Miss Manners: i have no recipe to give

[minoanmiss]

DEAR MISS MANNERS: Cooking is one of my passions, and I love to share my food with others. And while I love positive feedback, I am sometimes taken aback by the automatic request for a recipe as soon as someone compliments something I've made.

Unfortunately, I do not use recipes. I am an intuitive cook, who many times throws things together. I have explained several times to these people that I do not use recipes, but continue to get asked.

I am not a curmudgeon, and not trying to keep my creations' ingredients secret; I just don't have the time, energy or memory to remember everything that went into a dish. What would be a good response to the constant, "This is delicious. Recipe, please!"?

GENTLE READER: "I made it up and don't have one. But I'm flattered that you liked it so much. You'll just have to come over again and I'll try to re-create it."

Comments

[minoanmiss]

Hahahahah you reminded me of the best part of my childhood, hanging out with my maternal grandmotgher, including when she cooked.

[full_metal_ox]

Would you be interested in a recipe (as best as I could recall the specifics, a day after the fact) for a soup that I completely ad-libbed for company?

[minoanmiss]

Totally!

In exchange I just posted a little photoessay about a recent cooking adventure.

Recipe first, followed by backstory.

[full_metal_ox]

I LIKE YELLOW THINGS SOUP.

2½ cups water.

1 tablespoon powdered chicken bouillon.

1 tablespoon powdered vegetable bouillon.

1 cup fideo noodles.

1 Opal Apple, diced into 1/4-inch cubes.

4 ounces Bread Cheese, ditto.

Eight large extra-spicy tortilla chips.

Put the bouillon into a 9-inch circular glass microwave dish, and pour in the water to dissolve it; add the solid ingredients; cover the dish and microwave on HIGH for about eight minutes.

3 servings.

The specific brands I used, as a snapshot of the placetime rather than a decree:

Herb-Ox Chicken Bouillon.

Knorr’s Vegetable Bouillon (note, however, that the powdered form seems to have been discontinued, at least in the Anglo-American market.)

Fideo are fine short Mexican noodles—-less than an inch long—-widely used in struggle and comfort cookery; I probably used Moderna brand. Broken angel-hair pasta would do the job, as would any small durum pasta such as stars or alphabets.

Opal is a trademarked (as of 2024) crisp sweet apple cultivar with warm golden-yellow skin, available seasonally in the U.S. and Canada.

Bread Cheese is a type of cheese named not because it contains bread or is any more recommended for sandwiches than any other cheese, but because it’s pressed into a firm rectangular block and grilled, resembling a slice of toast. I’m told pan-fried Halloumi is similar.

Paqui Haunted Ghost Pepper Tortilla Chips; the company has since folded. Those were pretty ferocious to my palette; note that I used them to flavor a fair amount of liquid that also contained fat and dairy.

Backstory infodump begins here.

This improvisation was committed on a wet wintry March 11, 2022 in Dayton, Ohio. A traveling nurse paying me house calls had been working herself into the verge of a nervous breakdown during COVID, and I'd promised her hot soup; these were the leftovers and pantry staples I had at hand to wrangle into a takeout carton, with some left for myself. Whether it was simply the right gesture at the right time may have had some bearing on her reaction, but she raved about the soup and demanded the recipe, claiming that she and her sister-in-law had fought over it. (I personally see potential for improvement; onions, miso, sweet bell peppers, seitan, and chicken could all fit comfortably here.)

(The soup name was inspired by the song-poem “I Like Yellow Things”, written by Tiel Faulkner and performed by Bobbi Blake: http://blogfiles.wfmu.org/KF/0507/msr5/01_-_Bobbi_Blake_-_I_Like_Yellow_Things.mp3; the topic of song-poems had come up because I’d played my nurse “City’s Hospital Patients”, a salute to health-care workers written by John Kelly and performed by Teri Summers and the Librettos: http://blogfiles.wfmu.org/DP/2007/01/023_04_Rod_Rogers_Teri_Summers_and_The_Librettos_-_Citys_Hospital_Patients.mp3

By way of explanation: there used to be mail-order music studios that would run ads in magazines, soliciting readers' poems to set to original music and dangling the tantalizing possibility that you—yes, you could be the next Carole King or Burt Bacharach! In practice, you sent in your lyrics and money, got back copies of your record, and what happened after that was 100% on you.

There was absolutely no editing, and so results ranged from embarrassing to hilarious to bewildering to astonishingly good. No matter how oddball your subject matter, puzzling your thought processes, shoehorned your rhymes, or awkward your scansion, as long as your lyrics came accompanied by $79.99 or however much, the long-suffering studio musicians at the song-poem company would compose a melody and record them, and the return letter would assure you that you had the next potential Top 40 hit! John Trubee, then seventeen, discovered as much when he sent them the following as a Social Experiment: http://blogfiles.wfmu.org/LR/spam06/28_-_Ramsey_Kearney_-_Peace_and_Love.mp3)

Re: Recipe first, followed by backstory.

[minoanmiss]

cheers in delight

More comments soon!