My Cooking Method: How to Not Waste Food

I have a good friend that can't seem to cook everything she buys. She plans three or four recipes for a week and goes to the store and buys the ingredients. She chooses recipes that look good but they always take more time than she expects and then she's left with way more food than she can eat. So she has leftovers for three or four meals until she's absolutely sick of the dish. Even worse, by the time she gets to the other meals she has planned, some of the ingredients she bought have gone bad.

Cooking healthy, fast meals for one or two people can be challenging. Most recipes online serve four and aren't always tailored to the needs of a working person. Below I'll outline my personal method for cooking and you can see if it would work for you as well. I call it leftover recycling.

Let me walk you through an average day in my kitchen. For breakfast, if I don't have any leftovers, my fiance and I will eat some greek yogurt and fruit. If we do have "breakfast sized" leftovers, meaning enough for two breakfasts but not quite enough for two lunches, I'll serve it with a creative twist. For example, I just bought two miniature dutch ovens, so for breakfast today, I divided up some leftover chicken and veggie curry into the two of them, cracked an egg on top of each, and baked it at 350 degrees until the egg was cooked. They looked like little curry and egg pies! **I will make a post about this technique soon!** It's easy, delicious, and uses up all the leftovers.

Lunch will either be "lunch sized" leftovers with a twist -- adding a fresh veggie or fruit side, scrambling some eggs into it, etc. -- or I'll start something from scratch to begin my next round of leftover recycling. I try to cook healthy food, so this usually involves a lot of vegetables that I either roast in the oven or grill. Grilling is awesome and adds instant flavor to everything, but many people don't have time to grill every other day (including me!) so a lot of the veggies I eat are oven roasted. Take a few choice vegetables like zucchini, squash, bell peppers, broccoli, etc., chop them up into reasonably sized pieces, put them in a bowl, and mix them with olive oil, salt, and pepper. Spread them on a baking sheet and cook them for 15-20 minutes and voila! You have a pan filled with roasted veggies! **Roasted veggie recipe post coming soon!**

So what do you do with this random assortment of roasted vegetables? Eat them creatively, of course! Sometimes I'll make a seasoned sour cream (sour cream, lemon pepper, salt) to dip them in. Sometimes I'll buy a rotisserie chicken and have a pile of veggies with a drumstick. Sometimes I chop them up even more and scramble them with some eggs and hot sauce. The important thing to remember is that you'll have leftover veggies and those will be used for dinner.

When dinner time rolls around, continue to use the veggies creatively. If you have a jar of curry, mix that up with whatever veggies you didn't eat for lunch and serve it over rice! Have a lot of that rotisserie chicken left? Make it all into a soup! Have some fish that you bought on sale? Wrap a serving of fish in some parchment paper with the veggies and bake them in the oven at 350 for fifteen minutes. Seriously, you can do anything.

The basic thing to keep in mind is that you'll be eating a lot of vegetables and be doing a lot of experiments. Don't buy a weeks worth of veggies at the store, either; buy enough for your first "cycle" and then when you run out, go buy more. You'll save money in the long run and won't waste any of your food. It's a good idea to keep some things on hand, like canned veggies and beans, chicken/vegetable stock, garlic, and seasonings, but as long as you only buy produce and meat when you need it you won't have any waste.

That's basically it! Below I'll run through two days of cooking just to reiterate some points.

For two people.

Day one:

Breakfast: No leftovers, so we eat yogurt and fruit. Go to store to buy a rotisserie chicken, two zucchini, two bell peppers, a sweet potato, and an onion.

Lunch: Chop up half of the veggies, toss in olive oil and seasonings, and roast for fifteen minutes at 350 in the oven. Season a dollop of sour cream with lemon pepper. Serve drumsticks of chicken with veggies and sour cream. Store leftover chicken and veggies in fridge.

Dinner: Remove all the chicken from the chicken bones and save the bones in the fridge. Chop the chicken and the remaining cooked veggies into reasonable sized pieces. Put in a sauce pan along with a jar of your favorite curry. Reheat and serve alone or with some rice. (I serve it alone because, well, carbs.) Save leftovers.

Day two:

Breakfast: If there are leftovers from dinner, reheat them in a sauce pan over medium-low heat. Crack two eggs over the top and put a lid on the pan. Check periodically to make sure nothing burns. Once the eggs are ALMOST done, turn off the heat and serve.

Lunch: Remember the other veggies that you bought but didn't cook? Cut all of those up and roast them. You're out of chicken, so be creative with the veggies! For this example, I ate the veggies with a side of canned refried beans with melted cheese on top. Protein!

