My favorite dish is cleaning out the fridge on Sunday night and improvising a great medley.
The roots of creativity of cooking are hungry people trying to figure out how to take something that's not particularly fresh or tender and transform it into it something delicious that everyone will love.
I saw a cavalry captain buy vegetable soup on horseback. He carried the whole mess home in his helmet.
Juilin," she asked hesitantly, "what were you going to do with the salt and cooking oil? Not exactly," she added more quickly. "Just a general idea." He looked at her for a moment. "I do not know. But they did not, either. That is the trick of it; their minds made up worse then I ever could. I have seen a tough man break when I sent for a basket of figs and some mice.
Cooking requires confident guesswork and improvisation-- experimentation and substitution, dealing with failure and uncertainty in a creative way
What has impressed me the most about the Italians whose tables we've sat at is that they are traditional cooks but also outrageously innovative. These people are wild improvisers.
I don't really time how long it steeps, but in general I don't plan much when it comes to tea or cooking. I'm more about the feeling.
It was for bringing the cook tulip-roots instead of onions.
If I'm not writing a poem to decompress from my experiences on a movie set, I usually just cook and it's like meditative. Especially since I'm at the stage now where I don't really use measuring cups. Kind of instinctual, I just kind of prepare my own dishes as I go along.
If a lump of soot falls into the soup and you cannot conveniently get it out, stir it well in and it will give the soup a French taste.
It turns out that Molly wasn't her mother's daughter in that respect. Charity was like the MacGuyver of the kitchen. She could whip up a five-course meal for twelve from an egg, two spaghetti noodles, some household chemicals, and a stick of chewing gum. Molly ... Molly once burned my egg. My boiled egg. I don't know how.
Dinner was meat - not hunks of meat, as in Australia, but pathetic scraps of meat, as in Britain - which the girls upstairs transformed into edible dishes by heating it in secret ways and adding bits of stuff to it.
Possibly I want to bring my acting into the cooking, blending the two together. What I love is cooking for other people and seeing them enjoy what I have created for them. And same thing goes for acting. I have even tried to make some Chinese dishes before. It's very difficult. That's probably why eating at authentic Chinese restaurants is part of my journey here.
I am the MacGyver of cooking. If you bring me a piece of bread, cabbage, coconut, mustard greens, pigs feet, pine cones...and a woodpecker, I'll make you a good chicken pot pie.
I think people make it too systematic in a way, like it's a chemistry formula. Food is not like that; food is very forgiving. Connecting and making do with a lot of the food elements can be fun and exciting.
Somehow I had to turn the salted peanuts in the cigar box into petits fours.
Then Maura made something with butter and Calla made something with bacon and Blue steamed broccoli in self-defense.
The way I cook it's more like mad science. There's a lot of inspiration and dramatic failure with the occasional gorgeous success.
One of the secrets, and pleasures, of cooking is to learn to correct something if it goes awry; and one of the lessons is to grin and bear it if it cannot be fixed.
A home cook who relies too much on a recipe is sort of like a pilot who reads the plane's instruction manual while flying.
