Cooking with not knowing

Since I’m home all the time, my garden is thriving. There are tomato bushes 4 feet high and, of course, the ever-present, ever expanding zucchini plant. (what’s the deal with zucchini? They never languish.) The fennel bulbs are the first to come ripe. So I picked the largest bulb in the garden, brought it to the kitchen and opened up my favorite vegetable cook book looking for ideas. There is a recipe for fennel confit, but I don’t have enough fennel to pull that one off. On the next page is a recipe for a fennel, olive, and goat cheese tart-YES! That sounds great! The only problem is, I didn’t have the necessary puff pastry dough and the goat cheese in the refrigerator smells like old feet, as only old goat cheese can. What to do?

During this quarantine I don’t just go to the market to buy ingredients for a chosen dish. Since market visits are more like once a month treks up steep mountains and down dangerous ravines, I’ve learned to work with what’s in the pantry.  I’ve become proficient in creatively adapting recipes using whatever ingredients are on hand. No puff pastry? How about the russet potato in the back of the vegetable bin. No useable goat cheese? I remember seeing some brie from this month’s shopping excursion. All the other ingredients patiently sit in my pantry waiting to be chosen. So I cut the potato very thinly and arrange the slices on a pie platter in an overlapping pattern then cook it to make a sort of potato pastry shell. The fennel is sautéed in olive oil with fresh garlic and sherry added then reduced. Minced olives and lemon juice are stirred in and the brie is sliced and arranged on top of the potato shell. Once cooked, the fennel preparation is spread over the potato and brie. There wasn’t a crumb left fifteen minutes after the tart hit the table.

One of the gifts of this quarantine is the need to be more creative in our everyday life. We can no longer just go out and get what we want or do what we want so we are forced to create new ways of doing things. Families are finding ways to celebrate birthdays and graduations and we are all getting very inventive with toilet paper. The innovator of the recipe for the fennel tart probably had some leftover puff pastry from another cooking project, I had a russet potato.

We can bemoan what we no longer have or we can make a life out of whatever we have on hand. Everyone has different ingredients in their pantry, everyone is subject to different circumstances and those circumstances are always changing. In meditation we stop and look at this unique moment, not what we want, or what we used to have, or what we feel we should have. We simply have whatever is in the moment.  We each possess unique ingredients in our pantry from which to make our daily tart. We take what is there; a broken heart, a chronic pain, a son, a daughter, a friend, or a talent for dancing, and make something new out of the ingredients. Then we go on to create the next dish, each day and each moment.