I am proud to be from Albuquerque when I click over to Duke City Fix and see the new tagline “More Dick, Less Knipfing.” See, DK is a newscaster and, uh…I guess you had to grow up there.

Anyway, I went to the equally obscure (sort of) city of Pittsburgh this weekend, partially to see Loretta Lynn sing and partially to visit Peter’s friend from grad school, who’s just moved there and illustrates the shocking truth of NYC real estate by living in a house a million times nicer than hours and paying about a tenth as much. Or something like that.

Anyway, really, the point of this post is to say I’m glad I got my creative desperation-cooking juices flowing in the kitchen last week before we went (I did finally go grocery shopping on Wednesday, but I still cooked a pantry-style meal: sloppy joes, succotash, and some radishes rattling around the bottom drawer).

Because as Peter and I are puttering around the kitchen, getting out pans, turning on the burners to make dinner, Gaby says, “Oh, I should’ve mentioned at the store–we don’t have any salt.”

Grrrrrrrrrkkkkreeeeeeekkk. Or however you spell the sound of the record being quickly ground down to a stop.

Wha?

Gasp.

Several more dramatic pauses for emphasis.

…

…

OK. Have I made myself clear? Cooking without salt is a little hard to imagine. It’s every cook’s not-so-secret trick. I mean–you can’t boil pasta without salting the water, right? The Constitution would probably spontaneously combust in its little secret vault. The Starship Enterprise would fall into a black hole and never recover. The earth would flatten out, and I’d probably fall off the edge, to where the dragons are.

Peter offered to run out and get salt. I, typically, dug in my heels. NO. We’d manage. We’re creative people. We had one packet of Chinese-takeout soy sauce, half a bottle of reduced-sodium soy sauce, a jar of anchovies and half a pint of olives. And some parmesan. We’d wring the umami out of those babies and whip up a damn fine dinner–no extra grocery shopping required.

Luckily, my dinner plan consisted of making some grocery-made lamb sausages into a pasta sauce. Those sausages were probably already loaded with salt. I’d been planning to add olives anyway–I added more. I hacked the rind off the parmesan and threw it in the sauce with the canned tomatoes, that probably had salt in them too.

Peter made a Caesar salad dressing heavy on the anchovies. He grated extra-coarse parmesan cheese.

I smothered the butternut squash with feta cheese.

I glugged so much soy sauce in the pasta water that it looked like it had come out of lead pipes that had been rusting for three hundred years.

At the last second, I panicked and added an anchovy to the pasta sauce too.

It all turned out totally freakin’ fine. And for once in my life, I actually had a meal involving feta cheese and olives where I didn’t think, Gah, this stuff is good, but it’s soooo salty.

Lesson learned. New Year’s resolution: Less salt, maybe. Definitely less Knipfing.

Using up all the odd bits of food in the fridge is one of the kitchen challenges I really like. It’s like a card game where the goal is to get rid of all your cards. (And not go out in the freezing cold and buy groceries.)

Due to the high winds advisory and my looming deadlines, leaving the house is the last thing I want to do…which has led to me shouting “Rummy!” triumphantly (uh, and figuratively) in the kitchen the last couple of nights.

Sunday, we were cheating a little, with leftovers from Kabab Cafe, plus a handful of green beans. I got into the kitchen just in time to deter Peter from mixing the green beans with a can of black beans he’d found in the pantry. My rule with leftovers and slim pickings is to make as many discrete dishes as possible–loaves ‘n’ fishes, fishes ‘n’ loaves.

So instead, Peter sauteed the green beans, while I mashed the black beans up with garlic and some chicken stock. (What, no lard? I told you, it’s slim pickings…)

There was some fresh mozzarella in the fridge, left over from an over-ambitious purchase the previous week. I melted a bunch of that on top of the beans, and threw the last of a bag of poor, frost-bitten corn tortillas from the freezer in the oven to warm up. Then, in a great “Rummy!” moment, I fished out about a quarter-cup of green tomatillo salsa from the fridge, the leftover bit of a Herdez can. In my mental fridge inventory, it had been sitting back there, nagging at me for months. Ha–gotcha!

