Cooking Good Meals Without Recipes
Many people cook a meal using a favorite recipe, or experiment with a new one, often finding themselves bored with the first and disappointed with the second. Can you imagine watching the Food Channel as one of the chefs takes time out to read a recipe? Recipes are useful but there is something even more useful - a knowledge of treatment.
Here’s what I mean by treatment. You can take a piece of beef and braise it in broth with a few vegetables and make a pot roast. You can take the same cut of beef and, as they do in South America, braise it with coffee. Take the same piece, marinate it for three days, braise it and you have sauerbraten. How you treat that piece of beef determines the final outcome. The cooking temperature remains the same for all three treatments. The side dishes will vary and they become additional treatments for the meal. You get the idea.
Carrying that idea a little further, you can take a chicken breast and come up with numerous ways to treat it. You can bake it, fry it, broil it, cut it up and stir fry it, or cook it on the grill. Same chicken breast, different treatments.
For example, let’s say you have decided to have chicken tonight and don’t have much time to spare, so chicken breasts are your choice. You decide to saute them in a little olive oil. (treatment) You also decide you want some sauce with the breasts. (treatment) Do you want a light butter and lemon sauce, a white sauce, or a tomato-laced sauce? (all treatments) Since the sauce you chose might be a little rich you feel a simple green veggie will go well and decide on broccoli. To make it very simple you will just par-boil it and drizzle some extra-virgin olive oil over it with a little salt. (treatment) Finally, for a starch, you can have potatoes, rice or pasta and you feel pasta would go well. Maybe just buttered and sprinkled with parsley. (treatment) Just to add a little flair, since the chicken breasts will be a golden brown, you don’t won’t to cover up that wonderful color so you ladle a layer of sauce on the plate and place the chicken breast on top, sprinkled with a little parsley. (treatment and presentation)(By Ed Dugan)
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