Default recipes. We all have them. I often feature a default pasta night here on Sippity Sup. It’s different every time and that is sorta the idea behind default recipes.

Default recipes are great when you just feel like opening up the fridge and making something from whatever is on hand at the moment. As I said pasta is a great candidate, as are frittatas, quesadillas and even crostini. I swear I could make an interesting tapenade from the leftovers of your fast food lunch, don’t laugh I bet I could.

Another topping closely related in spirit to a tapenade is salsa.

My default salsa is typically made with chopped tomatillos, white onion, salt, pepper, and a little heat. I also like the addition of limejuice and cilantro. When I want to get fancy I add roasted peppers. Sometimes mild one like Anaheim or poblano. Other times something with some fire– like serrano. When I decide to add peppers to my default salsa I prefer to roast the peppers first, and if I am already roasting the peppers it’s no bother to roast the tomatillos too. See how default dishes work?

This may sound like I am tooting my own horn (toot-toot) but there are times when I have made a particularly good batch of tomatillo salsa and I think: “Man this is so good I could eat it as soup”.

I am still cooking from my mother’s recipe collection. It started as a Mother’s Day Tribute to my own mother who passed away in 1993. It was a way to say Thank You for the love of food and cooking that she instilled in all three of her children. She might not have planned it this way, but her enthusiasm for cooking and entertaining turned out to be contagious. But it’s funny because I never really knew I had been infected with the cooking bug until after my mother passed away.  She died young and I was still finding my own adult direction in this world, so she’ll never really know the great gift she gave to me.

And this next recipe really is a gift too. A great gift in fact. Of all her recipes that I have brought to you this is my favorite. It’s the one closest to a recipe I would have written myself. And despite all the childhood favorites and comfort foods I have paraded across this blog in the past week, this is the recipe that most closely aligns with my adult tastes and sensibilities. I am so glad I started this project because this recipe is bound to become a dinner party staple at my house. It's everything I like in food. Great texture, bold flavors, and enough lusciousness to hold it all together.

Has this ever happened to you?

You come across a blog. A cooking blog. You see a recipe that appeals to you on some unexplainable level. Naturally you leave a nice comment and then you move on. You look at all kinds a great recipes that day, but for some reason later that same day you find yourself thinking about that one particular recipe. You try to shake it out of your head. You're not even hungry, yet you find yourself going back to that blog for a second look.

But the trouble with going back for a second look is now that recipe becomes lodged in your brain. You can't shake it off. Everything you see reminds you of that one particular recipe. Stiill, you try to stay focused on the tasks at hand and move on with your day.

Somehow you make yourself believe that you have moved on. Sure that recipe is flitting around the corners of your mind, but you think you have got the situation under control. Then out of nowhere, while sitting around one night watching American Idol weeks later– BOOM, there's that recipe front and center in your brain blocking your view of the television.

What do you do to get a litttle peace and quiet? Well, I'll tell ya the only thing you can do is get to the kitchen and put the whole incident to rest.