THROWING A FEW THINGS TOGETHER

Or, the fine art of Picky-Pick.

Picky-Pick is what we have for supper when we have no supper planned.

Picky-Pick is the hastily assembled toasted cheese sandwich, the bowl of tuna salad with crackers and pickles. (She Who Must Be Obeyed dotes on little bitty pickles, be they sweet gherkins, dills, or cornichons.)

Picky-Pick is when you look in the refrigerator and pantry, say, “Fuck it,” and chow down on a bowl of cereal while you watch “Jeopardy.”

Picky-Pick is leftovers of pretty much any kind, especially if they consist of remnants of more than one meal.


SWMBO’s amazingly tasty Four-Bean Salad.

SWMBO’s excellent four-bean salad, a dish originally created in a frenzy of pure improvisation, is most emphatically not Picky-Pick - that is, unless it has been marinating in the fridge for three or four days, in which case it falls under the general category of leftovers.  Add a handful of feta cheese to it and you’ve got the backbone of a fine meal.

We had several chicken sausages left over from a weekend grilling session - the perfect underpinning for Picky-Pick - and all I needed to do was convert ’em into something resembling a meal.  That was easy enough: I cleaned and sliced up about a pound of Fart Balls Brussels sprouts, added a couple of minced garlic cloves and a thinly sliced shallot, and threw it all into the sauté pan in which I had been browning the sliced-up sausage remnants.  A splash of chicken broth to deglaze the pan, and presto!  Suppertime!


Sausage ’n’ Sprouts: another happy improvisation.

Sausage ’n’ Sprouts!  That stuff tasted so good, I almost forgot it was Picky-Pick.