So we had melty, cheesy black beans, some fresh, crispy green beans (with a few more even left over from that) and reheated assorted rice and squab tastiness from Ali. Something about the black beans and the garlic and the cheese and salsa just struck me as super-bachelor food–the kind you cook in college, or just after. In a good way.

The next night…obviously the kitchen situation was even bleaker, but the weather was even nastier. Windows were getting blown out of Manhattan high rises.

There was a chicken carcass in the fridge, stuck there post-stock-making, hoping I would pick the last bits of meat off of it. Since I was desperate, I did – while I was reheating my six last green beans for lunch, with an egg. The chicken was in such miserable little bits that it wasn’t even appetizing to put in a soup. While I picked, I thought…

And I remembered AV saying how she’d just whipped up some croquettes, casually, one day, as you do. To me, croquettes are a weird thing you get in an automat in Amsterdam, and I’m not entirely sure I like them. But there’s something appealing about molten deep-fried goo on a severely miserable day, which I guess is why the Dutch like them so much.

So, I figured: chicken croquettes, and, uh, frozen peas. I looked in the pantry: one potato, and some marinated artichoke hearts. (And while I was looking, I saw a big, unopened bag of panko.) OK, so chicken croquettes, potato croquettes and artichoke croquettes, with super-crispy panko breading. And frozen peas. I could use the frozen last stems of dill out on the porch for the chicken…

Dinnertime rolled around and I was actually excited to start this deep-frying adventure. Until I realized we didn’t have any milk to make a bechamel–the goo that binds croquettes together and sears the roof of your mouth.

This led to a dilemma–should Peter go to the store for milk and all the other millions of groceries we needed? In that case, why would we have something gross like croquettes for dinner?

Then I saw the container of heavy cream. NO. I put my foot down: no grocery shopping–I’d use cream thinned out with chicken stock, dammit, and we would triumph!

So I did all the croquette-making. I was tempted to do a Thor’s Love Kroket treatment, but since I’d never made even simple croquettes before, I didn’t quite trust myself with the complex architecture required. Also, having multiple kinds of croquette, rather than one big, potentially gross one, was more in keeping with my leftover-cooking rule.

Oh, and–ultimate “Rummy!”–I breaded the very last remaining slabs of mozzarella (that shit would not go away!), to fry those up too. Made a little tomato sauce on the side, with tomatoes from freezer and haggard bits of windowsill basil and long-forgotten olives.

Then I fried everything. Did you know mashed potato just disappears in hot oil? I did not. But after peering into a disturbingly light panko crust and contemplating the emptiness at the core of the universe, I do now.

So we lit our Delft-pattern blue-and-white candles (very gezellig) and ate our remaining three types of fried food. And frozen peas (I put mint in at the last minute–one more herb salvage). The mozz sticks Peter dubbed better than Hooters’ because there were no distracting boobs around. The chicken ones tasted just like real Dutch kroketten, for better or worse–the dill gave them that someone-tried-to-season-this-but-with-what-exactly? mystery flavor.

Sadly, we did not have any beer left in the fridge with which to consume our fried snacks. If we’d been proper bachelor diners, we would’ve.

But at least there’s still a pot of frying oil sitting on the stove. Rummy, dude.

Tamara was on WNYC earlier today talking about how some New Yorkers prefer to hang out and eat at home, instead of going to fancy restaurants–crazy, I know! But when you’re picking between fancy restaurant and dinner in Tamara’s backyard, well, the choice is pretty clear.

Listen up here:

For those of you just stopping by, “supper club” is not code for “crazy sex romp,” as some people commenting online seem to think. What the…? Can someone explain to me what era that euphemism is from?

I’m a lazy blogger. I rarely have time or inclination to seek out other food and travel bloggers. The ones I know and like have all come to me (The Homesick Texan, A Thinking Stomach, Daily Gluttony, etc) via comments, which I greatly appreciate.

