Part of our goal on this website is to not only give you cool recipes to use, but to also help you learn how to improvise your own meal based on your unique circumstances. So let’s start with the thought process for how to plan out the meal, using the previous recipe as an example.

First, we need to decide what the main feature of the dish will be. In this case, we’ll use the chicken patties that we made previously. Having decided this, we have to choose either to emphasize the existing flavor (in this case, mustard), or de-emphasize it and use other flavors. To decide this, let’s make a quick inventory of the ingredients we have available. In my case, I have onion, garlic, bananas, grapes, chocolate, beer, chickpeas, canned tomatoes, eggs, mustard, and spices. You might notice that I included some things that people might not traditionally include in a dinner entrée. If you’re going to take one thing from this website, let it be this: when you’re low on food, ANYTHING can be an ingredient!

So, taking a look at the ingredients we have on hand, we can definitely choose to accentuate the mustard flavor of the dish. Beer will go well with the mustard (just think of drinking beer and eating honey-mustard pretzels), and bananas, being high in carbohydrates and relatively mild in flavor, will probably go well with the dish. Since we’re adding more ingredients, we’ll need to add more mustard to make sure the flavor doesn’t get lost. We’ll use onion to complement the sweet taste of the bananas and mustard. Lastly, we’ll turn this into a pasta sauce, since we have boxes of pasta ready to use. Also, because I love pasta!

(Important note: it’s always useful to have a big bag of onions and garlic in your fridge at all times. They’re cheap, a great way way to add flavor, and a key ingredient in many recipes!)

Lastly, if you ever have any doubts about whether two ingredients will go well together, you can get a preview of their combined taste by smelling them. First, smell one ingredient, and hold onto its flavor. Then, smell the other one, and decide if the two go well together.

So remember, have no fear, and keep experimenting!