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Not Really Meal Prep
Nov. 21st, 2022 11:24 amPriestess sent me this link:
https://youtu.be/ZJe3yL7NHdA
I like this YouTuber and I have mentioned him before in an earlier long food post that was largely about food acquisition in our house and how it has changed. https://walkitout.dreamwidth.org/2053518.html
The YouTube video linked above describes why he has trouble meal prepping, alternative “cooking systems” and their pluses and minuses, and what he is doing now, which he calls the Sunday Braise.
Doing a major cook on the weekend appears in a variety of No Cooking Cookbooks. The Braise approach that this YouTuber describes is central to David Chang’s _Cooking at Home_, a no recipe cookbook that I liveblogged reading and then reviewed (warning: it wasn’t pretty):
https://walkitout.dreamwidth.org/2025828.html
https://walkitout.dreamwidth.org/2026146.html
https://walkitout.dreamwidth.org/2027795.html
The general strategy of doing a Big Cook on Sundays that you use to stock your fridge and freezer for the coming week(s) is also central to Pillay’s really awesome _The No Recipe Cookbook_, https://walkitout.dreamwidth.org/2031169.html.
I doubt any of us will ever be as unbelievably together as Pillay, but _reading_ her book gave me so much inspiration and so many ideas. As long as reading someone else’s awe inspiring competence does not cause you to go do horrible self-destructive things, I recommend her book highly. If reading about someone else’s amazingness is damaging to you, please don’t read it.
Priestess thought that perhaps what the YouTuber was doing was like what I do. And it both is and isn’t, and the answer to the question (is this like what you do) was too complicated to address in a text _and_ I kinda wanted to blog about this anyway, so I’m gonna write that post next. I’ll either paste it below, or post it separately and link to it from here.
-=-=-=
Not Really Meal Prep
A modular approach to home cooking
Above, I reference a YouTuber who advocates for a Sunday braise and then build meals around the meat approach to home cooking. This is virtually identical to what is described in _Cooking at Home_ by Chang and Krishna. I’m sure that the resulting meals are tasty and filling, and each meal quick to prepare; the Sunday meat prep takes little fiddling altho you do have to be around to put it in and take it out which will take a few hours.
However, I am working around a set of constraints that makes this approach to home cooking completely unworkable for me. I cannot tolerate the amount of meat involved other than for an occasional meal. I cannot tolerate the amount of salt involved, period, full stop. If I wanted to do something along these lines, the closest I would come would be to cook a bird on a weekend, and then cook with the parts throughout the week. I _have_ done that, and it’s an enjoyable experience. I wouldn’t salt the bird; I would just put it in a roasting pan at 300 and turn it over once when it was about halfway to done. If I was ambitious, I would stuff it, because in-bird stuffing is amazing. If a neck was to be found in the bird, I would make chicken stock with the neck.
But I don’t do that all the time. Here’s what I do instead.
Pre-Prepping Meat
The kids have a pretty limited repertoire, so we have ground beef around for burgers, and we cook chicken parts because they’ll eat baked or grilled or pan friend chicken. They generally prefer unbreaded, so this is all very simple to do once thawed. I have already posted about how I acquire animal protein. When I open a package of ground beef, I’ll make patties from all of it, and put patties in a container separated by a piece of parchment paper, or put them in separate small rubbermaid containers, depending on what containers are currently in the drawer and depending on whether I’m making one patty or more than one for immediate cooking. If a patty sits in the fridge for more than a day or two and the kids aren’t eating it, I’ll often incorporate it into some other dish as ground beef. As long as the weather is mostly cooperative (constant precipitation for days is a problem, as it a very large volume of snow on the deck), my husband will grill the chicken on the outdoor gas grill, and put it in one of the frigoverre containers. The chicken is then available to use either plain for the kids, or in a prepared dish.
Otherwise, the freezer is full of all kinds of great things, and at intervals, one of us will make something that will produce a 6-8 servings of something. My husband makes pulled pork. I might make gumbo or jambalaya or cacciatore or similar. We’ll thaw the meat ahead of time, and we’ll do this when we know that we have everything in the house to make the dish. If we really want one of these, we’ll make a run to the store at some point to get all the components for the dish, and then the remaining leftover components unused in the dish will join the regular supply.
