Preparing dinner without a recipe.

So my mom took some frozen meat from the freezer of our fridge and told me to make dinner today around 3:30pm. .65 lbs of freezerburnt red meat in plastic wrap on a syrafoam tray. Not that I mind, it's a new area to conquer. Who doesn't want to expand his or her skillset? Here is what I did.

Measured out two containers of rice from the big bag in the garage. Washed it in a container in the kitchen sink. Filled it up to "2" and let the rice sit for half an hour on the counter. Meanwhile.

I put some Mazola corn oil in a big aluminum pan and set the electric range to "Low." Next, I wondered about salads and how to cook the red ice-encrusted meat. Put a quarter stick of butter in a tiny pot along with worcester sauce, tobasco, ground pepper, a bit of water and milk. I didn't measure anything precisely at all, but would guess a quarter cup ws, half tablespoon tobasco, too much pepper, and mere 'dashes' of milk and water.

I took three potatos from the garage, washed them in a sink and cut two into slices on a board. I tried making the slices as thin as I could, which was not very, then started slicing the results into thirds. That wasn't so hot, so I began using the big chopping knife I had to instead just chop across everything on the board in one direction, then another, then another.

Three oval cut glass salad bowls. I ended up not using them for salad. Instead, I grabbed a plastic grocery bag of green leafy stuff -- a ball (head?) of it. It was hard to peel off the leaves so I quickly saw it wasn't salad material but instead, cabbage. Yuck.

The sauce mix in the little pot is on Low still, as is the meat. I added a little water to the meat and turned the burner knob for more heating action.

After chopping up each of the potatos, mushrooms (cheap safeway kind) and the cabbage, I had put each in a round steel bowl. Cabbage on top, then mushrooms, and potatos on the very bottom. As far as cabbage, I washed it under the tap in a smaller bowl, and instead of cutting it up, broke it up into smaller pieces right there. Kind of like wringing a wet cloth. Smart chefs know how to save time.

So I put half of that in the small pot with sauces. I poured some of the sauce first onto the meat in the pan next to me. At 4:05 I put the rice into its cooker and set that outside on autopilot.

The small pot seemed like a really sad experiment -- there was sauce on the bottom and half of my potato-cabbage-shroom mound on top of it. I decided to turn off the heat and concentrate on my meat, and to use its aluminum pan to stirfry the pot contents correctly, later.

At various intervals I added or removed liquids from the pan, making sure to turn the slices of beef (?) over halfway through my 45 minutes (15x3=45; i was using an oven timer) of cooking them. For some reason the beef got really dried out and hard. I didn't realize this until I ate it of course. Soon, it went into the oven on "warm" and I used the pan to salvage my halfcooked pocashroom mixup.

While standing at the stove and taking off the lid to turn the stuff with a big spoon every several minutes, I used the remote to watch some programs on our new tv, from the kitchen. Quite fun. I got to see a bit of Baywatch Hawaii, Stargate-1, PBS's "new yankee workshop" where a guy made a neat octagonal slatted table, and New York Undercover. I'd never seen any of these before.

At any rate cooking the "unholy mixture" of veggies in the pan got really old but I kept paying attention to it every few minutes. Earlier, I'd added around 1.5 tablespoons of honey, also.

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I put the meat slices on plates -- four on two plates, and one on another. Then I scraped roughly a third of the veggie stuff onto the plates as well, next to the meat. Rice I added to the plates as a third appendage, although my mom wanted hers in a rice bowl, being Japanese that she is. Hot tea for mom, organic milk for me, and soy milk for my dad. What health nuts!

I asked my parents if they could guess what I'd put in. They knew visually the three veggies but my dad also asked if there was spinach, due to some friggly stuff off the cabbage head. No way. My mom said "spices" but couldn't identify them. Well, pepper is obvious to anybody because it's so visible. What my mom noticed right away was its spiciness. Overall, they seemed sincerely impressed.

Someday, perhaps I will be on that tv show Iron Chef (ktsf, uhf26, saturday evenings). What a laugh though -- I didn't follow any recipes. Except one which was for pepper sirloin steak (hence the butter, worcester, pepper). I would have used similar ingredients in any event -- but it's true there are hundreds in the cabinets. I suppose today's "success" can be attributed to stupidity and beginner's luck. Maybe it's what I'm wearing -- a Clinton Gore 96 shirt, khaki shorts, non-tube socks. Or the fact that I played catch with a nerf for a while this afternoon. Besides that, I got a haircut Friday. Nahhh. If you make something different that doesn't taste good, then it's supposedly good. Yeah, that's it. Of course, there's the parent factor too. I really only wrote this page for Becky who will probably be bored by it as any poor soul would. Next time, I'll take pics. :)

Ken
1751PST