Yummy Chaos

I go about cooking a little differently than most people, I think. And my method of grocery shopping is very disconcerting to those not accustomed to it. I just go and get whatever looks good, without a menu plan or indeed any pre-conceived notion of what I want to make. Then when it's time to cook I look at what I have and just make something. It's a good way to go, I think, because you never get crippled by a missing ingredient, and you always buy what's good and fresh. I am a firm believer in cooking meals with simple ingredients: fresh vegetables, olive oil, legumes, herbs, etc. In that regard I guess I am a little like a painter, who creates different things using the same basic palette of paints. To others it often looks like a chaotic mess of a system, but it works for me.

Here is an example. This is a South Indian curry that I made from things lying around, basically rice and chick peas with spices, covered in a roasted chili-tomato sauce. It was pretty fast and very very tasty. And of course, healthy stuff. I don't want to give the impression that everything I do works though, when you wing it sometimes you can really produce a stinker. But the trick is to just move on and learn from it, and as the years go by I find that I make fewer "mistakes" now than I used to.

So, here's to a special kind of "blatant experimentation rooted in a firm familiarity of the basics". Does that make any sense at all? If it does, we're all in trouble.