Cooking with what's there

Admittedly, I'm not much of a cook. It's not that I can't, or don't enjoy it, I just don't do it very often. I'm sure this is at least partly because I have the extreme good fortune to be married to a man who a) loves to cook and b) is very good at it. It's something I really want to do more of, though, honestly.. One thing that I find particularly compelling about cooking is the creative aspect of putting food together, and even though I'm not terribly experienced in foodcrafting, I've been known on many occasions to toss a dish together strictly by winging it. Having the ingenuity (and the moxie) to open your cabinets and cook from what you have on hand is a great skill to cultivate in a frugal, simple kitchen.

A case in point: our Thanksgiving Dinner Part Deux last weekend... A scant thirty minutes before sitting down, we realized we hadn't planned enough food and were rustling around in the cabinets and fridge trying to decide what we could throw together. A few mostly-empty bags of frozen veggies, some eggs, the last of the cheese and the remaining herbs later, voila! We had a quiche-ish kind of casserole. I've done this lots of other times before, cranking out red sauces for pasta, curries, and unusual-but-usually-tasty bean dishes improvised with a handful of oddments from the larder.

Today, I was in the spontaneous mood to bake some cookies without many specific cookie kind of ingredients on hand, so I pulled out the Fannie Farmer Baking Book - a great "basics" cookbook chock full of tried-and-true, time tested traditional recipes. Our copy is food stained, dog-eared, and the binding is cracked with pages falling out (probably from stuffing it full of cards, printouts, and scraps of paper with recipes scribbled on them). Serendipitously, it flopped open to a page with a recipe for Maple Syrup cookies, which required only about five ingredients, all of which I had laying around. So... I whipped 'em up. They turned out well - a chewy, sweet bar kind of cookie, not terribly maple-y, but maybe I only say that because I'm a maple freak and can't get enough of the flavor. I'll definitely be making these again. (By the way, the yield for this recipe is for "sixty 1 1/2 inch squares." Who on earth would only want a 1 1/2 inch square? Not I! So in recipes like this I always end up with about 10 cookies. I can't decide whether that's bad or not.)

Now if I can just figure out what to do with some canned tuna, coconut milk, the last dusting from the bottom of a few spice jars and some powdered sugar...