Like most people, I cook with an idea in my head of how whatever I’m making should taste. Usually this idea is very specific: I want my _____ to taste like the delicious _____ I had at that potluck last weekend, or like the _____ my mother used to make. As I gain more experience in the kitchen, I’m slowly moving away from this kind of imitation towards a more inventive approach to cooking, but I still spend a lot of time trying to get different things “right.”
Sometimes I succeed the first time: the one and only recipe I know for stir-fried Sichuan green beans is perfectly delicious, and I have no need for any others. Sometimes I make something so good that my idea of how it should taste changes on the spot: from the moment I tried Alton Brown’s baked macaroni and cheese, I couldn’t care less about trying to recreate the Velveeta-yellow rendition of the dish that I grew up with.
Most of the time, though, my idea of how a given dish should taste gradually changes as I experiment with different recipes for it. For instance, I started out looking for a tomato sauce recipe that tasted like it came from a jar. The whole point of homemade tomato sauce, though, is that it tastes homemade, so my first efforts to make a sauce I liked failed to please me. They did, however, slightly alter what I wanted–I realized that most commercially made sauces are much more watery than I like and not nearly spicy enough. The next few times I made sauce I was looking for something that tasted like it came from a jar, but thicker and with more red pepper. I failed again, but now I was starting to appreciate the tang you get from good canned tomatoes that tasted wrong to me before. When I finally got a tomato sauce “right” it tasted nothing like the sauce I had originally set out to make: after many hours of negotiation, tomato sauce and I had reached a compromise.
A few weeks ago I finally found a salsa recipe that I unequivocally love. Salsa frustrated me for years: how, I kept wondering, could I continue to prefer factory-produced, preservative-laden salsas over something I made myself with fresh produce? But salsa after salsa just didn’t taste right to me. The problem, I finally realized, was texture. I use frozen cherries in this recipe which, after being thawed, have a texture similar to the cooked tomatoes, onions, and peppers in most storebought salsas. The crunchiness of the red onion is a welcome contrast, and its distinctive flavor finds a partner that, for once, can stand up to it in the cherries and chipotle, as does that of the cilantro.
When I made this on Sunday, I drained the cherries before using them and reserved both their juice and the lime juice I didn’t use for a cherry/lime vinaigrette that I’ve been eating with arugula all week. This London Times article recently reminded me that I can still do a better job of getting good mileage out of the food I buy, so this is a nice bonus! From Mark Bittman’s How to Cook Everything Vegetarian, cherry-chipotle salsa:
2 cups pitted cherries (fresh or frozen)
1/2 cup diced red onion
1 tablespoon chopped canned chipotle chiles in adobo sauce
1/2 cup or more chopped fresh cilantro leaves
1 tablespoon extra virgin olive oil
3 tablespoons freshly squeezed lime juice, plus more to taste
salt and freshly ground pepper
1. Put all the ingredients in a medium bowl and stir to combine. Let sit for about 5 minutes, then taste and adjust the seasoning, adding more chile, lime, or salt as needed.
2. Serve immediately or refrigerate for up to a couple of hours. (Bring back to room temperature before serving.)
