This is the first in what we hope will become a series of posts about secret ingredient cooking. Everybody is familiar with Iron Chef, the television show in which a competitor must cook a five course meal with every course incorporating a specific secret ingredient. Mariam and I prefer the show on Food Network called Chopped, wherein competitors must cook a single course in each round, each time incorporating all four of the ingredients in a secret ingredient basket. Frequently, these ingredients are strange or unusual, and almost always, the combination of ingredients is intuitively very weird. But usually these chefs manage to pull off something that, at least in theory, sounds like it ought to be pretty good, and the tasting judges often agree (though sometimes, disasters happen). It's improvisational cooking at its finest.
We were inspired by Chopped to try this ourselves. We like improv cooking - usually because we're too lazy to go look up a recipe and drive to the market to get the one or two ingredients we don't have, so we just make something up with what we've got in the fridge. I think improv cooking - that is, just cooking something on the fly with no recipe - is the test of a competent cook. Following directions is pretty easy, but to cook without directions, without a recipe, one has to understand the ingredients and techniques very well. It's also, of course, an opportunity to experiment - and that's why we wanted to try something like Chopped, with secret ingredients. It's an opportunity to experiment and try to understand ingredients and combinations of ingredients we've had no or little experience with in the past.
Our Secret Ingredient Improv works like a single round of Chopped with a looser time restriction. Four secret ingredients are provided, and the cook must prepare a single course using all four ingredients. For our first round, I selected four ingredients for Mariam to cook dinner. She had access otherwise to everything in our kitchen, which I tried to stock with as many ordinary or essential ingredients as possible, to give her all the options she could have.
This time, the secret ingredients were:
Mint Chutney
Tomatillos
Soppressata
Ground Dried Shrimp
Mariam will walk you through what she did:
I open the bag that contains the four ingredients and I'm like holy shit. What am I gonna do with these random ingredients. And why the hell is there ground dried shrimp. But for some unknown reason my surprise-overreaction time was rather short.
I started by tasting each ingredient individually. The dried shrimp smelled like rotten fish and was rather salty. The tomatillos have a taste between a tomato and a tart green apple which I thought would go well with mint. The mint chutney had a nice kick and also a tart aftertaste. And finally soppressata is just soppressata, pretty tasty. Why don't we just eat that for dinner.
I first thought of making a pesto sauce for the soppressata and serve it over pasta by mixing the mint chutney with tomatillos, parmesan and some pine nuts and use the dried shrimp as a smelly salt. But we didn't have any pine nuts. We had some almonds and I think it would have worked but I'm just not a big almond fan so I switched to plan B.
In plan B I wanted to just saute some onions with the tomatillos and soppressata and again use the dried shrimp as smelly salt. Then make a green quiche by mixing the eggs, milk and the mint chutney. Again we didn't have a pie crust and no I didn't want to start making one from scratch. (IAN: And I'm really sorry I didn't think to stock the kitchen with pie crust, because this actually sounds really good.)
So this is finally what I did.
I chopped some tomatillos, onions and tomatoes and sauteed them together and then added some chopped soppressata. I seasoned them with black pepper and oregano. I added some aji amarillo pepper to make it just a bit spicy so that it would go well with the mint chutney.
In a separate pan I started making a roux for a white sauce. I seasoned the white sauce with the dried shrimp and the ground mushrooms Ian made earlier.
Voilà, that's what your chef made for you today. Enjoy.
IAN: So the kicker is that then I had to eat, and judge this. I'll start off, I suppose, by saying that it's rather difficult to plate a casserole in a way that doesn't make it look like a bunch of stuff piled together in a pan. A casserole has to be constructed really well, and has to come out of the pan really well, in order to be presentable as anything other than a pile of food on a plate - lasagna, for instance, can be made to appear beautiful on a plate. Something like tuna casserole, not so much. By its very nature, any kind of penne casserole will have a disordered structure, and thus be difficult to plate beautifully, and Mariam's dish suffered from this as well. It's not really her fault - it's just the nature of penne casseroles to be sort of ugly.
But did she, as the judges on Chopped always say, "transform the ingredients"? Yeah, I thought so, actually. I'll say first that when I chose these ingredients, I couldn't help but formulate ideas about what to do with them myself, and a pasta dish is definitely what I would have done, too. Tomatillos paired with tomatoes is a proven combination that worked really well here. However, I think Mariam was too hesitant with the tomatillos - on their own, cut fresh, they're quite tart, and a little bitter, so I think she got a bit scared and used less than she could have gotten away with. I wanted to taste more of the tomatillo, as the tartness was a good balance against the sweetness of the tomatoes and onions, and a way to temper the salt in the soppressata and the shrimp white sauce.
The white sauce confused me while she was making it - I wasn't sure I understood what she was doing with two pasta sauces (it looked like to me). But I think she made it work, as the white sauce did indeed serve its function as the cap of this casserole, to hold in the moisture of the tomatillo ragout below. I think she could have played more with the dried shrimp - she basically used it as a salt substitute, which I think is great, owing to my general distrust of actual salt. But it's not just smelly salt - it's salt that tastes like shrimp. I wish she had paired it with something in the white sauce other than the dried mushroom, something that might have complimented the shrimp flavor better and made it stand out as shrimp flavor.
Tossing the pasta with the mint chutney is not what I would have done, but only because I wouldn't have thought of it. It achieved two things - first, it gave the pasta a great minty freshness that played well with the ragout, and second, it imparted a lovely green color to the pasta which only darkened became more intense as the casserole cooked in the oven. The pasta in this dish was both tasty on its own, and a jolly green color.
Back to me:
And next week it is Ian's turn to cook and I can play the judge an be all mean to him :D. So if you have any ideas about what ingredients I should put together to make Ian suffer, please let me know. But don't leave a comment. Email me at noleftoversleftover@gmail.com. We need to keep it a secret.
And if you are experimental like us and are planing to create another dish with the four ingredients Ian got for me, let us know how it goes.
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