On being more creative in the kitchen/fusion!

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BAPyessir6

Senior Cook
Joined
May 15, 2020
Messages
285
Location
Prior Lake
I love making things to a T in the kitchen, but I also like to flex my cooking knowledge/creativity and try to "make things work" by throwing stuff together. If you've ever seen Chopped on food Network, it's that same idea. People get a few ingredients and try to make dishes with it. (Say, a dessert using/featuring prunes, cream cheese, and animal crackers. Or an appetizer using tofu, tomato paste, and prosciutto)

Mostly I only do this when I have to use X ingredient up before it goes bad or I just have a ton of it, but I want to improve these cooking muscles. Is there any way to improve doing this, or is it a "just do it more and more" idea?

Shop with no grocery list? Force fusion dishes by choosing 2 random countries once a week?

The most recent 3 random kind of "fusion"/weird combo dishes I did within the past week were:
1. Cabbage rolls filled with pizza (pepperoni, cheese, tomato sauce, rice)
2. Carbonara using butternut squash in the sauce and red pepper flake to cut the sweetness of the sauce (egg, Parmesan, a little cream, butternut, basil, black pepper and bacon since I can't find guanciale)
3. A simple pork fried rice white shiro paste (miso!), cabbage, and apple. I fried the cabbage to a good golden to give it a nice char/smokiness that paired great with the apples I got from the orchard. I sprinkled some smoked Gouda on it too and that made it nice!

In my mind, this isn't super out of the box, but I wanna work on this nonetheless. Any ideas?
 
2. Carbonara using butternut squash in the sauce and red pepper flake to cut the sweetness of the sauce (egg, Parmesan, a little cream, butternut, basil, black pepper and bacon since I can't find guanciale)

I've seen carbonara done with spaghetti squash on YouTube. It looked good

Using bacon is okay when you can't find Guanciale or Pancetta. Ya' gotta' do what ya' gotta' do. There is NO cream in carbonara. Never!

CD
 
I think it is just a matter of trying things out, accepting sometimes it will go wrong.
For me, cheese on rice is a firm no. But thats me and a combo I won't even try.

One of my recent one was Thai red curry butternut with white beans.
Worked a dream, but you won't find it in Thailand ;)
 
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