1. “I’ve never made a meal at home with sugar snap peas before.”
2. “I could be the kind of person who owned and prepared sugar snap peas.”
3. “Starting today, I’m going to fill my crisper drawers with a variety of glossy and vibrant-looking vegetables. Not because I’m going to start eating only vegetables, I’ll still eat bread and cheese and things, I just want to make more room in my life for beautiful produce, I’m just always going to put my food on a beautiful plate, and eat salads with shredded cabbage that I have shredded myself and not bought pre-shredded and starting to brown out of a plastic shell from Trader Joe’s. Beautiful tea leaf salads, and followed by entire roasts, or haunches, or things, and I’ll make sauces, and I’ll sop those sauces up with crusty bread, but I’ll never eat half a thing of stale bread over the sink because I refuse to empty my dishwasher, and I’ll do things like have a recipe for sugar snap peas, and think about all the things I want to cook all week before I go grocery shopping, and then I’ll make them. Between my will and my actions there will be no difference. What I want to do, I will do. What I don’t want to do, I won’t.”
4. “One bunch of sugar snap peas, please.”
5. “Ah, I see the sugar snap peas glistening up at me, as cheerful as damnit, from the vegetable drawer. Hello, sugar snap peas. How fond I am of you. How I’m looking forward to the time we’re going to spend together. I don’t need you just now – all I want to do right now is eat whatever is already pre-made in my refrigerator – but as soon as I have a few minutes, and the kitchen is really clean enough to work in, I’m going to do something very special with you.”
6. “Oh, God, the peas are still in there. I’ve got to do something with those peas. If I did something with them tonight, maybe they wouldn’t taste withled and shrivered. It might not be too late.”
7. “Well, time to throw out everything that’s gross in the fridge so I’ve got space for all the gorgeous produce I’m sure I’ll pick up at the store today. Yes sir, things are really going to be different around here from here on out.”
[See step 1; repeat.]
But… but the beauty of sugar snap peas is that you don’t even NEED to prepare them. You just eat them. Directly from the bag. Before even leaving the farmer’s market.
Same with cherry tomatoes from the market. You buy them, eat two, think “Oh my goodness, the fresh deliciousness! I will surely snack upon these, and not upon Oreos, all week.” Then you throw out all those tomatoes and the Oreo package before you go to the market next week.
…
Are you me? (Looking guiltily at the empty Oreo box and the full cherry tomato box.)
Last summer I bought cherry tomatoes and garlic cheese curds from the market on the same day and discovered they made an amazing snack when eaten together. Evidently I’m still thinking about this a year later.
GARLIC CHEESE CURDS WHAT
I just spent a day in Wisconsin and went to a shop that had a WHOLE AISLE OF CHEESE PRODUCTS and it was glorious.
…. that…. isn’t standard?
/Wisconsinite
Years and years ago, I had a girlfriend from Illinois (I’m English) and I was visiting her and we drove up to Minnesota and as we went over the state border into Wisconsin there was a big sign saying, “STORE AHEAD, STOP NOW FOR FIREWORKS AND CHEESE” and I was very, very, very, very confused and they thought it was hilarious that I was confused.
There used to be a store in Wisconsin, near the St. Croix river, labeled “Taxidermy and Cheese.” It was a good landmark.
CHEESE CASTLE!!!! It’s a thing: http://www.marscheese.com/
Although honestly I was dissapointed that it was more beer than cheese, and that the building wasn’t more castle-like.
There’s a place in Pennsylvania that advertises “fireworks, adult videos, and karate supplies”. Talk about one-stop shopping!
Only one aisle?
/French
I’m in Minnesota and we don’t have a whole aisle at my grocery store, but then my grocery store is weirdly organized. The imported/good/interesting cheeses are displayed with the hummus and tapenade, all the way across the store from the…normal cheese? It might amount to an aisle’s worth of food if they would just put the Parmesan together with the Land o’ Lakes.
Oh my goodness, are you perchance talking about a Lund’s and Byerly’s? I’m a recent transplant to Minnesota and I was so confused about where the cheese lived when I first set foot in one of those.
that’s honestly, like, only 1/4 of a Woodman’s cheese aisle
Woodman’s was where we went! It was a joy to behold.
(faints)
They’re so good! I don’t know where in the world to find them except the Saint Paul Farmer’s Market!
*grabby hands* Gimme.
Come to the upper Midwest!
It’s The Dream. Some of my most wonderful, cheese curd filled times were in the upper midwest.
WHERE DOES ONE FIND THESE GARLIC CHEESE CURDS.
I almost replied to this comment just by shouting CHEESE CURDS but that’s not helpful. I find them at the farmer’s market in downtown Saint Paul, MN. They probably exist in at least one or two other places in the universe.
Should’ve figured it was a Midwest thing. On the upside, near Quebec is likely one of those other places! 🙂
Farmer’s market in Santa Barbara on Saturdays. Yummmm!
Local creamery in Oregon makes them, and they call the garlic ones Vampire Slayer.
I found some at one of those interstate pull off places with a bathroom and a couple of disappointing fast food options somewhere in Eastern Upstate New York once, but I couldn’t tell you which one. They were in a little fridge case by the door. Also, there was a little miniature produce stand at the door where I was able to buy wonderful local strawberries and red currants. It was everything I have ever wanted in a rest area, and also incredibly strange. However, I did not make any effort to remember which pull off it was. Inexcusable. (FYI–strawberries are not the ideal companion food for garlic cheese curds.)
It makes me sad, so very sad, that people live where they do not have regular access to a delicious variety of cheese and cheese curds. I am partial to Sriracha cheese curds. And dill ones. And black pepper ones. And chive ones.
/additional Wisconsinite
This is what you do with cherry tomatoes once you get them home, if this is an actual thing that happens:
http://leitesculinaria.com/76063/recipes-roasted-…
Crack. Tasty, tasty crack.
Okay, this is happening in my house tomorrow for lunch and i’m going to follow the direction to just eat them off the tray, eat the whole lot up. Holy god, this sounds amazing.
(And healthier than my vague plan to just drive toward takeaway food and see what happens..? It’s been Need To Do Shopping day for about a week. O.o)
This stuff on pasta or really good bread makes me cry with summertime joy.
Oh my god I just made a batch and ate them all. So much goodness!
But that’s actually the *opposite* of eating them all before you get home from or even leave the market. My tip: eat them all in five minutes while they are perfect, feel so well-nourished that you know Oreos cannot undermine the vitamins you’ve already consumed this week. Now you’ve enjoyed *all the snacks*!
My second container of aspirational cherry tomatoes (I DID eat the first, let me console myself and my dreams of Adulting Good with that) sits in the fridge even now, sitting directly on the cusp of ‘I could still eat those?’ and ‘Uh, they have tiny little black spots now, I cannot, sir, I WILL not!’
And my family block of Cadbury’s Caramello chocolate, bought at the same time, has one row left.
I feel like you KNOW me.
I spent long enough on food stamps that I still have a tendency to view produce as a special treat that I have to save for just the right moment. Then it goes bad, because I spent so long waiting for the Perfect Tomato Moment that all the tomatoes went black and slimy.