Pre-Prepping Veg
But that’s all fairly unusual. Most meals for me are NOT those kinds of meals. As I have noted in a previous post, we get boxes delivered to us from Siena: farm produce and mushrooms year round, and during the summer, some season items. I pre-cook a lot of the greens using bacon fat or olive oil and balsamic vinegar. I pre-cook the mushrooms using bacon fat or olive oil and vermouth I also typically have a rubbermaid or frigoverre container with rice, and another one with pasta. When I cook rice or pasta because there isn’t any, or because I’ve got some time and I’m in the kitchen anyway, I make extra for exactly this purpose. I usually have prepared red sauce in the fridge (pomi boxes and kirkland signature tomato paste and the usualy italian herbs but no onion and garlic, so my husband can eat it when he wants to; the rest of us can add onion and garlic powder or I can chop fresh and incorporate into the veg part of a dish). Many of my husband’s meals involve taking either one of the larger prepared meals as described above, combining it with rice or pasta and heating it in the microwave. We also have bread (either home baked, or from one of the deliveries) and my husband always has a stock of cheese, so bread and cheese are a common lunch for him.
A meal for me is thus: some starch, some pre-prepared greens, whatever additional vegetation available looks good, and umami either in the form of meat/poultry/eggs and/or mushrooms.
What does that look like?
a 2 egg omelette with mushrooms and greens, and maybe some panfried potatoes if I have them or a slice of bread if I don’t
Pasta with red sauce, greens, veg, mushrooms and possibly a little meat, maybe with some fake cheese or nooch on top
Veg, greens, mushrooms, rice, possibly meat — either a stir fry over rice or a fried rice or dirty rice or whatever
Pizza: if I think I’m going to do this, I’ll usually pull some extra out of the sourdough crock in the morning, add a little flour and oil to it, grease the pan and form the crust. The Breville makes it easy to proof, take out, heat to 400 while I put the toppings on, and then cook. Because I have the greens, mushrooms and red sauce usually pre-made in the fridge, and I generally have cheese and some soppressata or similar, it’s just a matter of chopping up a little garlic and maybe bell pepper if I have any while the oven goes from the proof temp to the 400 temp that I will cook it at. This isn’t the fastest meal, but it doesn’t take that long either, because the sourdough crock ensures that I’m never more than an hour away from a really good crust. But before I developed that skillset, I just used whatever bread we had — english muffins, sliced, whatever. Uncooked greens OR precooked greens go on _top_ of the cheese.
In the summer, when there are cucumbers, but really any time at all, salad sandwiches are a great use for crunchy vegetables. Also in the summer — or whenever I have lettuce or salad greens like turnip leaves, arugula, etc — a big salad with homemade honey mustard dressing (maple syrup or honey, mayonnaise, mustard, some hot sauce) or oil and balsamic.
Meat _can_ go in any of these. But it’s not required in _any_ of these. Every one of these dishes is built around a starch plus a lot of vegetation, much of it pre-cooked.
Fruit
I eat a lot of fruit. I like sourdough pancakes with blueberries, maple syrup, spread and peanut butter. Those I can pull out of the crock at any time, adding a bit of baking potassium (you would probably use baking soda) to counteract the sour and get lots of fluffy bubbles. I like apples plain, in apple crisp (whole grain flour, oatmeal, brown sugar, cinnamon and oil strewn on top), heated on the stove with cinnamon sugar on top. I love oranges, and I save the peels to make my own marmalade. I bake a lot of quick breads: in the fall and winter, pumpkin or squash bread. In the summer zucchini or banana bread. I bake more dessert-y things, too, but I’m focusing here on the ones that are part of a meal in my mind, as opposed to, Chocolate Cake or even Pineapple Upside Down Cake. All the quick breads can be eaten over the course of a week, or slightly more if you have a cold fridge or freeze half the loaf for later.
Sides
When I had the corn share, I suddenly had to figure out what to do with corn. I made corn pudding and esquites/elotes.
