The Art of Simple Food

What I mean by “relearn how to cook,” is learn and understand enough cooking and baking basics so I am no longer at the mercy of other people’s recipes. I want to be able to look in my fridge and kitchen cupboards and have some inkling how I can combine certain items to create a dish or a meal without consulting a cookbook or Googling anything.

The list of dishes I can create in the absence of guidance is limited and includes French toast, scrambled eggs, tuna salad, various stir-fries, basic baked fish or chicken, smoothies, and sauteed vegetables. There’s also a short list of self-created concoctions I make more often than other dishes, such as The Marcia Mash (mash together one can black beans, one ripe avocado, and one cup jarred salsa; serve with tortilla chips or just eat it straight) and Cauliflower Surprise (combine or cook together all or most of the following ingredients: Thai-flavored tofu, one small head caulifloer, one can chick peas, a handful of raisins, peanut sauce to taste, curry powder to taste [optional]).

Ironically, if I want to be able to cook without constant guidance, I’ll need some guidance. To that end, I’ve selected Alice Waters’s The Art of Simple Food as my cooking primer. I’ve already read the first few pages; it looks like the first issue I’ll address will be replacing many items already residing in my fridge and cupboards.

My rationale for making the sort-of summer rolls can be found in the post Rallying for Roll-ups! Part 1: Sushi.

I’ll make this short and sweet:

1. I wanted another light roll-up thingie to add to the HUGE menu. Found Five-Spice Turkey & Lettuce Wraps from EatingWell.com.

2. The prepared filling had a nice level of spice (I used Chinese Five Spice Powder from Penzeys Spices). Cooking the turkey in the sesame oil and using the five-spice combo yielded a delicate sweet-spicy nuttiness to the mixture. The only bummer was the turkey, which had bits of bone or gristle or something. I’m not sure if this is the nature of ground turkey or if the brand (Nature’s Promise of Stop & Shop) could do better.

3. I was so focused on roll-ups that I failed to understand that wrap doesn’t necessarily mean roll-up. I even overlooked the photo in the recipe, which had filling in lettuce-leaf cups, not filling rolled in lettuce leaves. Even so, the Boston lettuce leaves we were using were so fragile they’d disintegrate if we looked at them the wrong way — let alone if we tried to enclose or wrap anything. So, the lettuce became a side salad instead. We liked the filling so much, though, we decided to try again, but this time roll the filling in small spring-roll wrappers. This seemed to work, at least when Gary was the one doing the rolling up, so we added our “five-spice turkey summer rolls” to the HUGE menu. I called them “summer” instead of “spring” due to my potentially incorrect assumption that summer meant the roll was fresh and not fried and that all spring rolls were fried. (In other words, we didn’t plan to fry anything.

4. So, the recipe changes were:

• Use small spring-roll rice wrappers instead of Boston lettuce to hold the filling
• Shred some iceberg lettuce to add to roll before rolling up (for added crunch, even though the water chestnuts added some texture already)
• Don’t chop the herbs; just use whole leaves (we used mint and basil) as seen in “real” summer rolls
• Offer a dipping sauce. We used Ellie Krieger’s Vinegar Dipping Sauce, which is part of her own http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/ellie-krieger/soft-asian-summer-rolls-with-sweet-and-savory-dipping-sauce-recipe/index.html. We also tried to follow Krieger’s instructions for wrapping summer rolls, but we had a very hard time with it nonetheless, as the photo of roll-up rejects, below, can illustrate.

The summer roll-up rejects were not pretty, but they were pretty tasty.

Lessons learned:

• Don’t ignore a photo that comes with a recipe. It can clue you in to certain characteristics of the finished product if you’re too lazy to read the recipe itself.
• If you’re going to rely on your husband to wrap summer rolls an hour before guests are due to arrive, make it on a day he’s not already scheduled to be rolling maki.
• If you don’t like the smell of vinegar, do not make a vinegar dipping sauce.
• If you’ve never rolled summer or spring rolls before, find a cookbook or Web site, such as cooksillustrated.com, that has illustrated directions.

Stay tuned for Rallying for Roll-ups! Part 3: Rugelach