Earlier this week we had a short break in Anglesey, taking a tiny cottage for four nights. One night was supposed to feature a pub meal, but lovely though the seaside village was its two central pubs were less than inviting: in one you seemed to be near the toilet wherever you sat, not a great boon to appetite; the other could have made a Hammer Horror setting - dark, empty, silent, creepy.
So with few supplies to hand it was make-do time in the kitchen. That great stand-by the omelette provided the first course, made with two peppers, some garlic, and a load of chorizo. It got me thinking about how certain dishes are so amenable to kitchen sink cookery - the stew and the curry to name but two. The pizza is another obvious contender.
But as so often in cookery, there is an indefinable but readily appreciated limit beyond which a dish shifts from interesting to messy and confused. Had I added another meat - ham say - that omelette would have indeed been messy. Another vegetable - onion or potato - would have worked. Why is that? Am I judging by a standard of meals eaten in my past? Or do the putative ham and actual chorizo clash?
The pizza case is an intriguing one here: we eat four thin home-made ones on our regular pizza nights. Put too many ingredients on one and it doesn't work at all. But it seems fine to have cheese and tomato and anchovy on one, chicken and sweetcorn on another, peppers, pepperami, ham and garlic on a third, etc etc. All the ingredients end up mixed in ones stomach. Eaten slice by slice the different toppings follow one another closely. So is this just a question of taste, keeping flavours more or less discernible, and a momentary question at that?
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