This is not a metaphor for anything, shut up.
Ugh, now I want some sugar snap peas.
I’ve got a week-old half bag of them in my fridge? I was briefly enthused and ate half of them and now am eating montezuma lime and sea salt chocolate instead.
I cannot wait for Proper Summer Produce, I will eat only tomato sandwiches and sugar snap peas DIRECTLY from their container as the Lord intended.
I briefly worked at a greenhouse that also sold some veggies.
Truly, the Lord intended one to eat peas and strawberries directly from the plant while ostensibly filling buckets to be sold to customers. And the Lord also intended the picker to take occasional breaks to visit the feral barn kittens.
That was A Good Job, I think.
I worked at a farm stand for most of my youth, and I can 100% co-sign this. So many too hot days spend “restocking” the cooler, AKA standing in the walk in fridge shoving handfuls of snap peas in my mouth.
Here the problem becomes that you have eaten two pounds of sugar snap peas before lunch, and your digestive system would like to have a word with you.
Correct.
Snort-laugh from the repeated-raw-food-attempter here.
I want to eat some right now. (I only have green beans to snack on though, woe.)
Yep. Some years back, I had classes straight through lunchtime. Snap peas, nuts, fruit, and chocolate got me through that semester.
I always think this and then inevitably end up getting a stringy one and choking on it and then I rage quit eating peas.
Very glad to know this. I have enough self-awareness to know I will never use vegetables that require cooking, and thus my impulsive farmers’ market purchases are limited to things I can consume raw. Which helps this cycle some.
Pro-tip: there /are/ ‘strings’ along the top of them that can be (but are not always) chewy and annoying. But you can usually remove them by grabbing the little nib at the bottom end and peeling it back. It is a minimal prep step, and not totally necessary, but will enhance the enjoyment.
I literally stopped reading and scrolled down to say exactlly this. Sugar snap peas are the perfect snack (well, the perfect snack that is not chili flavored mini rice cakes…the perfect green vegetable snack). They’re so sweet, and they crunch so loudly! I swear, that loud crunch makes me happier than a lot of things in life, to the point that I wonder why I enjoy it so much while I’m eating them. If you cook them, you kind of lose that.
Well I think we would all benefit from aiming for whirled pea…
[GUNSHOT]
[THUD]
This pun/plot device should be in a Miss Congeniality sequel somehow.
Step 7 needs a slight tweak:
“Well, time to throw out everything that’s gross in the fridge so I’ve got space for all the gorgeous produce I ALREADY BOUGHT while at the store today."
Because it's during that time you remember that you already bought the gorgeous produce a few weeks ago, and it's has since turned into some kind of liquid mush due to neglect.
I absolutely do this. But the good thing about sugar snap peas specifically is that you don’t have to cook them. You can just eat them raw as a delicious snack. No whole haunch preparation required.
And in fact, I would argue that cooking them is blasphemous and defeats their entire purpose. Maaaaaaybe you can cut them up and put them in a chopped salad. Maaaaaaybe.
You can throw them into a stir fry at the very end, so they only cook for 30 seconds or so, and then they’re still crispy and wonderful.
TOO REAL
I have some major dietary restrictions (wheat, soy, and nut allergies on top of normal vegetarian stuff) and on top of that I’m trying to go the whole month of May without using corn, rice, or anything containing refined sugar in order to break my terrible habit of eating nothing but cheese rice and vanilla ice cream for days at a time, but ANYWAY now I have all of these vegetables because I and they’re just looking at me and I don’t know what to do with them? Like, it took me 20 minutes to cut open a spaghetti squash the other day and then once I had finally hacked through the stupid thing I still had to google to figure out whether or not I should scoop the seeds before or after baking it and then I found out I could just microwave it but I didn’t know if that would taste as good and it was so confusing and entirely too much work for a vegetable that was trying to pretend to be a grain product.
I’ve been basically trying to eat better and stuff but really I’ve found that the best vegetables are the ones that take me like 5 minutes to make. Sauteed spinach and green beans are the best because they go into the pan and then they come out of the pan and that’s it.
If you’re going to go with squash, I like acorn squash because you can just put it in the oven for a while and then come back and then that’s it. Screw “steps.”
Roasted acorn squash with a teensy bit of butter–and I really do mean teensy–and cinnamon is very tasty.
My problem is when I make it and it comes out right, the next time I forget what temperature I set the oven to. Then I look online and get conflicting advice about what heat and time combo works best, and the squash will be undercooked but I don’t find that out until after letting it cool down for the proper amount of time. It becomes a lot of effort for something that’s supposed to be easy.
I would also like to say that spaghetti squash is not a spaghetti substitute, I don’t care what the health people say. If you want to eat spaghetti, eat spaghetti. If you don’t, then just avoid it.
The answer is broccoli slaw.
Carrot and parsnip slaw!
I made a spaghetti squah “lasagna” once and it took me two hours but was very delicious and when boyfriend said “hey this was really good we should have this again” I screamed and threw my squash rind at him because NO (and he was very confused because he had been working late throughout my squash fiasco).
This is my mom and spinach pie. She makes it for Easter or very special occasions but that’s it because it’s so labor intensive and you have to buy special groceries to make it and do all kinds of prep.
So much pie is like this- it takes much longer to make than it does to consume.
so much every food is like that, which is why i hate cooking. i also tend to be a slow eater when i do cook things (read: hamburger helper), maybe because i feel like if it took so much time (30 minutes) to make i should at least take some time to eat it. also why i usually just microwave some soup.
see the thing about hamburger helper (and i only get the lasagna kind, I think? with the long ribbony noodles) is that it’s way better as leftovers. so i spend all that time making it and immediately put the lid on the pan and into the fridge it goes, and i eat a sandwich instead. so it’s like the time spent cooking it doesn’t really count? because it feels like it’s just a 45second microwave nuke instead.
but i do also fancy it up on my heirloom china with actual flatware (instead of fingers or the cooking spoon) and i break out the goblet for my cherry coke when i reheat it, so maybe it’s the same impulse you have anyway.
hamburger helper was fancy eating when i was a kid, and i can’t get over that association. it feels so special to have it even in my 30s now that i like to really do it up.
Casserole-y things with noodles and protein make the BEST leftovers.
My Cunning Plan for the new place with the big kitchen involves preparing tuna casserole, etc, in a bunch of one-serving Pyrex dishes instead of one big pan, then when they cool down putting their lids on and freezing them, and having Just Enough Casserole for work lunch, or when I’m Too Witches to make something.
ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh that is amazing. i wouldn’t have thought of that, but it is genius! you’re right about the leftovers – cottage pie is another one that i love best the second day.
i know the whole “cook and freeze for later” thing, but i honestly didn’t associate that with single-serving Pyrex until now, and of course that’s the way to go, rather than freeze the entire batch or fight with plastic baggies and tinfoil.
o/
Glad to be of service! I got the idea from some FB video with people making single servings of baked macaroni and cheese in a muffin pan.
FWIW I found I don’t like freezing in glass. I make in a bigger dish and freeze in rubbermaid. No worries about dropping and breaking icy pyrex.
