Not a ton of content today, just a friendly reminder to be your own private chef. Wake up with a hard-to-satisfy craving? (no, not that kind) Just call on your internal private chef to whip you up a bespoke meal. All it takes is a little lazy preparation. it helps to do a little experimental shopping here and there.

See a vegetable someplace that you’ve never eaten? Grab a few. See a sauce that looks good but has no english on the package? Pick up a little bottle. Once you’ve done this for a few months, just when convenient, you’ll have a much more solid idea of the things you love and what they’re made of, or what they *could* be made of, in a pinch. Just take a chance- most of the most interesting stuff out there is cheap as chips, and that’s cheap, jackson!

This morning, with a fridge full of next to nothin’*, I unearthed a lonely king oyster mushroom, a nub of veggie chicken, some snap peas, the last of a sad bunch of cilantro, and a little scrap of pancit noodles.

This all went into a smoking hot frying pan with a couple of fine-chopped thai chilies and 2 cloves of garlic. Finished off with a sauce made from peanut butter, kimchee starter (my new fave thing- I’ll post about it once I get a little more info), china hot oil from the Dol Ho dim sum place in Chinatown, and a little lime juice and Maggi.

A few minutes later, a full-color version of the dish above was ready and waiting, along with a pint glass of Blue Bottle coffee, dripped from a Melitta cone. I couldn’t have bought this dish anywhere in the city. Making it it took 5 minutes, and was no harder than: Choose stuff, chop stuff, cook stuff, mix sauce, stir fry stuff in sauce, eat. Needless to say, it was just what the doc ordered. The smell even roused my hung-over housemate from his bed of pain.

…and just think what I can whip up once I actually restock the place!

* I realize that a lot of people wouldn’t call having all this crap “next to nothin’”, but what I want to foster in folks is a certain element of constant exploration, where you might be picking up random food items regularly enough to find yourself having bottomed out your fridge with a few things like these still hanging around.

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