A few days back, I made some awesome Baja Fish Tacos using this recipe posted on Food Network. As much as we dug the meal, we didn’t finish all of the fried fish, white sauce or use up all the chopped up cabbage. The next day I was trying to figure out what to do with all that and decided to go with a salad. So, that day, at the farmer’s market, I picked up some lettuce and a few ears of corn. I chopped up the lettuce and tossed it in a bowl with the cabbage. Then I shaved some carrots I had in the fridge (from the farmer’s market the previous week), mixed those in with the salad and cut up a lime into wedges. I had two small tortillas leftover and we almost never wind up eating those, so I cut them into strips and cooked them in a pan with some oil. I’m getting pretty good at that thing where you shove the pan forward in the air and flip its contents without using a utensil. I’m sure there’s a cool cooking term for it, but I’m not up on the lingo.

In the same pan, I dropped the remaining pieces of fried fish I had just to heat them through. Once they were nice and warm, I put them in a dish with some tin foil covering until my wife came home from work. Meanwhile, I steamed three ears of corn. When they were done, I plated two of the ears for the table and then cut the kernels off of one as a garnish for the salad. I added everything to the table and also got the white sauce out of the refrigerator to act as a kind of dressing and we were good to go.

I’m not really a recipe creator at this point in my cooking odyssey. I can follow a recipe and maybe toss a few things in here and there to add a little oomph, but I don’t create anything from scratch and I always use a recipe when cooking. I feel like this was a good step in the right direction though because I did it all in my head without writing anything down. Sure, I had done the hard part the previous day, but it was kind of fun to use that base and build something different. Now I just need to add a few things to make a killer salad to get rid of the rest of that lettuce!