One serving pyrex dishes, brilliant!
ok so I’m sure that someone else has already written this but! here is my professional opinion on cooking squash: don’t even bother trying to cut the damn thing open raw, you’re going to need a fucking chainsaw. bake them whole and then just cut them open after! I’ve been making spaghetti squash and all of the squashy cousins for mannnnyyyy years and never regretted this choice. also, never sliced my finger attempting to cut one open.
and you know what? you can stir fry everything and roast everything and then feel super righteous as you warm up plates of deliciously and lazily roasted veggies for your lunch. 😉
Co-signed. Never have I been closer to requiring a team of orthopedic surgeons on standby than when the knife got stuck in the squash during an attempt to cut it in half.
If you ever see a recipe that starts with, “Peel a butternut squash,” channel your best Nancy Reagan and Just Say No.
You can also put it in a slow cooker whole, with a little bit of water (a couple of spoonsfull), and then afterr 6-8 hours of roasting, easily pull the flesh away from the skin.
I like the whole cut of your future eating jib but how do you cheese rice please and thanks? I will also have to quit it to lower my cholesterol but we may need to be briefly addicted to it first is how I’m thinking.
I was also wondering about cheese rice and ice cream. I’m intrigued.
This is me not just with produce but with leftovers “look at this large meal I cooked, I have lunch all week!” Forget to bring lunch. Months later clean out all the tupperware. Cry and Gag.
I am now almost out of tupperware, because they get so bad I have to throw them away. Cry and gag, indeed, especially when you’ve washed it with bleach and it STILL smells like rancid…well, I’m not really sure what that was anymore, but it’s definitely not that anymore.
I got a beautiful new set of glass (GLASS) storage dishes and I refuse to use them until I live some place with a dishwasher. Unfortunately I didn’t make that manifesto until after I threw out half of our greasy, stinky plastic tupperware.
Oh yeah, I’ve sacrificed a few tupperware to the garbage gods because they’re just too terrifying to even deal with. Just nope ’em right into the trash.
Put them in the freezer. On trash day, run hot water on the outside just long enough to free the contents, pop the Tupperware open, and dump the remains right in the trash. Tupperware is easy to clean and no smell.
this would be my partner if i didn’t pointedly ask him about his leftovers whenever i am hungry. he always insists the food is no longer edible; i have a stomach of steel but also don’t like wasting food that looks and smells perfectly normal, so he watches in horror as i happily rescue his food and our tupperware.
it me.
The truly disturbing thing is when it still smells good, but it is a horror to look at.
This is me not just with produce but with leftovers "look at this large meal I cooked, I have lunch all week!" Forget to bring lunch. Months later clean out all the tupperware. Cry and Gag.
This is the truest thing I’ve ever read.
I, and two friends I live with, work at farmers markets and thus have access to endless free produce.
And every week half a damn farm stand appears in the kitchen.
It’s like each individual vegetable is a metaphor for one of our aspirations: the asparagus is finally starting a real garden; the ramps are getting around to scheduling a dentist appointment; the weird spiky green thing that I’m fairly sure is from the beginning of Invasion of the Body Snatchers is finally finishing a whole short story.
And watching them wither away is like watching every one of our hopes and dreams wilt, shrivel, and begin to smell extremely funky. Fittingly the spiky green things take the forever to finally go bad.
This is why I’m not sure if I will ever get a crop-share. There would be too many wasted aspirations in my fridge.
I did the crop-share/community-supported agriculture box for a few months and it was a true waste of beautiful vegetables. Week after week, the box came and I was all, “THIS is the week I figure out how to make something appetizing out of…..gee, seven bunches of chard, a scary unfamiliar pepper that might be hot or might be sweet, and two celery bunches..?? Shit.”
My mother solved this by recruiting basically all of our local family into the scheme, so now when she has carrots but wants potatoes, she calls my aunt up and cons her into trading. We always got a list of what was in the box, so the call usually started with “hey, so, I KNOW you have four potatoes and I also KNOW you don’t have enough carrots for that casserole…”
(This plot completely falls apart at Christmas, when the farm gives up on winter & just starts sending seven pounds of kale per family unit.)
Yeah the OTHER reason I probably shouldn’ t do a CSA is that I have a weird dietary thing where my body thinks carrots and apples and celery are birch pollen (oral allergy syndrome, it is real I promise) and my partner hates kale.
So we’d be giving away like all the good stuff and basically eating everyone’s potatoes. Which, ok, I like potatoes! But it’s not really worth it for just potatoes.
And the thing is, even small boxes delivered every 2 weeks are still too much produce for a single person with a surgically small-ized stomach.
Have you tried 2:4:1 soup?
Here the joke is how badly I’m missing the point.
Wuzzat? That math soup? Why is there math in the soup? I don’t understand and is causing me not insignificant consternation. You’ve made me consterned. Help. Googling ‘abstruse soup-based ratio joke’ is not yielding satisfying answers.
Oh! Simmer four cups of vegetable in two cups of broth/beer/water, purée, add one cup of dairy. Best soup.
If you freeze it, you can pretend it’s for when you get sick.
Aha oh that makes sense. Also sounds like the kind of super easy cooking thing that I would completely ruin with wild last minute experimental spicing.
I have Mallory’s problem on a very large scale because I love farmers’ markets with all my heart and have since I was twelve. When the lifestyle blogs say “get to know your farmers’ market sellers, they will get you the best stuff if they like you” it fails to mention how much of the best produce you’ll get. It is a lot. I behave in a rational economic fashion and buy it all. There is no space where you are buying the right amount of vegetables and nothing is rotting in the fridge.
There’s also the problem of going back to the market the next weekend and having to face the vendors with the shame of non-consumption writ visibly across your face.
Oh we know.
We Always Know.
I know you know! It’s a vicious circle of knowing!
Mallory, have you learned nothing from the New York Times debacle of a pea-obsession?
this was not in the NYT, but this morning I saw a recipe for pea pesto on a popular food blog and my mind immediately blanked to “???!??!!!?”
What is it about putting peas in things unnecessarily??
Pea pesto is amazing and I will not hear you besmirch its name. It is the perfect lazy person pasta sauce!! Because I always have peas and pine nuts for some reason (???). No but seriously, you should try it. It is good. Unless you don’t like peas. In which case do not make it. haha
It’s my go-to “shit, we have nothing to eat” food, because there are always peas in the freezer.
Sugar snap peas are like the one beautiful vibrant fresh vegetable that I can be trusted to eat. Let’s talk green beans, eggplant, squash, and anything leafy.
Eggplant!!! Every time I buy eggplant, I’m so eager and ready and HELL YEAH eggplant. Then I remember I don’t really like it. ….
I like it but it’s never again been as good as the first time I cooked it. I don’t know what happened.
I am so confused about eggplant because I love eating it when other people cook it, but when I do it it’s almost always awful. (The only time it’s not awful is when I slice it up, cover it in olive oil, and roast it to death. Even that’s hit or miss.)
Stick it on a gas hob, whole, until it literally burns. Peel off the flesh (this is a disgustingly satisfying job) smush it all up, and then add garlic and olive oil.
Welcome to heaven, AKA lazy baba ghanoush.
