I think they say that necessity is the mother of invention. I tend to misquote things like that pretty often, so I could be wrong, but since you're reading my blog, I assume that you're more interested in what I say than what they say. In any case, necessity has always proven to be a powerful force in my creative process, and nowhere is this more evident than my cooking. I began my education on the subject in college, using the best in canned and defrost-able goods to give myself cheap and tasty sustenance, but my true prowess over makeshift-cooking was forged in the Peace Corps, where limited ingredients and lack of certain nutrients forced me to stretch the limits of my palate's comfort zone to provide myself with a diet that wouldn't leave me bored, gagging, or malnourished. I'm sure that my opinion of many of my "successes" have been tainted by limited variety and lowered standards, but I think that there are a few gems among my repertoire which some of you folks might appreciate too. These recipes have simple ingredients, are pretty easy to make, and were mostly all made up as I was going along (so don't expect any kind of exact measurements, short of what I was able to eyeball at the time of cooking). So for the first time in print, and just in time for the Jewish holiday season, I bring you "The Best of Chef Ablaye's Makeshift Fusion Cuisine."
PanJakes
The idea of an alternative pancake named after myself came about one day while I was in my village in Mali. I wanted pancakes, but I didn't have any milk or sugar, and the clouds were gushing water like God's bidet, so going shopping wasn't an enticing prospect. I could either make the blandest pancakes ever with flour, water, oil, and the one egg I had left, or I could break out my Mad Scientist Chef's Cap and improvise. I took a look in my dry goods chest, and sitting right on top was one of the most versatile ingredients in the improv-chef's collection: dry-packaged vegetable soup mix, courtesy of Mom and her care packages. Now, I am not a fan of brothy soups – I like to feel like I'm eating food, not drinking it. These little 10 gram packets of soup powder with tiny nibs of dried carrot, green bean, tomato, and corn did not a meal make.
But lo and behold, I was able to find a few good uses for the stock after all. One of them is to toss it into a pot with rice and water and make some vegetable soup-flavored rice, which is quite good. Even more surprisingly tasty was my idea on that soggy and hungry day: make it into a PanJake! I won't bother with the specifics of the recipe here, because if you don't know how to make a pancake, there are half a million folks on Google who will gladly explain it, and my recipe, at least the first time I made it, is precisely the same as any of them, only instead of sugar and milk, you toss in the soup mix and water. No other spices or salt are needed, since the mix takes care of that. If your soup mix doesn't come with tiny dried chunks of veggie, you should dice up some yourself to add flavor, and a few nutrients.
I will add that the second time I made my veggie-soup PanJakes, I tried something a bit different. I used the same recipe, only with more flour, less water, more baking powder, and less heat under the frying pan. This allowed me to make a thicker, fluffier PanJake, which could be cut in half and used as a flavorful sandwich bun - it goes great with tuna or cold cuts. I've also since expanded on the idea of the PanJake to make it not just different sizes and consistencies, but different flavors too, based on whatever soup mix or other ingredients I have available: Cream of Mushroom PanJakes, Fried Tortilla-Style Curry PanJakes, Squash and Beef PanJakes (make sure to grate the squash very fine and either grind and cook or slow/pressure-cook the beef first so you can mince really tiny bits), and the other possibilities are only limited to your ingredients and daring.
Pumpkin Latkes
Well, these are basically the same as any other kind of latke, or potato pancake to you non Yiddish/German speakers. What you're going to need first is a pumpkin. I used a 1kg slice of pumpkin – about 1/6 of a whole large one – and that was plenty for a big lunch for me. So if you want it to be a main course for the family, get one that's about 3-4 kg, or 6-8 lbs. For the 1kg recipe, you also want a medium onion, some flour – I really couldn't tell you how much, but it might be around 1 cup – 2 eggs, some oil, some garlic if you want (I didn't use any when I made this, but that's only because I didn't have any), salt, and of course, some sweet-yet-savory pumpkin-friendly spices, such as nutmeg, turmeric, coriander, peppercorn, and basil.