Potatoes, sweet potatoes, turnips and a variety of other root vegetables can be chopped or grated, and pan fried or air fried (or probably deep fried but I really just don’t). On their own, they are familiar sides like home fries or hash browns or latkes or potato pancakes. Filled out with more veg, they can be a meal sized hash, familiar to many in the form of corned beef hash, but there’s no reason it has to be corned beef.
Cole slaw is usually served in tiny little cups, almost as a garnish, but it’s really good as a big side salad.
All of these things you can make extra when you make it, and have 2+ servings later in the week.
Meal Prep for a week is something that I just don’t have it in me to do. Yet? But I can do components of it to make during the week cooking easy and fast. This lets me have the textural qualities of scratch cooking, but faster and less fatiguing mentally. Having those greens in the fridge, pre-cooked, means I eat a _lot_ of greens and I put them in everything.
I still do occasionally have a steak and french fries from a bag (yes, we have bagged french fries in the freezer). Those are a nice treat when the grill is available and we want to share a meal. And that’s a fast, easy, meal. I don’t ever make it just for myself; he eats quite a bit more meat in a meal than I do (but does not eat meat every day either), so together, a package works out with a small amount of leftovers that can become a meal of the sort I describe above.
TL;DR : get a lot of greens that you like, and prepare them a way that you like, that you can integrate into a lot of your meals. Do that with other vegetation to the degree that that makes sense to you. Make up a big salad (cole slaw, corn salad, etc.) that you can eat out of for 2-4 days. Have prepped starches (pasta, rice, bread) that you can scoop out. Find combinations that you can scoop into a big bowl, nuke for 2 minutes, squirt hot sauce / sprinkle nooch on. Either shove salad into your mouth while your food is heating / cooling down, or eat it for dessert or snacks.
Enjoy living your best life.
(I don’t want you to get the idea that I only eat vegetables and so forth. I often have Ben & Jerry’s fake ice cream. I always have a tin of dark chocolate bars. And as I mentioned above, I’m quite capable of making baked goodies of all kinds whenever I feel like I want and/or need them. I trust you can find the treats. The above is a way to reduce the cognitive, time and other load of preparing food to sustain you.)
https://youtu.be/ZJe3yL7NHdA
I like this YouTuber and I have mentioned him before in an earlier long food post that was largely about food acquisition in our house and how it has changed. https://walkitout.dreamwidth.org/2053518.html
The YouTube video linked above describes why he has trouble meal prepping, alternative “cooking systems” and their pluses and minuses, and what he is doing now, which he calls the Sunday Braise.
Doing a major cook on the weekend appears in a variety of No Cooking Cookbooks. The Braise approach that this YouTuber describes is central to David Chang’s _Cooking at Home_, a no recipe cookbook that I liveblogged reading and then reviewed (warning: it wasn’t pretty):
https://walkitout.dreamwidth.org/2025828.html
https://walkitout.dreamwidth.org/2026146.html
https://walkitout.dreamwidth.org/2027795.html
The general strategy of doing a Big Cook on Sundays that you use to stock your fridge and freezer for the coming week(s) is also central to Pillay’s really awesome _The No Recipe Cookbook_, https://walkitout.dreamwidth.org/2031169.html.
I doubt any of us will ever be as unbelievably together as Pillay, but _reading_ her book gave me so much inspiration and so many ideas. As long as reading someone else’s awe inspiring competence does not cause you to go do horrible self-destructive things, I recommend her book highly. If reading about someone else’s amazingness is damaging to you, please don’t read it.
Priestess thought that perhaps what the YouTuber was doing was like what I do. And it both is and isn’t, and the answer to the question (is this like what you do) was too complicated to address in a text _and_ I kinda wanted to blog about this anyway, so I’m gonna write that post next. I’ll either paste it below, or post it separately and link to it from here.
-=-=-=
Not Really Meal Prep
A modular approach to home cooking
Above, I reference a YouTuber who advocates for a Sunday braise and then build meals around the meat approach to home cooking. This is virtually identical to what is described in _Cooking at Home_ by Chang and Krishna. I’m sure that the resulting meals are tasty and filling, and each meal quick to prepare; the Sunday meat prep takes little fiddling altho you do have to be around to put it in and take it out which will take a few hours.
