breakfast pizza: how ideas come from visual associations

(Video link here.) The first 20 seconds of this wacky video illustrates an essential tenet of improvisation – especially in cooking: the associations of ideas in your field of vision. Here, a classic breakfast next to a frozen pizza sparks the brilliant idea of a breakfast pizza. For us, it’s lead to the discovery that vanilla bean scrapings are delicious on avocados (with a little sugar), that a chunk of chocolate smeared with peanut butter = a peanut butter cup, that amaretti cookies and creme fraiche make a delightful cake for one; the peanut butter and dulce de leche make a stupendous “truffle” or cake filling; that bacon is a great substitute for some of the butter in a cake; that herb salt makes a great dusting for butter cookings. We’ve also found figs to be divine with salami, sugar to be great on olive-oil brushed toast, among about a million other revelations (many of which are in Sally’s The Improvisational Cook and A New Way to Cook).

All it takes is TRYING out the combos you see before you and seeing if they work.

via Epic Meal Time