Five common kitchen quagmires

Situation 1.  You alternate between the same tried and true dishes, have done so for years, and though everyone else likes them…you’re bored.

Situation 2. You have favorite ingredients that find their way into everything you make. Thus, everything you make tastes the same.

Situation 3. You enjoy trying new recipes, but find yourself spending too much money stocking up on all the required ingredients, and what you don’t use that day either spoils or clutters up your cabinets.

Situation 4. You have a family with various tastes and no one dish appeals to everyone.

Situation 5. You live alone but enjoy cooking and find yourself either making way too much food for yourself or unable to eat leftover ingredients before they spoil.

All of these situations suffer from a simplistic approach to food.

1. You cook what you know.
2. You use ingredients that you know.
3. You blindly follow the cooking advice of others.
4. You want a one-dish-fits-all solution.
5. You don’t bother to budget food.

These common cooking bad habits may seem difficult to overcome without culinary confidence and creativity, but like most things, only a shift of perspective can solve these problems.

Solution to situation 1 and 2: try new recipes

This can pose a challenge for those of us who ‘know how to cook.’ We follow our own set of proven procedures and ignore unexplored techniques. Force yourself to follow a recipe from a trusted source, measure everything exactly, resisting the urge to round. You may find amazing revelations like how something can actually taste palatable without garlic, and that a tablespoon of grated ginger really can take up 2 inches of root, and that little steps like salting eggplant, soaking beans and par-cooking really just wastes time.

Solution to situations 3 and 5: eat based on need

The philosophy of seasonal eating has been sold as a budget solution to food. Using the supply and demand rationale, produce in season should be more abundant and therefore inexpensive. However, not all food follows this rule. Some short-season items have such anticipation (or hype – depending on how you feel about that food) they will never drop far in price even at the height of their availability. If you have attempted the seasonal eating diet as a cost cutting solution, only to find yourself paying twice as much at the farmer’s market or CSA for boxes of food that goes bad, maybe you need to switch the focus to what is dying in the refrigerator first.

Old seasonal philosophy: buy everything you can in season or on sale, then brainstorm what to make.

New thought process: make a list of the perishable food items dying in the fridge or pantry, then, purchase seasonal or sale items to embellish those perishables into meals.

If you hate the waste but still feel committed to your large CSA drop or can’t break the addicion to the warehouse store, team up with a partner in food to split the bulk purchases into manageable meal plans.

Solution to situations 1, 3, 4 and 5: employ alternates

Understand substitutions and employ them regularly. A recipe modification may only require one or two substitutions to satisfy polar opposite appetites. Knowing which foods can be substituted, (chicken and mushrooms, shrimp and chicken, steak and eggplant, beans and stew meat, butter and oil) and changing a recipe accordingly can spare a headache of complaints and help keep within budget.

A summary solution: methodical meal planning

The romantic notion that the best chefs go the the market every morning to choose the best products  and then create masterpieces that exemplify the freshness of the given food item inspires many of us to overspend, create mediocre meals, and eventually waste a lot of product. As usual, romantic ideals airbrush the gritty details. In reality, restaurants would go out of business if budget, innovation and waste reduction were not their primary considerations. Food lovers must graduate past the infatuation stage of the relationship and get more pragmatic to avoid all the kitchen quagmires above. The following methodology solves all problems and keeps the love alive:

1. Create a weekly meal plan that includes a minimum of 3 new recipes.
2. Select the new recipes by:
   1. choosing a cookbook, magazine or website
   2. make a ‘mental’ list of the most perishable items you currently have in your kitchen
   3. select the recipes that use up the most perishable items while requiring the least new items to be purchased.

You may eyeball this decision, or take it to the calculation stage. Though some may find the calculation stage extreme, it helps take the emotion out of the choice.  For example, I currently have bread about to go stale, way too many tomatoes from my garden, basil, zucchini and chicken in the refrigerator. I found a panzanella recipe that incorporates all of these items plus some olives I have.  It only requires me to purchase some artichoke hearts and red wine vinegar because I am running low.  This recipe has a score of 3, because I used up 5 perishable items and only purchase 2. I do not count things like garlic, oil and vinegar in the calculation since those items are either not perishable, or they are kitchen staples that will go to use anyway.

Now compare this to an equally tempting recipe, a grilled chicken club sandwich. It uses chicken, bread and tomato, but also calls for lettuce, bacon and avocado. This recipe would have the score of 0 because it uses 3 items but also calls for 3 items to be purchased.

At this point, you can opt to incorporate a substitution. Say you have spinach instead of lettuce and want to use cheese instead of avocado.  You can turn this into a score of 4. However, resist the impulse to always substitute your favorites. This method encourages innovation, and while substituting similar products for thrifty purposes, or to accommodate dietary restrictions makes sense, be sure to make each meal distinguishable from the next.

One fun method that incorporates more creativity involves recipe blending. So you found two recipes that use up all of your perishables but neither really excites you. Place all of the ingredients from both recipes  out on a counter. Then, create an entirely new dish, more to your taste, from the same items. For example, from an Indian cookbook I found a chickpea recipe and a cauliflower curry recipe. Both recipes called for rice on the side. I have one family member who claims not to like Indian food, but I know it has more to do with the stewed presentation of curries and not the ingredients. To solve this, I took the recipe for the chickpeas, added the peppers from the cauliflower recipe and folded them into the rice. I then tossed the cauliflower with the dried curry spices and a little oil and roasted them.  Lastly, I took some chicken, marinated it in the yogurt, onion, ginger and garlic called for in both recipes, and had a meal everyone enjoyed.

Summary

Removing the decision making process and conforming to a methodical meal selection results in less waste and allows more room for experimentation, solving all problems at once. Feel free to play with any recipe on this site and share your modifications!