a little this and a little that, a random breakfast mash

I’ve been vegan about five years now. I’ve been cooking only about five years as well. The 8+ years before I went vegan, I lived off pasta and jarred sauce. Peanut butter sandwiches. I didn’t even own a cookbook.

And now I have a pretty serious cookbook collection (obsession?) and I discovered that I enjoy cooking. I need recipes though (hence the cookbooks), and I’ve always been amazed at people who can come up with recipes, or adjust recipes on the fly, or “use recipes for inspiration” to come up with something of their own. My mom, in fact, is someone who will go through her recipes, and end up with three of them on the counter, from which she makes something that is all and none of those recipes, and it is delicious. Of course people always ask for the recipe, and she’s stumped. She might never be able to recreate it, she definitely can’t give out a recipe that would have a hope of being near what she actually did!

Me, I’m a recipe follower.

Mostly.

In the past year, if that, I’ve discovered that sometimes I can wing it. I can’t claim that I come up with anything that anyone but myself would be satisfied with, but it is still an exciting step for me.

Usually this happens out of desperation. I will have three ingredients and a great deal of hunger, and so I throw stuff together and that’s that.

And that’s sort of what happened one morning recently, as I got ready for work. I needed something to bring to work for breakfast-ish. I had leftover millet. I knew I could work with that. But what to do? So here’s what I did:

Random Breakfast Mash:

• some leftover millet
• a big spoonful of almond butter
• some shredded unsweetened coconut sprinkled over, generously because I love coconut
• some maple syrup
• some water because I forgot to add soy or almond milk before I left home, and I needed some extra liquid, thus I had the choice of either coffee or water when I was at work…I went with water.

Heat in microwave for one minute, and stir it up.

I’m not entirely sure that this would be something that other people would want to eat, but it just might be. I found it delicious, and I was pleased to note that I could distinctly taste the various elements of this random breakfast mash. This might be something others take for granted, but I have a sense of taste and smell that are hit or miss, so distinct tastes are quite often beyond the skills of my poor taste buds.

The great thing about a recipe like this, is that it could be rewritten as:

Even More Random Breakfast Mash:

• some amount of some grain
• various amounts of some other things

No pictures of this one. It would just look like a millet mash in any case!