I'd like to try to help you understand a fundamental pattern that, I hope, will open up many possibihties for you. In other words, I want you to be able to grasp the power of creativity that working with food offers you. Many analogies can be made to convey this idea, but I am going to use paint, that is, paint as it relates to the blending of colors.
Food scholars and chefs speak about the "mother sauces," and in a way, it is the offspring of those sauces that I'm referring to here, but in terms of colors. There are really only seven colors in the rainbow. In school they taught us the mnemonic Roy G. Biv to remember red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet. Well, I have no mnemonic device to help you remember the foundational sauces, and in any case there may be several other basic sauces that could be included in this list, even though some of these are not true "mother sauces." But if you can think of them, you probably will have already absorbed my point.
I have chosen the following sauces because of their modern popularity: butter sauce, hollandaise, tomato sauce, vinaigrette, mayonnaise, cream sauce, and brown sauce. Think of each of them as the color white. Now if you think of any of these basic sauces as plain white paint and you wish to add, say, tomatoes, and you think of the tomatoes as red paint, you will be blending white and red. Any of the above sauces can be "tinted" with different flavors, or "paints." It is simple enough to learn these basic sauces and then alter them, expand them, and "paint" them into different colors, or flavors!
Now think flavor every time you read the word color. For instance, cream sauce becomes Creole mustard cream sauce by the addition of a color (flavor), mustard. Brown sauce becomes Marsala brown sauce by the addition of a color (flavor), Marsala. Vinaigrette can become Mango-chile vinaigrette, mayonnaise can become basil mayonnaise, butter sauce can become a gazpacho butter sauce. Do you see the doors opening? Each sauce, each color, each flavor that you can play with?
A few scenarios to further illustrate my paint analogy can and should be considered. It is important to be able to dOften the shading or tinting of a basic sauce will work because it reiterates the basic premise of a dish. The Sauternes in the butter sauce with my sauteed Florida lobster recipe works because the sweetness of the Sauternes echoes the inherent sweetness of the lobster. It is tone on tone.
More often, however, I will call for a juxtaposition of flavors to offer a dramatic transition within a single dish by choosing a tint that will contrast with the main thematic taste of the entree. The port mustard cream that I serve as a sauce with ginger ravioli with smoked capon and chutney is illustrative of an attempt to offer a broad spectrum of sensations for the palate. Heat, sweet, tart, smoke, and more collide and embrace as they connect with the tastebuds in that dish. A simple cream sauce could not offer these vibrant and challenging tangents.
But let's discuss some pitfalls to avoid. If you were to use a smoky plum tomato sauce (tomato sauce being the white paint and the smoke being the tint) with say, smoked salmon and smoked salmon butter, you would undoubtedly smoke your guests out of the dining room-a classic case of too much of a good thing.
Or, let's imagine a delicate pair of sweetbreads that have been poached in a carefully made court bouillon commingling herbs, mushrooms, root vegetables, and Champagne. The sweetbreads are cleaned, gently pressed compactly to insure a velvety texture, and readied for a sauce chosen by the chef. Unfortunately, he has elected to tint a harmless and otherwise useful mushroom-scented white butter sauce with a tropical fruit salsa, and, for good measure, a Thai-inspired peanut sauce. It's something akin to the gent who would wear a paisley tie with a striped shirt and checked pants. Third-degree overkill.