Did this over a campfire. My nephews politely declined. My niece had a spoonful, then cried until I gave her more. We call it baby-ganoush.
OK, wait, so stick it on there whole, without cutting into it? Or am I completely mis-understanding?
Whole. Though it is wise to poke fork-holes in it. When it is done, the eggplant skin will be browned / blackened, and the insides will be soft enough to scrape off the skin and mash with a fork. It will probably pick up some smoke flavor during cooking– that is a feature, not a bug IMO.
Ooh, thanks. I love eggplant when others cook it but have failed to figure out a good way to do it myself. This sounds easy enough that even I could do it.
Yeah, just literally whole! No cutting involved. It is so easy and so delicious.
This is what I do with eggplant. It’s the only thing I do with eggplant. It’s the only thing anyone needs to do with eggplant.
http://www.lottieanddoof.com/2012/07/smoky-eggpla…
But eggplant is so easy? You just wash it and slice it lengthwise and marinate it in balsamic vinegar and oven-roast or grill it until it’s a mass of meaty balsam-y strips.
eggplants are the most beautiful plant, but I never buy them. I think you can just roast the thing whole*, with some whole garlic tossed in there too, scoop it all out, and smash it all up with oil? Then, like, stuff it in a pita?
*when in doubt, I turn the oven up to 400, put the vegetable in, and then sit and read and check it every ten minutes or so.
My mother used to buy one eggplant every year for the Thanksgiving centerpiece (which consisted of things like apples, gourds, tiny corncobs, etc.) and reassure my father that she was Not Going to Cook It, at least not when he had to know about it. He claimed to have rejected eggplant even when he was in prison camp. I really like it now, but find the little Asian ones easier to cook than the big purple things.
With squash, you could do what my parents always did when I was growing up: Take your beautiful (and ours were always home grown) yellow squash and zucchini, slice them, bread them and fry them in oil. Green bens are great that way, too. In the south, we freely admit that the surest way to see that you eat a vegetable you would not usually eat raw is to fry that bad boy up. I’m too intimidated to buy an eggplant, though.
So you take the eggplant and some cloves of garlic. If it’s a big eggplant, you slice it in half; if it’s a little one, don’t. Just slather the whole thing in olive oil and some salt. You put it on a baking sheet (cut side down, if applicable, with some parchment or foil or something to control the mess). Wrap up the garlic cloves in some foil with some olive oil and put them on the baking sheet. Roast the heck out of everything (let’s say 425), until the eggplant collapses and smells like heaven. Put the eggplant (without the stem) and the garlic cloves (without the skins) into a food processor with a bunch of your favorite tomato sauce. Puree. Toss with pasta. Add cheese, other protein, or both of your choosing.
Ta-da. Introductory Eggplant.
I might actually eat this.
The first eggplant of the season is always roasted and finished with lemon juice, and is very delightful. The next one goes in tacos, still pretty good. The third one gets thrown in some sort of stirfry where it doesn’t belong. The fourth – twenty-fifth ones slowly turn pale brown and mushy in the bottom of the drawer…
Sugar snap peas are best eaten raw and with no accompaniment.
So declares the memory of 6 year old smallpistachio, whose grandmother gave her sugar snap peas to plant. We had those in our garden (the garden was entirely raspberries and peas, not fancy) for ten years.
Even Taller-But-Younger Pistachio, who haaaaaaaaaaaates peas, would eat sugar snap peas from our garden.
Get out of my head, Mallory.
(ignores the three-week-old rhubarb that is shriveling in the drawer because surely I will become the kind of person who makes rhubarb crisp before it’s completely gone to slime)
If you throw it in the freezer, you can procrastinate even longer! Rhubarb freezes really well.
I still have rhubarb from last summer in my freezer. It’s not quite enough to make a crisp but I haven’t really been enthusiastic about just cooking it, either. At some point I’m either going to have to give in or let it go to the great rhubarb god in the sky.
No, no, no, throw it in a food processor until it’s the consistency of apple sauce and then use it in a banana-bread like recipe. It’s heaven, I promise.
That sounds amazing. Do you cook it before putting it in the processor, or just grind it up raw?
Grind it up raw. Depending on the age and juiciness of the rhubarb you may need to add a little liquid.
Sorbet. Or just simmer it with sugar to make a kind of jammy compote, which you can mix with yogurt or put over ice cream, or just eat by itself.
Mind you, do as I say, not as I do.
Yes! rhubarb + sugar + heat and you’re good with that Jammie compote you can eat with anything or alone.
Even the piece size, heat, and duration are really forgiving. Throw it in the oven (like in a pyrex or any bakeware) for a little while with abslutely anything else you have in the oven, stir occasionally, pull it out when you remember it’s there, and YUM.
Or simmer. Or roast it. Endless easy options.
RHUBARB CRUMBLE. Easy, delicious, and utterly necessary.
This is My Kale Story, with an additional Step #8, pretending that my old blender is a Vitamix so that I can throw an occasional handful of kale into a smoothie.
Bahahahaha “My Kale Story.”
“Hello everyone. Have a seat. I’d like to share with you… My Kale Story.”
I tried to pretend my regular old blender was a vitamix to rice-ify some caluiflower (cauliflower pizza crusts… another “healthy” thing that takes too damn long to make!) and the poor dear set itself on fire to get away from me and my aspirations.
My aunt once said, “I want to eat kale, but I haven’t figured out a good way to make it,” and I was like, “I have a foolproof way! Rinse it really well, shake off as much water as possible, then throw it right in the garbage because fuck a lettuce that demands to be massaged before I chew it.”
My mother in law likes to point out it was grown purely as animal feed for cattle when she was a kid in Ireland.
#6 it meeee. But then I’m like NO, I WILL not waste any more vegetables I WILL turn these into food
And that’s how I ate over a pound of roasted beets at 9:00 last night by myself.
Oh your next poop is gonna be GORGEOUS
I know! I’m so scared and excited!
Do beets … color it?
Yes, and (TMI?) your pee, too. The number of times I have been horrified and then realized, “Oh, I ate beets (or blueberries) yesterday.”
This explains why I thought my period was starting on Saturday (really, I just ate a lot of beets for lunch!)
WHY IS MY URINE FULL OF BLOOD- oh, right, the beetroot.
Oh yeah! Especially if you’ve eaten a bunch of them. It’s the worst when you momentarily forget you ate beets and panic when you assume you have an internal hemorrhage!
Vibrantly.
THEY SURE DO
Every time I eat beets I say out loud “I need to remember that I’m eating these.”
That happened to me once, and I spent a few terrifying seconds thinking I was hemorraging to death before I remembered the beets.
Every. Damn. Time. Stupid tricky delicious beets! (There is also an awesome Portlandia sketch about this!)
(It is so delightful that there are, like, ten of us going on about #BeetBusiness.)
It’s the business. The beet business.
Update: It was… highly pigmented.
Yes!!! I just knew it would be!
This now concludes this episode of Beet Business.
Just last night I added sweet potato and kale to my aspirational grocery list! Oh, the stir fries I envision. Surely I will eat my produce before the cheese Danish and ice cream sandwiches already in my kitchen.