However, I am working around a set of constraints that makes this approach to home cooking completely unworkable for me. I cannot tolerate the amount of meat involved other than for an occasional meal. I cannot tolerate the amount of salt involved, period, full stop. If I wanted to do something along these lines, the closest I would come would be to cook a bird on a weekend, and then cook with the parts throughout the week. I _have_ done that, and it’s an enjoyable experience. I wouldn’t salt the bird; I would just put it in a roasting pan at 300 and turn it over once when it was about halfway to done. If I was ambitious, I would stuff it, because in-bird stuffing is amazing. If a neck was to be found in the bird, I would make chicken stock with the neck.
But I don’t do that all the time. Here’s what I do instead.
Pre-Prepping Meat
The kids have a pretty limited repertoire, so we have ground beef around for burgers, and we cook chicken parts because they’ll eat baked or grilled or pan friend chicken. They generally prefer unbreaded, so this is all very simple to do once thawed. I have already posted about how I acquire animal protein. When I open a package of ground beef, I’ll make patties from all of it, and put patties in a container separated by a piece of parchment paper, or put them in separate small rubbermaid containers, depending on what containers are currently in the drawer and depending on whether I’m making one patty or more than one for immediate cooking. If a patty sits in the fridge for more than a day or two and the kids aren’t eating it, I’ll often incorporate it into some other dish as ground beef. As long as the weather is mostly cooperative (constant precipitation for days is a problem, as it a very large volume of snow on the deck), my husband will grill the chicken on the outdoor gas grill, and put it in one of the frigoverre containers. The chicken is then available to use either plain for the kids, or in a prepared dish.
Otherwise, the freezer is full of all kinds of great things, and at intervals, one of us will make something that will produce a 6-8 servings of something. My husband makes pulled pork. I might make gumbo or jambalaya or cacciatore or similar. We’ll thaw the meat ahead of time, and we’ll do this when we know that we have everything in the house to make the dish. If we really want one of these, we’ll make a run to the store at some point to get all the components for the dish, and then the remaining leftover components unused in the dish will join the regular supply.
Pre-Prepping Veg
But that’s all fairly unusual. Most meals for me are NOT those kinds of meals. As I have noted in a previous post, we get boxes delivered to us from Siena: farm produce and mushrooms year round, and during the summer, some season items. I pre-cook a lot of the greens using bacon fat or olive oil and balsamic vinegar. I pre-cook the mushrooms using bacon fat or olive oil and vermouth I also typically have a rubbermaid or frigoverre container with rice, and another one with pasta. When I cook rice or pasta because there isn’t any, or because I’ve got some time and I’m in the kitchen anyway, I make extra for exactly this purpose. I usually have prepared red sauce in the fridge (pomi boxes and kirkland signature tomato paste and the usualy italian herbs but no onion and garlic, so my husband can eat it when he wants to; the rest of us can add onion and garlic powder or I can chop fresh and incorporate into the veg part of a dish). Many of my husband’s meals involve taking either one of the larger prepared meals as described above, combining it with rice or pasta and heating it in the microwave. We also have bread (either home baked, or from one of the deliveries) and my husband always has a stock of cheese, so bread and cheese are a common lunch for him.
A meal for me is thus: some starch, some pre-prepared greens, whatever additional vegetation available looks good, and umami either in the form of meat/poultry/eggs and/or mushrooms.
What does that look like?
a 2 egg omelette with mushrooms and greens, and maybe some panfried potatoes if I have them or a slice of bread if I don’t
Pasta with red sauce, greens, veg, mushrooms and possibly a little meat, maybe with some fake cheese or nooch on top
Veg, greens, mushrooms, rice, possibly meat — either a stir fry over rice or a fried rice or dirty rice or whatever
Pizza: if I think I’m going to do this, I’ll usually pull some extra out of the sourdough crock in the morning, add a little flour and oil to it, grease the pan and form the crust. The Breville makes it easy to proof, take out, heat to 400 while I put the toppings on, and then cook. Because I have the greens, mushrooms and red sauce usually pre-made in the fridge, and I generally have cheese and some soppressata or similar, it’s just a matter of chopping up a little garlic and maybe bell pepper if I have any while the oven goes from the proof temp to the 400 temp that I will cook it at. This isn’t the fastest meal, but it doesn’t take that long either, because the sourdough crock ensures that I’m never more than an hour away from a really good crust. But before I developed that skillset, I just used whatever bread we had — english muffins, sliced, whatever. Uncooked greens OR precooked greens go on _top_ of the cheese.
