I usually make Marty and me breakfast and lunch, but today we decided we would fend for ourselves. Marty made his breakfast while I was busy and it smelled delicious.
I wasn’t paying attention to what he was doing and finally asked him what he made. With a smirk, he said bacon, egg, and cheese on waffles. Sounds like a delicious breakfast. I had some honey greek yogurt and a piece of my homemade peanut butter protein bars.
For lunch, he made leftover chicken tenders sautéed in from what I could smell, hoisin sauce, and he added a tiny bit of spätzle we had leftover as well. I made some seafood salad and had it on a rice cake.
Marty’s style of cooking I call mish-mosh. There is nothing wrong with mish-mosh cooking, and it actually impresses the hell out of me. It’s like taking a mystery basket on the TV show Chopped and turning it into a gourmet meal.
Marty cooks by the seat of his pants; the problem for me is that you can never duplicate what you made with that style of cooking. For him that doesn’t matter.
When you are cooking for the public or like I did for kids at school, people expect the dishes you make to taste the same way every time they order them. That is why there are standardized recipes.
I have to give Marty credit that when he has to replicate food, he can and does it well. For 17 years, he cooked a Harvest Buffet Dinner as a fundraiser for the Arlington Rescue Squad. He had the help of a couple of friends that were on the rescue squad with him. I was in the kitchen to do what they asked me to do, and I was the dishwasher or better known as the dish bitch.
Their dinner was Slow Roasted Prime Rib with Horseradish Sauce, Roasted Turkey with Mango Chutney, Rosemary Roasted Potatoes, Maple Glazed Baby Carrots, and the showstopper Marty’s Famous Autumn Bisque. Desserts and rolls were made and dropped off by local businesses and community members.
People came every year and raved about everything, but the Autumn Bisque was always a home run. It was a savory butternut squash soup with warming spices and a bit of heat from pepper. It was topped off on the buffet line with a scoop of vanilla ice cream.
Ice cream in soup? That was what made his butternut squash soup a bisque, it was the cream in the bisque. When it hit the hot soup it immediately started to melt. When people stirred it looked like a soup latte.
He made a gigantic vat of the soup and was able to duplicate the taste every year. At the end of the cook, he would ask me what it needed and he would readjust his seasonings. It tasted the same year after year which is what people loved and looked forward to all year.
Marty is a great cook when he needs to be but prefers being a mish-mosh cook at home, especially when cooking for himself. I can put together a meal with things that I find in the fridge too, but I give way too much thought about what flavors go together and what compliments what to be a mish-mosh cook.
Does this go back to the banana etiquette piece I wrote about back in January? Does it have anything to do with being right or left-hand thinkers? How about our personality types? This may be since I am a planner and like things organized, and he flies by the seat of his pants and doesn’t stress about stuff.
Whatever we are doing we must balance each other out. We have been together since 1985 and married for almost 32 years. We rarely fight, but squabble about stupid things when one of us is being stubborn.
In our spätzle production kitchen, there is no squabbling. We each have specific jobs, and we work together like a well-oiled machine. We can work in close quarters and not bump into each other. We have a rhythm that flows. When we used to do catering, we had the same kind of workflow. Each of us is good at different things and has separate jobs, getting everything done well and efficiently.
I love that is Marty mish-mosh cook. I love seeing the things he comes up with. He loves my cooking and knows exactly what to expect when I say I am making such and such. We balance each other out and are a good match.