When they start to wilt/shrivel, instead of berating yourself, make African Peanut Stew (kale or chard or collard greens or spinach or whatever all work) and congratulate yourself on your brilliant foresight.
(I would always rather stew than stir fry, though.)
http://www.budgetbytes.com/2014/08/african-peanut…
That looks very good! Thanks for the link.
OK maybe this is a weird place to ask this, but that stew looks really tasty (plus the baby is crazy for peanut anything):
Is there any good substitute for tomatoes? I can no longer eat them, at all, without days of stomach pain. But they and their paste are SO GOOD in soups and things. What do I do???
Oh, dear. I wish I knew. I am heavily reliant on tomatoes & their products in my cooking, so I’m guessing you run across this lack on a regular basis. I hope someone has a good solution.
yeah, they’re basically in everything! i can’t do garlic either, so going out to eat is rather fraught. and frankly cooking in has lost its luster.
Moosewood Restaurant does a version of this stew that uses pineapple instead of tomato. I was skeptical, but there are never leftovers.
I’m not sure how specific your tomato predicament is. How about roasted red peppers?
It is very specific – roasted red peppers would be worth a shot!
Oh! Sweet potato, how I love thee. I’m the actual worst, most worryingly bad cook (i’ve been banned from kitchens before) and I found this recipe that’s so easy and so crazy-delicious that sweet potato is one of the very few vegetables that doesn’t tend to wither horribly in my crisper.
I feel like it’s my duty to give it to you, both out of Toast-love and also, seriously, these are crack levels of addictive and so easy to make. Just slice ’em, boil for a while while you get distracted on your RSS feed, smash’ em, throw some herbs on, chuck them in the oven, then EAT THEM ALL YOURSELF, DON’T SHARE*. (*It me.)
http://www.myhappilyeveraftertheend.com/2012/05/s…
Honestly, I just bake them whole on a cookie sheet and eat them out of the skin. They don’t even need salt. Sometimes (usually when I have an adequate weight for the group of people but they’re not in convenient one-per-person packages) I dice them, toss in olive oil and salt and pepper, and roast them.
I have sugar snap peas in my fridge at home right now. With me at work, I have leftover pad thai for lunch. I even like sugar snap peas, but with things Mallory finds offensive or like ranch dip, so.
My two best friends from high school and I have a running group chat, in which I once referred to my crisper drawer as a “graveyard of good intentions”. It might be the hardest I’ve made them laugh in the thirteen years since high school.
I had been making my own cauliflower couscous, and feeling quite virtuous doing so, despite the mess and tedium. Then I found out that Trader Joe’s sells it frozen for $2 a bag and now I am freeeeeee from the tedium of the food processor. I love frozen vegetables.
Team frozen vegetables.
Trader Joe’s has pre-made bags of sugar snap peas that are ready to eat like candy out of the bag while you congratulate yourself on healthy snacking and decide that this means you can totally also eat an entire Party Size bag of chips, because the one counters the other, of course it does.
Well that’s just math, right? 1 bag good plus 1 bag bad equals neutral but actually pretty good because you ate a whole bag of snap peas.
well, it is, because otherwise I’d eat both bags of chips…
It me, except I stupidly signed up for a CSA, so I don’t even choose the produce, and it keeps replicating every week. How am I supposed to eat a whole pound of green beans a week for two months straight??? I am just one person!!!
I got three heads of lettuce every week in my share, and I got sick to death of salads. I just couldn’t.
Freeze what you don’t eat. 😉
Yup. Green beans freeze like a dream and the beans frozen fresh from the CSA are much better when cooked later than the standard bagged-frozen-green-beans from the grocery store.
My mother went All In when she decided to get CSA shares. The farm in question has ‘normal local produce’ shares and ‘more exotic local produce’ shares and so Mom got both so she could foist stuff she didn’t recognize onto me. I have bamboo shoots, lemon balm, leeks, some kind of mystery leafy green, and ramps in my refrigerator right now left over from two weeks ago.
I’m glad I don’t have to find a use for most of the zillions of greens we get, but the weirder stuff is extra challenging.
Place them on your neighbor’s doorstep with a cheery note, ring the bell, walk away waving.
I have a very slight drawl and I look very country: “like a red barn” (quote from a dude) so I can even do this in the city. You might have to make 1/4 of these deliveries fruit pies if you don’t look like iconic architecture.
This is literally the only pro in my pro/con list for living across an ocean you. No surprise mystery produce in Alarming Quantities.
No “I picked 15 pounds of peaches on the way home, now I am making sufficient pies to use them because they got a little squashed.” No “BJ’s coming over later and we’re making five gallons of orange juice so I talked the neighbors into giving me fifty pounds of citrus.” No “How many flats of strawberries is too many flats of strawberries? Two? Oh. Huh.” no “I know it’s Saturday and it’s early but I bought a lot of tomatoes and I need a ride. No, like a lot. And the guy who sold them to me offered me a ride but he also invited me to what is probably an orgy? So. Please.”
You are missing OUT. I try to recreate the experience by mailing you produce, but shipping costs are prohibitive.
Sauteed, with soy and garlic and ginger, I could eat about a pound a DAY.
I did just that last night–a pound apiece for my partner & myself!
I was unaware we were to do anything with sugar snaps beyond (1) putting them in a salad, (2) eating them with hummus; or (3) eating them solo to balance the bad sugars in wine.
Balancing sugar with sugar is one of my favorite hobbies.
The worst for me is when the grocery store sells a vegetable I’ve never seen before.
“Oh!” I say. “I’ve never seen that! I don’t know how to cook that! I wonder what it tastes like. I will buy several and then just google a recipe.”
Then I cheerfully spend a week googling everything but that, return to the crisper to find the weird veg has now gone off, have to figure out all over again what it is exactly, slice into it “just to see”, decide it’s probably not supposed to have big, mushy brown spots on the inside, and sadly throw it away while swearing to myself that NEXT TIME it will be different.
I am pretty sure that this is one of the traits my husband finds most endearing about me, and not at all exasperating.
Mmm. Yes.
Once I bought a whole jackfruit. Google it if you like, but the TL;DR is that it weighs 20 lbs, has difficult-to-dissect innards, and oozes liquid latex.
After I’d covered the kitchen table with brown paper, sharpened my knife, and spent an hour hacking at the thing, I had a couple of plastic bags full of jackfruit pulp and a really bad attitude. The joyful reactions of my Filipina and Indian coworkers only marginally salved my temper.
Jackfruit is tasty as all hell, but buy the quarters that are already partially hacked up, I say.
Oh my gosh, JACKFRUIT!
This is one of the few weird produce purchases that I was successful with! It takes some serious commitment though. To deal with that horrible, sticky latex, I used latex (nitrile) gloves, coated in coconut oil, and a knife that I didn’t care much about (also coated in coconut oil so KEEP A FIRM GRIP). I laid down newspaper on the table, sliced the whole thing in half, and then worked methodically slicing the little bulblets off the main inner stem before de-seeding them. It took an hour or two, I can’t remember, and it required such frequent reapplication of coconut oil that I just had a little bowl of the stuff to dip into.