In the summer, when there are cucumbers, but really any time at all, salad sandwiches are a great use for crunchy vegetables. Also in the summer — or whenever I have lettuce or salad greens like turnip leaves, arugula, etc — a big salad with homemade honey mustard dressing (maple syrup or honey, mayonnaise, mustard, some hot sauce) or oil and balsamic.
Meat _can_ go in any of these. But it’s not required in _any_ of these. Every one of these dishes is built around a starch plus a lot of vegetation, much of it pre-cooked.
Fruit
I eat a lot of fruit. I like sourdough pancakes with blueberries, maple syrup, spread and peanut butter. Those I can pull out of the crock at any time, adding a bit of baking potassium (you would probably use baking soda) to counteract the sour and get lots of fluffy bubbles. I like apples plain, in apple crisp (whole grain flour, oatmeal, brown sugar, cinnamon and oil strewn on top), heated on the stove with cinnamon sugar on top. I love oranges, and I save the peels to make my own marmalade. I bake a lot of quick breads: in the fall and winter, pumpkin or squash bread. In the summer zucchini or banana bread. I bake more dessert-y things, too, but I’m focusing here on the ones that are part of a meal in my mind, as opposed to, Chocolate Cake or even Pineapple Upside Down Cake. All the quick breads can be eaten over the course of a week, or slightly more if you have a cold fridge or freeze half the loaf for later.
Sides
When I had the corn share, I suddenly had to figure out what to do with corn. I made corn pudding and esquites/elotes.
Potatoes, sweet potatoes, turnips and a variety of other root vegetables can be chopped or grated, and pan fried or air fried (or probably deep fried but I really just don’t). On their own, they are familiar sides like home fries or hash browns or latkes or potato pancakes. Filled out with more veg, they can be a meal sized hash, familiar to many in the form of corned beef hash, but there’s no reason it has to be corned beef.
Cole slaw is usually served in tiny little cups, almost as a garnish, but it’s really good as a big side salad.
All of these things you can make extra when you make it, and have 2+ servings later in the week.
Meal Prep for a week is something that I just don’t have it in me to do. Yet? But I can do components of it to make during the week cooking easy and fast. This lets me have the textural qualities of scratch cooking, but faster and less fatiguing mentally. Having those greens in the fridge, pre-cooked, means I eat a _lot_ of greens and I put them in everything.
I still do occasionally have a steak and french fries from a bag (yes, we have bagged french fries in the freezer). Those are a nice treat when the grill is available and we want to share a meal. And that’s a fast, easy, meal. I don’t ever make it just for myself; he eats quite a bit more meat in a meal than I do (but does not eat meat every day either), so together, a package works out with a small amount of leftovers that can become a meal of the sort I describe above.
TL;DR : get a lot of greens that you like, and prepare them a way that you like, that you can integrate into a lot of your meals. Do that with other vegetation to the degree that that makes sense to you. Make up a big salad (cole slaw, corn salad, etc.) that you can eat out of for 2-4 days. Have prepped starches (pasta, rice, bread) that you can scoop out. Find combinations that you can scoop into a big bowl, nuke for 2 minutes, squirt hot sauce / sprinkle nooch on. Either shove salad into your mouth while your food is heating / cooling down, or eat it for dessert or snacks.
Enjoy living your best life.
(I don’t want you to get the idea that I only eat vegetables and so forth. I often have Ben & Jerry’s fake ice cream. I always have a tin of dark chocolate bars. And as I mentioned above, I’m quite capable of making baked goodies of all kinds whenever I feel like I want and/or need them. I trust you can find the treats. The above is a way to reduce the cognitive, time and other load of preparing food to sustain you.)