And now, thanks to a comment on a Flickr photo, I’ve encountered another one, which is gorgeous eye candy and a topic after my own heart: Water Boils. It’s dedicated to boxed lunches.

When I was little, I was entirely responsible for my school lunches. This meant I bought a Peanuts-branded sandwich cookbook from that Scholastic catalog in third grade, and learned to make a million variations on peanut butter sandwich. This meant I would take things like canned sardines and Saltine crackers to the cafeteria, in my purple ‘Disco’ lunchbox. I was not exactly popular. But I really liked my lunches.

And now, as an occasional freelancer in the wastelands of Midtown, I still take great satisfaction in packing my lunch. No $7 sandwich for me, thanks. No heaping mound of halal-whatever-with-MSG. Occasionally I get a fussy officemate who laments the presence of garlic, but occasionally too I get a neighbor who says, “Ooooh, that smells great! What’d you bring?”

Anyhoo, I’m happy to see someone else in the world is just as obsessed–OK, who am I kidding, a hell of a lot more obsessed–with boxed lunches. Must get me a tiffin.

(Thanks so much to all the interesting people who stop by here. I need to get out more.)

So, paella went OK. I mean, it tasted great, and everyone ate well and seemed to have a good time. There are some pics over here.

But.

I got more pleasure out of cooking dinner last week–one of those dinners that starts with, ‘Crap–the fridge is empty!’

Then I remembered the beet greens (shamelessly scavenged at the Greenmarket, as the guys offer to rip them off the beet bunches, and then they just wind up in a heap on the ground).

As I was chopping up the garlic to use as a base for those, I thought some yogurt would go nicely, and we had just a little bit of the thick Greek stuff left. So I crushed an extra garlic clove for that.

The yogurt made me think of the Turkish combo of poached eggs with garlic yogurt. We had a lot of eggs, and they weren’t gettin’ any fresher. Presto, protein.

The beet greens were wedged in a bag with a bunch of radishes (the thing I actually paid for at the beet-farmer’s stall–I’m not that shameless). I figured since the beet greens (and heck, throw in some of the radish tops) were going to be sharp and garlicky, maybe I could tone down the radishes by simmering them in butter–but not so much they lost their crunch, which would be necessary contrast to the soft greens. We also had some leftover beef stock, so I threw in a glug of that, and went and ripped a handful of chives out of the front patch, for color.

Then starch. Something about the greens made me think: polenta. Which we didn’t have. But we did have semolina. Not such an exciting texture, but a perfectly good starch, especially once I added the last of a container of heavy cream that had been sitting at the back of the top shelf for a looong time (ultra-pasteurization can be a good thing, I guess). And grated in some random cheese that had been otherwise unappreciated.

Poached the eggs. Put ’em on a bed of semolina mush. Scooped on the veg. Dolloped the yogurt. Sprinkled Turkish pepper on the eggs for color and a smidge of heat. Beautiful. Nutritious.

But what was most exciting about the meal was the way my brain was firing as I made it. I didn’t have to sit and plan–I just started working, and while my hands did their bit, my brain was running two steps ahead: ‘Gonna need cheese for the semolina. Right–the cacciowhatever, get rid of that finally… Radishes look so sickly when they’re sauteed. Good–give those chives a little action.’ It’s a feeling that people who don’t yet know how to cook can’t understand–for them, cooking is all about cleaning dishes, lingering smells, other drawbacks. But once you get an inkling of this feeling, you’re hooked.

This feeling is also the closest thing to working in a restaurant kitchen–that’s more adrenaline, but the same autopilot coordination. But at home, of course, you also get to be creative.

Which is why more people should aspire to be home cooks, not schmancy resto chefs. And why more people should cook dinner for themselves and a few friends, rather than for twice-a-year, planning-requiring blowouts. If you don’t believe me, read Robert Farrar Capon for inspiration.

End sermon.