But OMG it is so tasty and so worth it. Would buy again. One fruit gives you a TON of food, so I brought a bunch of fresh jackfruit to a Superbowl party for people to try. I used it in smoothies. My husband made it into ice cream. And we STILL had a ton left over (so it’s a good thing it freezes well).
You can also take the seeds (which are roughly the same size as little fingerling potatoes) and bake them. They have a taste in the same ballpark as roast chestnuts or roast potatoes. So good!
I roasted the seeds! I also used the white shreddy stuff as a meat replacement (although I am not vegetarian; not by a long stretch). Jackfruit white shreddy stuff makes excellent pulled fake-pork and is fantastic if seasoned with cumin and hot pepper and folded with eggs into a breakfast taco.
The one problem I had with the seeds was peeling them, but I used a trick one of my coworkers told me: roast them, then toss them HARD in a bowl covered with a plate. It makes a racket, but removes most of the inedible skin.
My only difficulty with jackfruit (aside from the latex thing, which yes, keep a good grip on your knife!) was getting the people at the HEB to ring it up correctly. Nobody had any clue what it was, and it didn’t have a sticker or a code in the computer yet.
I got major Adventurous Cook Points for my jackfruit adventure. However, next time I will buy a five-pound jackfruit quarter so I’m not eating jackfruit products for weeks, pushing them off on friends, taking up valuable freezer space (tiny Polish fridge/freezer), and eventually giving up and composting the leftovers.
The farmers’ market near our place has just reopened for the season, time to buy giant baskets of fruit that I’ll totally forget about entirely freeze in small portions so I can use them to attract massive numbers of fruit flies make smoothies.
I bought fiddleheads last week only to remember I… don’t actually like fiddleheads. Then Wikipedia informed me that they can be toxic if not prepared right, and I don’t have a lot of confidence in my ability to prepare them right. They’re technically ferns and I don’t want to eat ferns, it makes me feel like I’m lost in the woods and have no other choice but eat ferns or starve to death.
Also they just don’t look like food, they have a sort of malevolent glow to therm.
Because it is Spring In New England, I have to go through the yearly ritual of remembering which spring produce fad/delicacy I like, and which I don’t– ramps or fiddleheads?
Thanks to your post, I have remembered that I love ramps and hate fiddleheads. Good!
It’s a bit fiddly and labor-intensive, but soaking them in several changes of water and then blanching for a few minutes before going on to whatever cooking method is called for has served me well in the past. I love fiddleheads though, so the effort is worth it to me.
Sugar snap peas are like Subtraction stew,; eating them entitles you to buy anything in the ice cream treat aisle.
Forty million thumbs up for The Phantom Tollbooth reference, I love you.
I’m pretty broke these days so I had to get really real about my food habits, and that’s why I pretty much stopped buying vegetables. Because I know I will never eat them.
And this. I have a teen boy who will fill up on cereal and not eat dinner, and I’m never home to cook anyway. The most I can do is …well, not a lot. Yesterday I called on my way home and the girl made shake and bake chicken legs, and I microwaved a risotto. We ate like real people at the table. Then I put it in the microwave for the teen and forgot it and threw it all out this morning.
I’m going to use this as a callout post for all the people in my apartment building who join CSAs and then never bother to check for their arrivals. We all buy produce aspirationally, but at least I let mine rot in my crisper like a civilized human, instead of letting the giant green tub languish in the lobby of a large building.
I think you’re misreading the international signal for “Please enjoy this gift of free produce, honored neighbors.”
The smittenkitchen recipe for ‘bowties with sugar snaps, lemon and ricotta’ is the best way to eat sugar snap peas while really eating something akin to macaroni and cheese.
Oh man, that sounds delicious.
The Momofuku wasabi peas recipe is inferior to all of the ingredients eaten in sequence and that means you’d have to choke down a teaspoon of raw horseradish so. Make the pasta dish.
Every year I get a tomato plant (or two) and envision all kinds of sauces, yummy sandwiches, etc. but inevitably, all my hopes and dreams are dashed because I totally forget about the damned things and they die a slow death in my half-assed garden.
This year, though, is GONNA BE DIFFERENT I SWEAR ON SWEET BABY JEEBUS. I have my three (THREE!) plants (cherry, Roma, another cherry that I thought was a normal sized tomato but on closer inspection, nope) that are planted in a container, against a wall, in a space that receives tons of sun, and nestled in a dirt bed churned with the finest of my horse’s poop. This set-up is fool proof. FOOL PROOF I SAY. Plus, I put a watering can right beside them to remind myself that tomato plants need water, like, all the damn time.
You want to know how smug I feel, knowing I’m going to get home grown tomatoes this year? I got a motherf***ing Rosemary plant right beside them in it’s own seperate pot (fist pumps +++++).
TOMATO SMUGNESS! Last year some kid gave us a tomato plant for our wedding gift, and in a fit of hunter-gatherer enthusiasm last autumn I saved the seeds. I have now managed to grow a whole batch of new plants… and I’m dreading the glut of tomatoes already.
Dang, you are prepared. (Get a basil plant too to befriend your rosemary plant.) I have tomato aspirations every year, and every year they never get enough sun so we get like one half-sized tomato.
I gave up on cherry tomatoes after a squirrel picked the ripe ones, peeled off and ate the skin, then left the good part sitting on the porch railing. Asshole squirrel.
I like that you capitalized Rosemary. This is right and good.
(I also do pretty much the same thing with my tomato plants. May a month is full of possibilities! July is the month of admitting that no, watering it now will not bring it back to life.)
Oh, I’m very good at growing rosemary. Did you know that in folklore, flourishing rosemary means the woman is dominant in the household? Well, my rosemary tells the world I am up all over this joint and may be preparing to take over the rest of the block while I’m at it.
Now ask me how often I *cook* with rosemary.
What does my wildly overgrowing thyme mean? It keeps trying to take over the entire herb garden!
THIS IS ME!!!! (don’t ask about how likely you are to cycle back round to step one)
dON’T LOOK AT ME
(yeah this is my entire relationship with vegetables generally because I am Not A Successful Adult)
Augh, it me, it all of us
So here’s a fun vegetable story: my husband and I are trying to “get better at budgeting” and “eat in more” and “be responsible adults,” so I’ve started actually grocery shopping rather than running to the store every damn day for one or two things. On my last run I got a few fresh veggies that I felt confident we could get through in a reasonable amount of time (winter greens are my best friend because they keep the longest), but then I was like, “Oh man, what if I were REALLY ON MY GAME and made, like, stir fries with frozen veggies, and threw frozen spinach in everything, and generally just utilized frozen foods in a way I never have before?” (I have literally never in my life bought frozen vegetables.) I was trying to be economical, I guess. So anyway, I bought some frozen spinach and green beans, end scene.
