In a way, this meal was a test of “hey you are cooking into a space you don’t know that well” and “you are cooking without recipes” and “you are cooking in a hurry and sort of distractedly”.
This might not be an optimal intersection. It might be where cookbooks and recipes serve as bumpers to the bumper cars.
The ideas were good. I edited out the quick pickles. (Just too much food.) I changed the rice in the black beans to a simple masa cake only to find I didn’t have masa so it became a polenta cake, with a different texture. It was dry but ok? I put too many serrano chiles in the fresh salsa on top of the black beans which were on top of the polenta cake and they sort of blew out the cake and the beans.
I made a chimichurri for the steak. It was good! But it was a bit weird in the mix alongside the polenta cake/black beans and the roasted banana. The roasted banana probably needed more roasting. It needed a smarter relationship to the sliced avocado I put it on. I don’t think I cut the steak attentively on the grain; that runs so counter to what I do with other cuts of beef that even the reminder to do it otherwise didn’t help.
I can’t say “this was an objectively bad meal” but on each component I wasn’t where I wanted to be—and the idea was good for each one of them. It’s an important reminder of what recipes are (and maybe, in some broader sense, academic coursework is): a kind of constraint that gets you to an outcome but also (ideally) lets you understand that outcome in bigger and more useful ways.