#creative desperation

[gratescoff]

Creative Desperation Recipes Vol. 2: Slow Cooker Black Bean and Pickled Okra Soup

Ingredients:

2 cups of dried black beans

6 cups of water

1 large bay leaf

1 packet of Knorr’s Vegetable Recipe Mix or similar

1 cup of salsa (I used black bean and corn salsa)

8 oz of pickled okra, sliced into round pieces (aka about 8-10 pieces of okra based on standard jars)

1/2 tsp of garlic powder (or more! or use ~3+ cloves of roasted garlic)

1 tsp of onion powder

1 tbsp of tomato paste

2 tbsp of olive oil

1/2 tsp (or more to taste) of your favorite seasoning salt (I used the McCormick Hamburger kind that I got for free ages ago because it has dried red peppers in addition to salt)

a few dashes of Tabasco sauce/any other hot sauce or more to taste

Directions:

Add black beans, bay leaf, and water to a 3-quart slow cooker and cook on high heat for approximately 3 hours, or until beans are soft to the bite.

Mix in the packet of Knorr spices carefully (to make sure the maltodextrin in it doesn’t clump), and then add everything else and leave it alone for another couple of hours to let the flavors meld, tasting as needed to adjust seasonings to the level you want. Just be careful to not add too much salt or acidic ingredients.

Remove the bay leaf before serving. 

Notes:

It ain’t pretty looking, but this is yet another one of those recipes I just slapped together based on whatever ingredients I had so feel free to mess with it and experiment! E.g if you have a low tolerance for spice, leave out the Tabasco sauce. 

Personally, I think this recipe would be even better if some freshly chopped cilantro or green bell peppers were added or corn or diced tomatoes and possibly even 1/2-1 tsp of cumin or oregano. 

This recipe is very good with a kinda bland starch of some sort, like tortilla chips. 

If you can’t find pickled okra, you can use fresh, but remember to use a substitute for the acidity that the pickles would have provided, such as lime juice, vinegar, or tomato juice or diced/crushed tomatoes. The acidity will help cut the sliminess of the okra. 

[gratescoff]

Creative Desperation Recipes Vol. 1: Champagne Flatbreads

Ingredients:

approximately 1/2 to 3/4 cup of champagne dressing

1 large egg

roughly 1/2 cup of wheat flour, plus more as needed

roughly 1/2 cup of masa harina

1 tsp onion powder

1/2 tsp garlic powder

1 tsp mixed dried herbs (I used Herbes de Provence)

butter, for frying

Directions:

In a little bowl, beat egg with a fork until well blended. 

Mix in the champagne dressing.

In a separate medium-sized bowl, mix the flours, spices, and herbs together. 

Make a little well in the bowl of flour and add the egg-champagne mixture to it and mix it up! 

If it’s too “goopy”, add more flour until it forms a sort of flatbread dough that can be easily shaped into palm-sized rounds like the ones you see in the photo above.

Heat a griddle to medium-high (350°F or 175°C) and melt butter, then fry the rounds on both sides until golden brown. 

Notes:

I am a bit of a food hoarder when it comes to things on clearance. So there’s always a point where I’m looking at a random mishmash of ingredients and trying to figure out how to cook them up, a bit like fitting the pieces of a puzzle together. Hence the Creative Desperation series of posts I’m making for this blog. The results might be weird, but hey, I’ll still eat them in the name of food science and to save money! 

Feel free to try this with a tbsp of chopped fresh herbs instead of the dried herbs or with all masa or all wheat flour because this was literally just whatever I had leftover tossed together. 

I like my flatbreads crispier, so I went back later and baked these in the oven at 375°F (190°C) for 30 minutes or so to make them a little crunchier, like pita chips. 

[akshatrathi]

Creative desperation

This constant urge to create something out of nothing can be a powerful driving force. Much of my writing career has been shaped, and I suspect will be shaped, by this urge. Now, Gary Klein's The Remarkable Way We Gain Insights has given me just the perfect phrase to capture this mindset -- creative desperation. 

Klein uses the term in a different sense. He uses it as part of a model that may help us "change our story". For me, creative desperation has chiseled out a story.