THE NEXT DAY: We’re making a stir fry, and I pull out the green beans and spinach and sit them on the counter. My husband walks in on the phone with his best friend who’s a manager at a Safeway, sympathetically listening to what sounds like a story of a Bad Day. He gets off the phone, and I ask how his friend is, and my husband tells me that he had to work for like 10 hours because there was a huge recall on frozen vegetables because of a listeria outbreak. We both freeze and stare, wide-eyed, at the frozen bags on our counter. He darts over to them and picks them up, like he’s afraid to even have them touching a surface in our kitchen, while I frantically pull up the FDA list of recalled foods. Sure enough, the green beans we bought were on the list. I briefly floated the idea of keeping the spinach; we both quickly decided that we’d rather not, in my husband’s words, “shit ourselves to death” just to make the $2 bag of spinach worth the purchase. They both were promptly thrown in the trash.
tl;dr: By the grace of a well-timed phone call, my husband and I were possibly saved from eating listeria-infected frozen vegetables. This was the first time I had ever bought frozen veggies and I legitimately think I might never try again.
So, has anyone had luck buying fresh veggies and freezing them yourself? I’m thinking specifically of things like spinach, green beans, snow peas, onions, etc. Stuff that doesn’t last very long fresh. Maybe that’s a good workaround? Or maybe I’ll just stick to buying brassicas for the rest of my life?!
I love freezing veggies! But I usually cook (most) of them beforehand, to varying degrees.
For the ones you mentioned, in order, I would: blanch the spinach & squeeze dry, blanch the snow peas and green beans, and caramelize the onions.
If you own a crockpot, freezing things becomes like 300% easier. I routinely buy several pounds of onions to caramelize in the crockpot on Saturday, or like 3 pounds of tomatoes to cook into marinara, or what have you and then freeze them all!
This is SO helpful. Thanks!
You had bad luck, but normally frozen vegetables are great (and way better than canned). In fact frozen vegetables probably have a higher rate of being safe than fresh ones, which can also have listeria and salmonella contamination.
I do sometimes freeze fresh veg (especially small chopped portions of herbs like cilantro, lemongrass, etc) but usually I cook big batches and freeze a portion of the cooked food — that seems to work better. Fresh vegetables are more likely to get freezer burn because you aren’t flash-freezing the way a big vegetable factory can.
Oh, I know, it was just a weird coincidence and funny in retrospect — I was mostly kidding about never trying frozen veggies again! But ugh, I know, American food safety standards are just ridiculous across the board. Did you read that New Yorker article about salmonella? I know the focus was chicken, but I also can’t forget the mentions about produce. Anyway, thanks for the tips on how to freeze your own!
oh, good!
I go in and out of being seriously addicted to frozen cherries, tart or sweet, especially in summer… better than a popsicle!
Every year at the end of summer we buy a bushel of red/yellow/orange peppers. Then we laboriously slice them up and freeze them (on a cookie sheet for like 20 minutes, then into giant ziplocs). Then we have delicious peppers for stir fries and omelettes and pastas all winter long.
It’s a shit ton of work, but it’s worth not buying peppers shipped all the way from Mexico. We also have no room for anything else in the freezer, cause we just have a regular ol’ fridge freezer.
Things that need minimal processing, like spinach, beans, and peas, would probably be super easy. If I had a chest freezer I would definitely do it.
I love the idea of saving seasonal produce this way. Thanks for the tip!
That recall is scary business for sure! But also remember listeria does not survive cooking. So you were probably not in much danger. The fruits on the list make me way more nervous!
Haha, I know! My nurse mom told me the same, and embarrassingly enough I even knew it at the time — but for some reason our brains just went into total shutdown panic mode. It was pretty silly. I was being mooooostly facetious about never buying frozen veggies again; that being said, I am interested in DIYing this stuff anyway.
Although listeria is killed by cooking. The people at risk are the people who were putting those vegetables in smoothies.
My parents freeze fresh green beans and corn and both are AMAZING.
It me.
But also, y’all. On Sunday I bought a head of cabbage for a recipe and on Monday I actually shredded the cabbage myself and used it in said recipe. I think I am growing as a person. (Never mind that the recipe suggested one small head of cabbage would yield 8 cups of shredded cabbage and I ended up with double that. I threw out the extra shredded cabbage immediately. Which made me feel monstrous but also free.)
I am impressed with your ability to throw away the extra cabbage! I would keep it in the fridge for several weeks and then force everyone to eat it for dinner the day before it liquefied, probably just cooked by itself and not at all delicious.
I once bought half a watermelon and then immediately brought it home and chopped it up into bite sized pieces and put said pieces in a container in the fridge so I could snack on them at my leisure.
I intend to ride that single occurrence all the way into genuine adulthood, you just watch me.
I PUT PURPLE CABBAGE IN EVERY DAMN THING FOR A FULL MONTH cause I needed a cup of it for one recipe. And still threw out 1/3 of the head.
(They keep forever if you just slice off a bit and wrap in cling wrap.)
Beetroot is my nemesis. I buy those packs of pre cooked shrink wrapped ones with visions of Russian borscht-style soups and salads and pickled things, and then they languish in the fridge and leak their guilty pink blood everywhere. You’d think the stains would be a cautionary tale but no.
WAIT WHAT PRECOOKED SHRINKWRAPPED BEETROOT WHAT
That does not exist in my grocery stores. Where do you find it? I love beets.
The Toast gets me.
Also, I always wondered what the title of my hypothetical autobiography would be, but now I know it will be Cheerful as Damnit.
Me, every single week. Like this week, I bought a huge bag of chopped kale and I was going to have kale every night this week and then I remembered after I prepared it the first time that I don’t really like kale at all. I also get a reminder email about the Bountiful Baskets co-op and I think about ordering and then I never do.
I also get a reminder email about the Bountiful Baskets co-op and I think about ordering and then I never do.
Oh god, IT ME, are we soulmates? Curiously bisected halves of a more responsible whole? This is exactly how my every Monday goes.
Hahaha possibly! I always think about all the wonderful product I could get, but then I worry it’ll be a super busy week for me and I’ll end up eating out for every meal and all that beautiful produce will be gross by the time I get around to doing something with it. I also think I’ll end up with like 29 zucchini and I live alone, I can’t eat that much produce by myself!
This is me buying ebooks on sale. I own so many fascinating sounding non-fiction books and award winning literary fiction novels that I will NEVER, EVER read. Even though I *finally* read Nelson Mandela’s autobiography I know in my heart of hearts that I will never read The History of Salt or Bless Me Ultima. Unfortunately ebooks don’t rot and I’m too cheap to delete them, so I’m stuck with all these aspirational books I will never read.
I do this with documentaries and my Netflix queue! I WANT to be the kind of person who comes home after work and watches a Nova special on the Qin dynasty, rather than four episodes of Pretty Little Liars, but I am never, ever going to be that person. Doesn’t stop me filling up my queue with them.
Mr Cleo and I both do that with our DVR too. We have several worthy documentaries recorded, but we usually just watch Chopped.
I am donating a bunch of aspirational physical books to Goodwill this week. I cannot move Ulysses to one more apartment in hopes that I’ll finally be compelled to read it; I just can’t. (Ditto Infinite Jest, which I have read but will probably not feel like re-reading until I am wealthy and settled enough to just buy a new copy.)
Okay, but A History of Salt is actually a good book! Bavarian salt mines doubled as underground amusement parks!
It’s hard to get past the boring title, but this book helped me understand how fundamentally different the world used to be.
That’s why I want to be the kind of person who would read that! It looks so interesting.
