Om nom: food combinations, or, playing with what's here

[elisem]

 So a little while back, for. my birthday I got various tasty things to nibble. One of them was salmon skin and salted egg crisps, with curry leaves in the mix, and some spice. Extremely tasty. When I got down to the bottom of the bag, there were a lot of little shards and crumbs that were particularly spicy. A mental note was. made for possible future uses.

Today was a future use. There wasn't a fresh vegetable in the house, but I wanted something with both softness and crunch, and wanted it to be in something that had umami plus. The last of the bread gave me toast. There was some braunsweiger (liver paste, Nueske's in particular) which went onto the toast, cut pretty thinly. (I am from people who like thick slices of braunsweiger on toast or bread, and normally I do too, but this was a special application, part flavor and part structural adhesive.) Then I spooned out some of the fragments from the bottom of the bag of salted egg and salmon skin crisps, laying them on top of the liver paste and pressing them in with the back of the spoon, and had it open-faced. 

Big win. Big tasty win. Especially the way the curry leaves went with the braunsweiger. 

Must remember this and make it again.

Part of the idea for this one was looking at the braunsweiger and wishing I could magically make a banh mi from the place in Global Market appear. So some of the taste combo came from that. Lettuce or bok choy or other green or variously colored thinly sliced vegetables, with vinegar or not, would have been great, but there was no such suppy in the house, alas. Although hey, there is a little new kraut in the back of the fridge which should get eaten up. Hmmm. Although we are out of bread now. Hmm. I wonder how it would be on top of ramen noodles. Pity that the boiled eggs are all et up.

Do you have any tasty kludged-together food that you are fond of? What gave you the idea?  

(My term for kludged-together food is "cream of refrigerator soup," which explains the tag. No actual soup was generated in this particular instance.)

Comments

[oracne]

I love cooking things that include stuff I am finishing off. This one isn't entirely kludged, as I've made bread pudding many times. We got unexpected challah (misdelivered). I was making popsicles all summer, but stopped before the bottle of mango/passionfruit juice was quite empty. I mixed up some of the leftover juice with bitter orange marmalade (also close to empty), sugar, a dash of powdered cloves, and a little lemon juice concentrate. I let dried chunks of the bread soak that up while I mixed up milk, cream, and eggs. I poured melted butter over the bread chunks, then the custard. It came out so great!

[carbonel]

Were the salmon skin and salted egg crisps from Irvins? I'd never heard of them before, but they sound wonderful (but pricy). I love salmon skin in general and always get the salmon skin salad when I'm ordering from Bagu.

Back when I was younger and short on cash, I discovered that ramen was cheap and filling. It was also boring, but I figured out that I could turn it into hot and sour ramen -- I love hot and sour soup -- by adding white vinegar, sugar, sesame oil, white pepper, and some chili oil, plus something with protein if I had it available.

A couple of years ago, before my T2 diabetes diagnosis, I bought some ramen on a whim and made myself some hot and sour ramen. Still tasty.

I learned about cream of refrigerator soup from seeing Laura Krentz make some at the post-Minicon Monday night party with consuite veggie leftovers and have since done that from time to time.

[elisem]

They were from Irvins, yup. They are indeed quite pricy, and were a special birthday treat. A little red circle on the bag says "DANGEROUSLY ADDICTIVE" and I detect no lies there.

[rosefox]

We recently made chicken stew with root vegetables and I decided to put some over buttered noodles, like beef stroganoff. It was perfect.

Most of my fridge clean-out goes into omelettes, or scrambled eggs with stuff if I don't feel like fussing with making an omelette. Today for lunch that was some ham that was about to go off, and sauteed onions, peppers, and zucchini left over from Friday night's rice bowls. It was equally perfect.

[kellan_the_tabby]

'contents of cabinet chicken' around here, regardless of identity (or presence) of protein item

not mine, & not impromptu, but I just had the first bite of an EXCELLENT chocolate bar I purchased at a farmers market Saturday -- chocolate, phyllo, & pistachio creme. HOLY CATS. It's a chocolate bar of baklava.