I keep on meaning to write some more about food and cooking and culinary creativity but, every time I come up with a bright new idea (or, more frequently, take an improvisational approach to a recipe and stumble on a tasty combination) I have a couple of other things to blog about first and the meal becomes a distant memory.

For example:

• Left over mashed potato and some undercooked cabbage? Blend together with an egg, some seasoning, a dash of vinegar and perhaps some other things that need using up from your cupboard and bake in the oven. I think I’ve seen this kind of thing called “rostis”; a more sophisticated slant on bubble and squeak.
• Chutney? A good amount of fruit or veg (I used green tomatoes, since it was clear my harvest wasn’t going to ripen) along with an onion base, perhaps supplemented with some other things like garlic or ginger, a fair amount of vinegar and sugar (the preservative) and some seasoning and spices. Apples and raisins also feature in many of my attempts. This kind of thing works well in the slow cooker for combining the flavours, then boiled to reduce the liquid and bottled in jars sterilised with boiling water while still piping hot.
• Fish? We tried tilapia the other day but I didn’t want to mess with picking out the bones at the table. As a solution, I filleted the fish and baked the fillets along with some vegetables, spices and a covering of couscous. I added water before it went in the oven, which the couscous absorbed. I also scraped as much flesh as I could from the left over bits of fish (for maximum efficiency, I could also have made a fish stock to use as the liquid from the discarded portions).

Recipes? Great as starting points but not the full story for turning ingredients into a meal.

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