I adore food, have been meaning to get more strategic about menu
planning, and harbor hopes of taking (read: affording) a 6 month
maternity leave. Menu planning is a fun & practical place for me to
start cutting back on expenses in preparation for my upcoming role as mom.
Just recently I was referred to this cookbook by Tamar Adler:
An Everlasting Meal: Cooking with Economy & Grace.
It isn't my normal style of cookbook - I usually go hook, line,
& sinker for the usual kind that offer neatly packaged &
organized recipes, promising a simple (& often healthy or easy)
solution to the usual menu planning challenges. I'm also hooked on a
certain degree of convenience. Don't get me wrong - I don't go crazy
with the processed foods - but I do tend to buy canned beans instead of
dry, and that sort of thing. I've also been making more of an effort to
buy more local &/or organic produce (especially the dirty dozen),
buy less canned goods in general (especially tomatoes - I get Pomi brand
in a box), etc. - especially since getting pregnant.
I've never tried to make my own yogurt, sterilize jars
for jam, or bake bread. In fact, I've avoided the whole genre of baking
so as to steer clear of the temptation to expose myself to any more
sweets than I already am on any given day (especially at work). I also
haven't been a frequent cooker of the whole chicken/fish/etc., making my
own chicken stock, or using up a lot of those extra bits of a carcass
or vegetable to save money. When I first saw Tamar Adler's book, I
wasn't at all sure it was for me.
Then I started reading the preview on
Amazon.
Yes, she talks about using up all the bits of your previous meals
and making your own chicken stock, but she's gentle and pretty darn
convincing about it. Or maybe I'm just ready to hear what she has to
say. Either way, I found myself intrigued enough to download the kindle
book and start plotting ways to incorporate her ideas into this coming
week's meals.
One thing she talks about in particular is always (or often)
starting with a pot of boiling water - that the basic pot of water is a
classic method that tends to be underplayed by the cooking industry,
with its impetus to sell lots of other cooking tools &
paraphernalia. What I
love about this is her appeal to my desire
to have meals dovetail into one another more easily, so as to maximize
the investment of time, effort, & money I put into my family's
meals. She's a fan of starting with that pot of water, adding odds &
ends from your fridge & recent meals, even bits like rinds, bones,
& the normally discarded odds & ends of one's produce.
For instance: boil one or more veggies (preferably those that are
grown in the same season), mash them, and use them as the base for a
pasta sauce. Use the same pot to boil the water. Stuff like that, but
she puts it in such a way that a relative convenience-fiend like myself isn't put off the way I was when my elders admonished me when I was younger to be more thrifty.
So between this and next week, I'm inspired to apply her ideas to:
- Ground Turkey
- After a cooking mishap last week & a bit of a strike on this
favorite stand-by of hubby's during pregnancy, I promised him I'd make
something with it this week.
- At this moment I'm thinking I'll make chili + rice or pasta, and
then turn the leftovers into a casserole later in the week. Maybe I'll
even make extra so I can make other meals that don't have to dovetail on
all the same ingredients in the chili.
- Chicken in a Pot
- I'm thinking I'll make a whole chicken in a big pot with
veggies, and figure there are a variety of things I can do with those
leftovers:
- Chicken stir fry
- Chicken stock & soup
- Chicken tacos
- Chicken chili
- Chicken Tandoori
- And more!
Here's hoping this leads to a more streamlined way of cooking
healthy, relatively easy meals with a nice balance between regular go-to
meals and variety!
