeat the story, and go back to her old way. (And then whine because it's unfair to have one's kid cook better than you. Speaking of unfair...)

A lot of the more improvisational things I've done more recently have been working around dietary restrictions. For a while, one of the women attending the local zendo was gluten intolerant, so I was making a lot of fruit and nut breads without wheat (or oats, or barley, because they're often contaminated with wheat - those two hurt more). Is it confidence or a self-destructive streak that had me mostly bringing them without a test run? They generally worked pretty well, though I want to play more with the buckwheat gingerbread. (Though I have come to love baking with buckwheat. At least in the winter.) And I still have grave reserves about rice bran - it's fine in small quantities, but more concentrated... blech. Weird bitters.

One of my good friends in Seattle is deathly allergic to all alliums, which has made him a fun person to cook for. I got to make him the first pesto he was ever able to eat. (Omit garlic, use a small amount of black truffle oil. The allium eaters in the bunch, who were able to do a side by side comparison with the pesto with garlic agreed that the black truffle oil pesto was at least as good.) That was part of a multi-course allium free Italian meal... but I don't get to cook for him much these days.

I do a lot of vegan baking... but vegan baking is pretty easy. (Though I've had a lot of bad vegan baking, so maybe it can be confusing or something.) Actually, I mostly cook vegan in general, with the exception of the occasional poached duck egg on soba noodles, but it's pretty rare that there's an improvisational element beyond "Huh. I want to make something involving fresh pineapple and peppers. Mm. And thai basil...."

[MadGastronomer]

Substitutions are so natural and normal to me that I don't really keep track of them, so I don't actually have any good stories.
Maybe the time I went to make pasta with roasted asparagus and goat cheese sauce, and used garlic scapes instead of asparagus? That was pretty tasty.
But I cook most things by "What have I got?"

[Elizabeth Bear]

I too mostly cook by "What have I got."

On the other hand, recipes are really useful when making something new/unfamiliar, or when baking. There is something to be said for consistent results in one's muffins, once one has found a really good way to make muffins. (I thought silken tofu for sour cream was actually pretty clever. And now I know how to make my muffins vegan and lactose-free, should it be necessary.)

[MadGastronomer]

Oh, I always use recipes when baking. I just don't bake very much.

[tylik]

It used to be that for baking I almost always used recipes when I was working with chemical leavening, and almost never did when I was working with yeast. But over time more and more things in the chemical leavening side have become comfortable for me to make without a recipe.

If I were making serious pastry, though, I'd be using a recipe, because I don't know pastry. And considering my diet, generally, I'm not that likely to take up pastry serious. It's funny - I don't miss eating meat, or richer food... but I do miss the technical challenge of cooking with it, occasionally. Or maybe not so much the challenge as the opportunity for spectacle. It's so immoderate.

[MadGastronomer]

You could take up chocolate or sugar work. Or don't-call-it-molecular-gastronomy.

[tylik]

Chocolate I can see*. And I keep on thinking of playing with some matcha and cocoa butter confections. Sugar is another thing I do very little of, and mostly if I'm working with added sweetening I use honey or maple syrup. (And not that much of it.) I'm just terminally boring.

* OMG, one of my favorite chocolate makers, Grenada, is making an 81% bar now, which is getting into dark enough to eat territory for me. So ordering... It's a splendid company, and really in about my top two or three for chocolates by taste. Very fruity and full bodied.

[MadGastronomer]

While chocolate work (which is chocolate sculpture, basically) is edible, sugarwork is not intended to be eaten. It's just for showing off. You CAN eat it, but it just tastes like sugar.

You said you wanted something immoderate.