Dinner: Soup time! This whole process takes a few hours, so start as soon as you get off work. Remember those rotisserie chicken bones? Put them in a soup pot and fill the pot with cold water until the bones are just covered. Bring to a boil on the stove, then reduce the heat until it's simmering. Let it simmer for about two hours. Once it's done, CAREFULLY strain all of the bones out. There are several helpful videos on youtube if you don't think you can do this without hurting yourself. Personally, I put a colander in a sturdy glass bowl, pour everything in, and then using oven mitts to hold the glass bowl, pour it all back into the pot. Then I chop the leftover veggies and add them to the hot broth, along with anything else I think might make the soup good, such as a can of green chilies or hot sauce.

Whew! What a long post! Good luck out there, and let me know if you have any questions!

Stove Etiquette: What do?

This is one of my biggest pet peeves in the kitchen. Many people I've cooked with don't know STOVE ETIQUETTE. This is different than OVEN ETIQUETTE, which I'll make a different post about. A stove can be a wonderful tool for delicious food or it can be the catalyst that burns your house to the ground. It's good to learn how to use it safely, especially if you're new to cooking. These are things that aren't in cookbooks necessarily but were passed along through my family.

Okay, here is where the magic happens! My stove!

It doesn't look like much, but you don't have to have a gourmet kitchen to cook gourmet food. There are a few things to notice here:

1) The top is clean. If anything splashes or falls onto the surface, I clean it as quickly as reasonably possible. Obviously if you have an active burner or the surface is too hot, you wait until after you're done cooking to clean it, but don't leave it for too long. The longer you leave it, the harder it is to get off.

2) I'm using the back burners. Why? Because it's safer! If you're going to put one or more pots on at once, it's better to fill up the back burners first and then use the front ones. Use common sense as well. If you're cooking a stock that doesn't really need much supervision while you're making a sauce that needs constant attention, put the stock on the back burner and put the other pan on one of the front burners. The last thing you want to do is knock a giant pot of boiling hot meat juice all over yourself.

Here's another thing you should notice. Look at the position of the handle:

When you LET GO of the handle, always make sure it's POINTED TOWARDS THE CENTER OF THE STOVE. This is so, so important. What if someone with a billowy shirt/sweater/cape walks by and your pot handle is positioned in such a way that it catches onto their clothing and goes crashing onto the floor? Or yet worse, crashing all over said person and causing horrible burns? ALWAYS point the handles inward.

Another important point about pot handles: you NEED to be holding one if you're stirring anything in the pot. It's just a good habit to be in. I know you're balancing your wine in one hand and you just need to stir that soup just a little bit and surely it'll be okay, right? NO. DON'T. Put your glass of wine down, grab the handle of the pot, and stir away. Again, you don't want the pot slipping off the stove and murdering your best friend. Then, when you're done stirring, move the handle back to the "safe" position we talked about earlier.

**Note: Use your brain. Don't grab a hot handle. If the handle is too hot to touch, use a dish towel to hold it. Just keep it away from the flames and don't leave it on the handle when you take your hand off.

More pot information: KNOW YOUR POT.

See this awesome stock I'm making? I'm using a thick old-school dutch oven to do it. I want the soup to cook properly and stay hot, so I want to use the lid, but the lid doesn't have a cooling vent in it.

"Wait, what's that?" you ask. Some pots have little holes in the top of the lid to let steam out. If your pot doesn't have that (or even if it does and the hole is CRAZY small) leave some room at the top for the hot air to vent out. If you don't, you'll get that bubbly disaster that everyone associates with making pasta for the first time. Don't know what I'm talking about? Basically the liquid in your pot bubbles up crazy high and then comes out from under the lid all over your beautiful stove top. It's a nightmare. Don't do it.

Another thing to keep in mind when using pots with lids: if you take it off to stir, you need to put the lid down so you can hold the handle (remember?). So where do you put it? On the stove top, of course!

If you don't have any room on your stove top, find another surface that won't be damaged by the heat, like the edge of your sink, and put it down there.

Speaking of keeping your stove top clean...

...put something under your stirring utensil. Generally the best thing to use is a small ceramic dish because it's not flammable, but mine's dirty and I'm lazy so I'm using a wadded up paper towel. Notice that the paper towel is FAR away from the flames. Fire bad.

Extra stove stuff:

I generally like to keep some things on hand for my culinary adventures. Salt and pepper are obvious choices and should be right next to the stove for cooking purposes. I really enjoy cooking with lemon pepper as well so I have a little bowl that I can grab quick pinches from (with CLEAN hands). Lastly, you need your cooking oils next to where the cooking happens. **Keep an eye out for my post on oils.** I have two that I prefer: olive oil and coconut oil. Also, pro-tip, buy one of those quick-pour stoppers for liquor bottles and stick it in your favorite olive oil bottle. It will make your life so much easier.

Okay, that's all for now! Let me know if I left anything out or if you have any questions!