Grate the pumpkins, dice the onions, crack the eggs, drop in a few tablespoons of oil, toss in the spices, and mix the whole thing together. Then, add flour until you get a consistency that's thin enough to glop into a pan, but thick enough that the liquid won't run around after you drop it in and turn into a PanJake. There are two ways you can cook them now. You can either do what I did and add oil to the mix and fry it on a dry teflon/non-stick pan, or you can keep the oil out of the mix and heat it up in the pan to fry the latkes in. The problem with the latter method is that while it tastes a bit better, pumpkins seem to soak up oil more than other vegetables, so you're going to go through a lot of it, and my love-handles are showing a little too much love for that. Either way, get the pan medium-high so that they have time to cook before they burn up, drop in blobs of the mix and flatten them out with a spoon or they will be much softer on the inside than the crust. Fry 'er at will!
Cookup Rice, Jake-Style
This is my own version of a Guyanese dish which itself doesn't have any specific instructions, other than throw rice into a pot with a whole bunch of local ingredients like veggies, beans, fish, and some spices, and cook it up, all together. It's simple even when locals make it, and mine is basically one variant based on my own years of culinary experience. First, take rice and water and throw it in a pot, preparing to cook it the way you would always cook rice. But before you put it on the fire, throw in small chunks of fish, curry powder (or similar spices that are used to make curry – I like coriander, turmeric, salt, plus some basil and rosemary) and coconut milk. Coconut milk is actually one of the non-negotiable ingredients; it isn't proper Cookup without coconut milk. If you don't have any fresh or canned, the powder works too but you have to wait until the water is hot before adding it. If you want a bit more authenticity, soak some beans overnight and toss them in too, but I don't usually remember to do that.
While you're cooking the rice, chop up and sauté some other complimentary veggies like garlic, onions, eggplant, bell pepper, carrot, etc. You want to cook them separately, because if there's one thing I learned while pulling kitchen-duty at Flo's house in Ireland (see my posts from May-July, 2011) it's that vegetables taste better when you roast them, grill them, sauté them, or do any damn thing at all to them besides boiling them. You need to let them burn, just a teensy tiny bit so they can caramelize and release the sugars and richer flavors. When the veggies are done, and just before the rice is finished, toss them into the pot so they can impart some of their flavor onto the rest of the rice, and wait for them to finish cooking. Break out a glass of white rum and water, gather up some mosquitoes, put on the Hindi dance beats, and enjoy, Guyanese style!
Chef Ablaye's Chowder Philosophy
I said before that I don't like soup, but give me a good chowder, stew, cholent, or anything thick and murky, and I'm a happy man. If I had to pick, I'd probably take a good cholent first to satisfy my Ashkenazic Jewish appetite, but the problem is that a proper cholent uses a lot of meat and barely, both of which can be scarce for Peace Corps Volunteers, and if you don't want to leave it cooking for the requisite 24 hours and use up all your gas, you might as well have a stew. A stew is good too, but it strikes me as a cold weather food and I tend to do Peace Corps in very hot places. Also, as I said, meat is rarely an option for me, and a stew without meat might as well just be soup, as far as I'm concerned.
That leaves my favorite fish and potato chowder recipe. Chowder is perfect: quick to cook, cheap ingredients, and it uses one of my other favorite improv-cooking ingredients besides soup mix: milk powder! That's right, milk that will never go bad, no matter how many miles there are between you and the nearest refrigerator! (Just seal the bag or can, or the ants will have a nice picnic inside it.) This is probably one of the easiest recipes I use: chop up the fish (remove the bones if there are any), chop up the veggies (which can be anything you want, but I like potatoes, carrots, onions, garlic, maybe a tomato or two, and celery if I can find it), and put them in a pot. Add water, but only enough to just cover the ingredients. Add spices, like rosemary, basil, pepper, salt, and tarragon. Boil until the potatoes are soft. If the potatoes are done, you know the fish is done too, unless you cut giant chunks of fish and tiny bits of tater. This is when you toss in the milk, or the milk powder, which I prefer to use since it's also a decent thickener. You don't want to overcook the stuff in the pot or it will all fall apart and you won't know a chunk of fish from a carrot, so if everything's cooked and it's still too watery (as I said, I like it THICK), toss in some corn meal or flour and mix it really well. And presto chango, you're a chowderhead!
