Faking it in the kitchen
By David Hagedorn
The Washington Post

To test the theory that any cook can fake a dinner party by jazzing up grocery stores’ prepared foods and passing them off as homemade, I recently served such an Asian-inspired meal to my friends—without disclosing the provenance of the meal’s ingredients.
       Because I am a professional chef, the process is easy—but getting away with it was trickier. When chefs entertain, expectations are high. At the end of the meal, I reaped the compliments before exposing the ruse. Even the food snobs were fooled.
       In the interest of science, I set aside some of my usual standards, which allowed me to discover credible ingredients I would have otherwise ignored.
       Kitchen Basics brand stocks are excellent, though still nowhere close to the quality of homemade stocks. Imagine brand organic soups are nicely textured, though a bit bland; minimal doctoring makes them sing.
       I tried other convenience foods: jarred chopped ginger and garlic, and canned whipped cream, whose lack of integrity did not, in my opinion, justify the scant amount of time their use saved.
       For this Asian menu, I refashioned 18 pieces of sushi by sprinkling them with soy sauce, topping them with a small dollop of mayonnaise mixed with wasabi paste, passing them under the broiler for a few seconds and garnishing them with slivers of pickled ginger.
       The next course required only five minutes to turn a carton of wan butternut squash soup and a smattering of ingredients into a bold, Thai-style yellow curry and coconut soup with salmon.
       Whole Foods Market’s rotisserie chickens can be quite succulent if they have not been sitting around too long. I opened a can and two jars to make a black bean and ginger sauce for the bird; it earned rave reviews.
       For a side dish, cellophane bags of baby spinach and carrots, microwaved with red bell pepper, sesame oil and ginger, took three minutes to prepare.
Chai floats, assembled in moments, were a refreshing end to the meal.
       I succeeded in faking out my friends, but the joke was on me. My guests considered my shortcut food every bit as good as my made-from-scratch fare. The experiment went so well that my ego could barely handle it.