Most of my recipes come from my daughter, who is an outstanding cook. She doesn't really have "recipes", she just knows instinctively what to mix together. I was just asking her a little bit ago, "What would you do if you had chicken breasts and rice?"
She came up with, "Chop the chicken breasts up, salt and pepper them, and cook in coconut milk. While that's cooking, saute onions and mushrooms and add salt, pepper, rosemary, oregano and paprika. Make rice in the rice cooker. Slice up some green cabbage really really thin (millimeters), and saute that for only a few moments until it's bright green and starts to wilt. Do not overcook! Just minutes is all you want. The flavor changes massively if you cook longer. Put cooked chicken on top of rice, cover with sauteed vege mix. Cabbage off to the side. Pour the coconut milk you cooked with over the top of the chicken if you want it like a curry, otherwise save the milk and use that to make fish soup or something else tomorrow. Add some spices that you like if it comes out needing something."
So this is what I'm going to do tonight! It sounds good. I have everything I need to make this already here, except for the cabbage. I'll go get that soon. She just makes things up to cook. Maybe she saw a recipe for something similar somewhere, and that may have given her some ideas, but she just does what she wants and it always comes out great IMHO. But she does leave me on my own to figure the amounts of each ingredient to add. She says that's part of my cooking training - experiment and learn. She gives me hints and pseudo-recipes like the above to get me started thinking. I know for sauteing that she typically uses either avocado oil or coconut oil depending on the heat she'll be sauteing at, so I'll use one of those. I'll probably go for the avocado oil and a higher temp saute on my first attempt at this. Part of my "experiment and learn" process.
