I’m at Tokyo-Narita – Iwould have had 2.5 hours here but my flight is delayed an hour and a half due to snow in Amsterdam (which is worrying, since I have to get home and I know what snow does to the Dutch train system) so this seems like a good time to write out my first post for Commodorified’s blog carnival on cooking for those who don’t. February is the right month for Carnaval, anyway!
There will have to be a separate second post with some recipes after I get home.
I really do not enjoy planning meals for weekdays, or cooking after a day at work. What I do enjoy is cooking big tasty meals when I have the time to do it right. Therefore, lately I’ve got into the habit of making a big pot of something on Sundays, big enough to give us a couple days of leftovers during the week. It also turns out that, for me at least, leftovers are much tastier when they’re planned, because they are some of my favorite meals that I know reheat well, rather than something that’s left over because I didn’t like it much and so didn’t eat a lot the first time.
What works really well for this is “poor foods”: the sort of thing a culture evolves to use up every bit of their leftovers and make a little bit of meat (which is generally more expensive than grains or vegetables) feed a lot of people. So things like stews and soups and one-pot meals are good candidates. There are only two of us here to feed, but the output of a 24″ Le Creuset Dutch oven only makes enough for one original dinner and 1-2 days of leftovers, so it’s not an unwieldy amount of food. Most of the meals I discuss will keep for week in the refrigerator or can be frozen.
My own kitchen is current very limited: no oven, just a tiny “combi” (microwave/grill/convection oven, not particularly good at any of those things), and a glass cooktop that neither heats up quickly nor gets as hot as I’d like. That means most of my dishes are things I can make on the stovetop in a Dutch oven (called a stoofpot in the Netherlands, if you ever wondered). The current repertoire includes chili; jambalaya; Hungarian goulash soup (my version is very tasty but not quite what we had in Budapest: still fine-tuning); red beans and rice; assorted attempts at beef stew, not yet perfected; and chicken soup.
My local supermarkets sell pre-seasoned tiny roasting chickens (maybe 2 kg max) already packaged in a baking bag; one trick that works well is to have the chicken on Sunday for an early-ish dinner, then use the carcass to make soup I can have during the week. If I had access to a US-style kitchen and ingredients, I’d get a bigger chicken, enough to have some left during the week. I’d also make all of my meals larger and I’d freeze a few single-serving portions every time I made a big Sunday meal, to have more variety on hand for quick cooking.
If I had a freezer, oven, and big chunks of meat in the local markets, I’d also add roasted / oven cooked foods to the repertoire: roast turkey, roast beef, and Texas-style beef brisket (add beef, tomato sauce, hot sauce, most of the spices you own, and cook at low terperature for 6-8 hours). Real Texans will point out that this is not how they cook it, but they’ll like the taste.
The one ingredient that makes all of these dishes possible is bouillon / stock / broth. At the moment I use the instant kind, which is too salty and I’m avoiding looking at the ingredients list for fear of what I might find; in the past I have used cartons of organic stock from the supermarket or Costco. If I keep up my Sunday cooking tradition when I settle back in the US and have a lot more freezer space, I will begin to experiment with making my own stock (other posts in this carnival have some good advice on doing that). Having some sort of broth on hand also makes it easy to improvise soups: throw in all your leftover veggies, cook for an hour or two and call it vegetable soup; add beans and veggies and call it minestrone; on a weeknight toss in onions, simmer twenty minutes, and serve with toasted French bread soaking in it and cheese grated on top.
Most of the foods I’ve mentioned above are wintery sorts of things; turkey actually works pretty well for summer too; you heat up the kitchen while cooking but then when it’s done you can refrigerate or freeze the leftovers, and then eat them hot or cold: sandwiches, on top of salads, whatever. Another thing we’ve been making for summer is Thai salad; I like using shrimp, rice noodles, a few crunchy vegetables, and then a dressing involving some oil, fish sauce, hot sauce, possibly brown sugar, and lime juice. It won’t keep for too long because the vegetables will eventually go limp in the dressing, but it’s still good for a day or two after you make it. The same applies to stir-fries – in fact, you can keep them for a few days.
I will try to post a few recipes this weekend.