You can knock out Bless Me Ultima in an afternoon. It’s an easy read. I read it in the cloud jungles of southern Mexico and was finished before the local mushrooms kicked in.
I had a feeling that if I named specific books people would tell me I should read them. I know that they’re great books, that’s why I bought them, that’s why I want to be the kind of person who reads them. But I’m actually the kind of person who reads about gay werewolves and cyborg princesses in space.
ETA: not that I think there’s anything wrong with my reading choices. I am proud of my romance and sf/f consumption! (I just aspire to broadening my horizons)
Oh, oh, I did read Bless Me Ultima but probably won’t get to Nelson Mandela’s autobiography. We should set up some sort of Toastie swap system so we can, you know, somehow transfer partial credit for reading to each other on an exchange system. So like, you haven’t read Bless Me Ultima, but you are now officially within one Toastie degree of having read it. Or something.
I love that idea!
I am living with someone who grew up wealthy and therefore has an aversion to eating leftovers for dinner (must be nice). Which means that I have both the slowly rotting produce problem (because who the hell has time to prepare a new meal every freaking night?) and the fridge full of ancient, uneaten leftovers problem.
All hail the gods of pizza delivery and that gyro place down the street.
Would it work better if you, say, preportioned each meal you cook into classy little stackable plastic containers? That way, it’s not leftovers, it’s classy little preportioned meals that you only have to heat up.
I say this as a person who is learning not to be leftover-averse. My mom, lovely woman that she is, is no cook–and she used to just sort of combine everything in the fridge and serve it over rice with bottled mushrooms and a lumpy sort of flour gravy at least once a week. So I have problems with leftovers.
Cooking an entire meal, then portioning it out into those Rubbermaid LunchBlox containers, though? I’m all over that shit.
One of my uncles was like that. He married into my family. My grandmother went to help out when her daughter / his wife had their first child (some 40 years ago). My gram fixed him leftovers for one meal and he just stared at her and said “we already ate this.”
My grandmother was shocked. Who doesn’t eat leftovers? She told this story about him for decades. DECADES.
Younger me was just kind of fascinated by the idea that someone had to fly out to cook for my uncle when his wife had a baby. Even in the 70s my dad knew how to cook.
My husband isn’t fond of leftovers – if you have it like, the day after the next day, he’s fine or he’ll make it into something else. Me? I will eat the same meal for dinner, lunch and dinner again as often as it will last if I like it, while he spends the whole week checking that I am actually okay with repeating a meal. We are very different people (and I have started keeping a notepad on the fridge with a list of what’s in the freezer because we never label things)
Spinach any way you like. Broccoli carrots radish in her arms. Tomato lettuce not forget. We must be gentle.
When I was young and broke, I used to shred my own cabbage. Now that I’m gainfully employed, I buy pre-shredded. To me, it’s a luxury and I love it.
Buying pre peeled garlic feels like the very lap of luxury to me. I look at it in my fridge and glow at my success in life.
This post is too real for me (she types why studiously ignoring the spinach that is currently going bad and starting to smell in her refrigerator).
“withled and shrivered” might be my favorite new Mallory words
Particularly as it made me think, “Like… Maria Shrivered?” twice.
Okay but I also this: I am a person who makes their list online a week in advance, making sure it is not over budget, contains at least one thing for all meals, and corresponds to a recipe of the week; SIMULTANEOUSLY, I am the person who buys fresh artichokes instead of canned every four months thinking that maybe, this time, I’ll do something with them before they rot, and yet…
Here’s how you do it:
Take your fresh artichoke and either put it into a pot of water that you then bring to a boil, covered, or cut it in half and put it on a plate in the microwave.
Cook said artichoke until a couple of leaves come off easily when you pull them.
While this is happening, melt butter. Put it into a small bowl with a squeeze of lemon (or not). Or put a glob of mayonnaise in a bowl. Whatever works for you.
Take the artichoke out of its cooking medium, burning your fingers slightly in the process, and take it to the table. Grab an extra plate on the way. Don’t forget your butter/mayo/whatever!
Yank off leaves of artichoke, one by one, and dip them into your dipping stuff. Scrape the innards of the leaf off with your teeth. (Optional: eat artichoke while alone and reading fiction.) When you reach the heart, scrape off the furry bits with a spoon, then sop the heart in the rest of the dipping stuff and eat it with your fingers.
Have plenty of napkins.
I need to add here that, after an hour of meditating on artichokes, I’m tempted to text The Boyfiend to bring home an artichoke and some good bread and butter. Because the only thing better than an artichoke and butter with lemon juice is all of that with crusty toasted bread, so you can soak up the remainder of the butter and little bits of artichoke that might have escaped your gaping maw the first time ’round.
I bought crusty bread today because I’m making poached eggs and spinach for dinner. I just realized I also have two artichokes in the fridge…
(Thank you)
I’ll be there in ten minutes with butter. Would you like me to bring blackberries and heavy cream as well? It’s the good kind of heavy cream, the raw stuff, that’s vaguely yellow and has to be scraped from the jar.
oh my god
i’m fairly confident in stating that menu management, including produce, is the one aspect of adulting I’m really, really good at.
Pity. I’d rather have a healthy retirement account.
fava beans, boy, I don’t know
1.) LOOK THERE ARE SOME STARVATION FOODS THAT WE CAN JUST STOP EATING, IT’S FINE, WE HAVE REAL BEANS NOW.
2.) PYTHAGORUS DIED RATHER THAN TRAMPLE SOME FAVAS BECAUSE OF HIS FAVA SOUL AND SEX CULT, FAVA BEANS TURNED ON THEIR PROTECTOR.
3.) The only times people have given up a seat next to me on BART when the train is standing room only were the time I was mumbling about fire (I had a fire ecology presentation coming up) and the time I was shelling fava beans.
AND YET, EVERY SPRING, I TRY AGAIN.
It took me an embarrassing amount of time to realize that everyone mentioning ‘stir fries’ was talking about the plural of ‘stir fry,’ and not some fancy new way of making French fries.
This cracked me up the most:
One bunch of sugar snap peas, please
Because. . . they don’t come in bunches.
For me the last step is guilt at having let nice vegetable go to waste and shame and penance by not allowing myself to buy anymore nice fresh things for a while. The cycle does repeat, but there is a span of time first.
One of my uncles was like that. He married into my family. My grandmother went to help out when her daughter / his wife had their first child (some 40 years ago). My gram fixed him leftovers for one meal and he just stared at her and said "we already ate this."
My grandmother was shocked. Who doesn't eat leftovers? She told this story about him for decades. DECADES.
Younger me was just kind of fascinated by the idea that someone had to fly out to cook for my uncle when his wife had a baby. Even in the 70s my dad knew how to cook.
My partner and I cannot do reasonable two-person meals. It's always enough to feed significantly more people than just the two of us, and we end up eating it all and then lying around like pythons trying to digest a deer.
This reminds me of Erma Bombeck’s Seven Days to Make Garbage column
https://books.google.com/books?id=A2jEiaSutG8C&am…
I might actually eat this.
What does my wildly overgrowing thyme mean? It keeps trying to take over the entire herb garden!