I often wish my cooking style was more “a little of this, a little of that.” When I try to combine fresh local produce and/or top-shelf pantry staples with joyous abandon and a little good olive oil and fleur de sel the results are generally underwhelming. How can so many good ingredients together be so dull? Sometimes the mix is wrong, sometimes the cooking method. Often things will be proceeding apace and I’ll second-guess myself and douse the dish with lemon, basil, vinegar, or cheese, knowing that if nothing else it will taste like one of those and that can’t be all that bad, except that those are accent ingredients for a reason and no one wants to eat a bowl full of balsamic vinegar (well, I don’t).

My desire to produce beautiful, delicious food and say “I just threw this together on the fly relying on quality ingredients and my rock-solid kitchen skills!” is partly due to Pinterest envy, and partly due to a belief that this (minus the boasting) is the essence of good cooking.  I’ve been reading Tamar Adler’s An Everlasting Meal, which is a wonderful book that you should buy, and it is inspiring and instructive if you want to get better at making the food you have good.

Anyway, I am still shaky without training wheels (=recipes), which is why dinner tonight was such a triumph. I had on hand cooked quinoa, rapidly rotting grape tomatoes, a drawer full of corn, and the usual other suspects: onions, dessicated herbs, butter.

I sliced and separated half an onion into strips. I cut the kernels off one ear of corn and quartered about 10 grape tomatoes. I melted about a tablespoon of butter in a skillet, added the onions and cooked them gently over low heat til they caramelized, about 20ish minutes. Then I added the corn and some salt and pepper, decided it needed some liquid to cook in, and had a stroke of genius. Sweet corn should cook in sweet wine. I poured in a shot glass of Riesling, a shot glass of water, and then only narrowly avoided the steam burn my home ec (“Teen Living,” actually) teacher used to warn us about. “Waft, waft,” I heard her shout as I lowered my face into the deliciously boozy mist.

Covered the pan and let the corn cook on low heat for somewhere between 5 and 10 minutes. In between stirring and sniffing I chiffonaded about 15 leaves of basil and finely chopped 2 green onions. Once the corn seemed just cooked enough I tossed in the green onions and tomatoes, stirred gently, and let them cook for a few minutes, still on low heat. Then in with the quinoa til it just warms up and the tomatoes have begun to break down a little (I might skin them next time, since I hate errant tomato skins).

I took a trial bite and between the butter, sweet corn, sweet wine, and caramelized onions, this dish needed a dash of something sharp. I grated about a ¼ of a lemon’s zest into the pan, then squeezed about a half-tablespoon of lemon juice in and scraped all along the bottom of the pan. Into a serving bowl, top and toss with basil (you want a lot of basil). Perfect, perfect, perfect.