Food templates

A post of MamaDeb's got me thinking about how most of my cooking happens. It's not recipes anymore, but templates. Like the pasta-vegetable-cheese one-pot template, which can be any pasta shape, whatever veggies are convenient and appeal (sauce falls in this category), and whatever cheese. Which itself can be generalized to starch-veggie-protein, substituting rice, or barley, or polenta, or wheatberries (etc.) for the pasta, and fish, eggs, or tofu (rarely meat, though) for the cheese. Or the not-an-omelette template, with sauteed veggies, sometimes leftover starches, and eggs. Quiche, too, is easily permutable. Or a variety of baked chicken dishes (and pretty much anything that goes well on chicken is decent on salmon, too). And so on. I think this is why only certain recipes catch my eye these days, ones that use a familiar ingredient in a very different way, or a very different combination, or use a technique I'm not familiar with (that's useful in more situations than just that). Endless recipes for pizzas (another thing easily permuted) aren't enough to make me want to read, or to use that recipe (though it may inspire a desire towards pizza that evening anyway). Oddly enough, food writing (other than the recipe parts), is very compelling reading for me.

ETA Part of this template thinking is tied into creative use of leftovers, somehow (at least in my brain). I get bored with the same thing for meals on end, and if it's just me, there's frequently too much food (cooking for one is not my forte). So I end up making a lot of things that are easily transmogrified into other dishes. Vegetable side dishes for Shabbat (always pareve, for easier use later) get put in with pasta, or turned into quiche. Meat goes into soup, or salad, or sandwiches. And so on.
(I do go through phases where particular dishes are made frequently, but meal after meal of the same thing isn't appealing).