Well, that's the best of what will most likely appeal to those of you who have ordinary folks who've never started a club with your PCV buddy called The Culinary Adventurers Club. If you end up trying any of these recipes, let me know how they came out! And if you have any good ones of your own that meet my criteria – cheap, stovetop-friendly, and yummy – send them to me as well. Until then, as they say in Mali, na duminike!
PanJakes
The idea of an alternative pancake named after myself came about one day while I was in my village in Mali. I wanted pancakes, but I didn't have any milk or sugar, and the clouds were gushing water like God's bidet, so going shopping wasn't an enticing prospect. I could either make the blandest pancakes ever with flour, water, oil, and the one egg I had left, or I could break out my Mad Scientist Chef's Cap and improvise. I took a look in my dry goods chest, and sitting right on top was one of the most versatile ingredients in the improv-chef's collection: dry-packaged vegetable soup mix, courtesy of Mom and her care packages. Now, I am not a fan of brothy soups – I like to feel like I'm eating food, not drinking it. These little 10 gram packets of soup powder with tiny nibs of dried carrot, green bean, tomato, and corn did not a meal make.
But lo and behold, I was able to find a few good uses for the stock after all. One of them is to toss it into a pot with rice and water and make some vegetable soup-flavored rice, which is quite good. Even more surprisingly tasty was my idea on that soggy and hungry day: make it into a PanJake! I won't bother with the specifics of the recipe here, because if you don't know how to make a pancake, there are half a million folks on Google who will gladly explain it, and my recipe, at least the first time I made it, is precisely the same as any of them, only instead of sugar and milk, you toss in the soup mix and water. No other spices or salt are needed, since the mix takes care of that. If your soup mix doesn't come with tiny dried chunks of veggie, you should dice up some yourself to add flavor, and a few nutrients.
I will add that the second time I made my veggie-soup PanJakes, I tried something a bit different. I used the same recipe, only with more flour, less water, more baking powder, and less heat under the frying pan. This allowed me to make a thicker, fluffier PanJake, which could be cut in half and used as a flavorful sandwich bun - it goes great with tuna or cold cuts. I've also since expanded on the idea of the PanJake to make it not just different sizes and consistencies, but different flavors too, based on whatever soup mix or other ingredients I have available: Cream of Mushroom PanJakes, Fried Tortilla-Style Curry PanJakes, Squash and Beef PanJakes (make sure to grate the squash very fine and either grind and cook or slow/pressure-cook the beef first so you can mince really tiny bits), and the other possibilities are only limited to your ingredients and daring.
Pumpkin Latkes
Well, these are basically the same as any other kind of latke, or potato pancake to you non Yiddish/German speakers. What you're going to need first is a pumpkin. I used a 1kg slice of pumpkin – about 1/6 of a whole large one – and that was plenty for a big lunch for me. So if you want it to be a main course for the family, get one that's about 3-4 kg, or 6-8 lbs. For the 1kg recipe, you also want a medium onion, some flour – I really couldn't tell you how much, but it might be around 1 cup – 2 eggs, some oil, some garlic if you want (I didn't use any when I made this, but that's only because I didn't have any), salt, and of course, some sweet-yet-savory pumpkin-friendly spices, such as nutmeg, turmeric, coriander, peppercorn, and basil.
Grate the pumpkins, dice the onions, crack the eggs, drop in a few tablespoons of oil, toss in the spices, and mix the whole thing together. Then, add flour until you get a consistency that's thin enough to glop into a pan, but thick enough that the liquid won't run around after you drop it in and turn into a PanJake. There are two ways you can cook them now. You can either do what I did and add oil to the mix and fry it on a dry teflon/non-stick pan, or you can keep the oil out of the mix and heat it up in the pan to fry the latkes in. The problem with the latter method is that while it tastes a bit better, pumpkins seem to soak up oil more than other vegetables, so you're going to go through a lot of it, and my love-handles are showing a little too much love for that. Either way, get the pan medium-high so that they have time to cook before they burn up, drop in blobs of the mix and flatten them out with a spoon or they will be much softer on the inside than the crust. Fry 'er at will!
Cookup Rice, Jake-Style
This is my own version of a Guyanese dish which itself doesn't have any specific instructions, other than throw rice into a pot with a whole bunch of local ingredients like veggies, beans, fish, and some spices, and cook it up, all together. It's simple even when locals make it, and mine is basically one variant based on my own years of culinary experience. First, take rice and water and throw it in a pot, preparing to cook it the way you would always cook rice. But before you put it on the fire, throw in small chunks of fish, curry powder (or similar spices that are used to make curry – I like coriander, turmeric, salt, plus some basil and rosemary) and coconut milk. Coconut milk is actually one of the non-negotiable ingredients; it isn't proper Cookup without coconut milk. If you don't have any fresh or canned, the powder works too but you have to wait until the water is hot before adding it. If you want a bit more authenticity, soak some beans overnight and toss them in too, but I don't usually remember to do that.
While you're cooking the rice, chop up and sauté some other complimentary veggies like garlic, onions, eggplant, bell pepper, carrot, etc. You want to cook them separately, because if there's one thing I learned while pulling kitchen-duty at Flo's house in Ireland (see my posts from May-July, 2011) it's that vegetables taste better when you roast them, grill them, sauté them, or do any damn thing at all to them besides boiling them. You need to let them burn, just a teensy tiny bit so they can caramelize and release the sugars and richer flavors. When the veggies are done, and just before the rice is finished, toss them into the pot so they can impart some of their flavor onto the rest of the rice, and wait for them to finish cooking. Break out a glass of white rum and water, gather up some mosquitoes, put on the Hindi dance beats, and enjoy, Guyanese style!
Chef Ablaye's Chowder Philosophy
I said before that I don't like soup, but give me a good chowder, stew, cholent, or anything thick and murky, and I'm a happy man. If I had to pick, I'd probably take a good cholent first to satisfy my Ashkenazic Jewish appetite, but the problem is that a proper cholent uses a lot of meat and barely, both of which can be scarce for Peace Corps Volunteers, and if you don't want to leave it cooking for the requisite 24 hours and use up all your gas, you might as well have a stew. A stew is good too, but it strikes me as a cold weather food and I tend to do Peace Corps in very hot places. Also, as I said, meat is rarely an option for me, and a stew without meat might as well just be soup, as far as I'm concerned.
That leaves my favorite fish and potato chowder recipe. Chowder is perfect: quick to cook, cheap ingredients, and it uses one of my other favorite improv-cooking ingredients besides soup mix: milk powder! That's right, milk that will never go bad, no matter how many miles there are between you and the nearest refrigerator! (Just seal the bag or can, or the ants will have a nice picnic inside it.) This is probably one of the easiest recipes I use: chop up the fish (remove the bones if there are any), chop up the veggies (which can be anything you want, but I like potatoes, carrots, onions, garlic, maybe a tomato or two, and celery if I can find it), and put them in a pot. Add water, but only enough to just cover the ingredients. Add spices, like rosemary, basil, pepper, salt, and tarragon. Boil until the potatoes are soft. If the potatoes are done, you know the fish is done too, unless you cut giant chunks of fish and tiny bits of tater. This is when you toss in the milk, or the milk powder, which I prefer to use since it's also a decent thickener. You don't want to overcook the stuff in the pot or it will all fall apart and you won't know a chunk of fish from a carrot, so if everything's cooked and it's still too watery (as I said, I like it THICK), toss in some corn meal or flour and mix it really well. And presto chango, you're a chowderhead!
Well, that's the best of what will most likely appeal to those of you who have ordinary folks who've never started a club with your PCV buddy called The Culinary Adventurers Club. If you end up trying any of these recipes, let me know how they came out! And if you have any good ones of your own that meet my criteria – cheap, stovetop-friendly, and yummy – send them to me as well. Until then, as they say in Mali, na duminike!
