The Enigma of Everfasting

Come to the Hudson Farmers' Market this Saturday, September 21 for the Kitchen Shrink LIVE!

Dear Tamar:

I inhaled An Everlasting Meal. I roasted farmers market vegetables weekly, funneled them into glass jars, then frittatas and pastas and on top of sourdough toast topped with a fried egg and drizzled with olive oil. I cooked and ate contentedly like this for years. I loved to cook.

Now, I work full time, then pick up my kids from daycare and head home. My kids tolerate about 15 minutes between arriving at home and dinner before full melt downs. My 3-year-old eats cheese quesadillas and pizza. My husband does not eat cheese (though he makes a mean mapo tofu). Neither is excited about roasted vegetables on toast. Sometimes, my husband cooks. Sometimes, my husband picks up the kids, and I cook. But many many days, I pick them up, and dinner is my responsibility, and I have exactly 15 minutes of pre-dinner time. I still love to cook. But are there any truly make-ahead or extra-fast meals that will please this prickly bunch?

-Everfasting

Dear Everfasting,

I wracked my mind for a charming and profound analogy for your situation. But what you described was too personal and too familiar. At the risk of making this about me: I know how you feel. I also love roasting farmers’ market vegetables and transforming them over the course of the week. I also was content like this for years. It was a paradise.

Then, as they did in yours, things in my life changed: my child stopped eating vegetables other than carrots; he sometimes eschews cheese; or rice; or eggs. (He’s the only 8-year old in the world who dislikes most pizza.) My husband is gluten-free. He likes food warmer than he used to.

My paradise dissolved. I think wistfully of jars of roasted cauliflower becoming dinner and bowls of olive-oily cooked greens promising greens-and-ricotta sandwiches for the next day’s lunch. For a while, I sulked. We ate hot dogs. Then, from the wreckage of my paradise sprouted something new.

My cooking has always relied on turning ingredients into elements of meals. That is, still (again) my outlook. But my focus is now on elements I can serve composed—with a meal’s parts keeping reliably enough to themselves for me to trust that everyone at the table will be able to assemble a dinner they like.

Here are some examples of the sorts of compositions I rely on:

• Muffin tin dinner: This is from my husband’s childhood, and has evolved into the below as our son has gotten older. But the idea is brilliant, as long as you don’t take yourself too seriously. Each person gets a muffin tin. Each well in the tin is filled with something, which can range from popcorn to lettuce to mozzarella to leftover chicken. This is obviously a bit of a crutch. But you have a 3-year old, and I, frankly, have loved my occasional meals out of a muffin tin.

• Breakfast for dinner: This can be eggs, bacon or sausage, toast, and a salad; or it can be pancakes—with enough salt in the batter to make them slightly savory—with toppings like grated cheese, chopped scallions, cold-smoked salmon, kimchi, cooked greens, and bacon; or waffles—which can include squash or sweet potato, with the toppings above; or it can be crepes, with prosciutto, mortadella, grated cheese, arugula, anchovies.

• Rice, eggs, and fill-in-the-blank: Much of the worlds eats rice for breakfast, making this both a sub-category and a category of its own. Serve bowls of rice, some kind of cooked egg, and one other ingredient—sliced salted cucumber, or chopped scallion, or an herb salad, or pickled ginger. Each part of this meal, like each part of breakfast-for-dinner, can be switched and subbed. You can serve white rice, sticky rice, farro, fried rice, etc; eggs can be boiled, fried, scrambled, cooked into a flat omelet; the-blank can be greens, beans, vegetables, bacon, sliced salami, pickles, and so on.

• Mezze-inspired snack plate: This is not really mezze. The word is meant mostly as inspiration. Serve olives, little pickles, hummus, roasted chickpeas, stuffed grape leaves, yogurt, leftover roast-vegetable salad, toasted bread or pita; or serve two types of cheese, two kinds of cured meat, bread sticks, mozzarella, and cut-up raw vegetables.

• Picnic: With the word “picnic” in mind, you might find a different set of inspirations and associations—maybe you combine leftover chicken with mayonnaise and quickly-chopped celery. Maybe you accompany dinner with buttered white toast. Maybe you include a bowl of grapes, and sliced pears. Maybe you drink a gin and tonic. Maybe you lay the tablecloth on the floor.

• Falafel or meatballs, bread, a salad. Falafel batter can be made ahead and refrigerated or frozen. Ditto for any meatball mixture. The salad can be middle-eastern one of chopped vegetables and herbs, or one of mixed lettuces, or one of leftover roasted squash, or leftover rice.

• Nachos: These are a house favorite. I lay the chips on a sheet tray, then cover a third with only grated cheese. I cover another third with cheese and meat I’ve refried with onion, cumin, paprika. I cover the final third with all that, plus beans, then, out of the oven, chopped onion, cilantro, pickled chilies, salsa, and guacamole. When I can, I fry leftover homemade tortillas into chips. When I can’t, I buy tortilla chips. If someone rolls their eyes at you when you say you’re serving nachos for dinner, tell them you got the recipe from a former Chez Panisse cook.

• Sausages and a starch: the universe of sausages is too vast for me to attempt a list; the same is true of starches, but make sure you remember corn bread and polenta and grits, and roast potatoes, boiled potatoes, and mashed potatoes, and beans and lentils, and noodles and rice. Lots of remembering to do, but not much else.

• Nicoise salad but not Nicoise: I serve Nicoise salad—a composed salad of boiled eggs, boiled potatoes, boiled green beans, a mound of canned tuna, a clutch of olives, a clutch of anchovies, a tuft of lettuce—because there are at least three items that are beloved by everyone. But after a few successful meals of Nicoise, I realized that any composed salad in which everyone likes three or more components is fair game. I’ve made iterations of Nicoise—with mackerel or hot-smoked trout instead of tuna ,and pickles instead of potatoes. I’ve made composed chicken salad. I once made a composed salad that contained hot dogs—along with lightly vinegared potatoes and boiled cabbage, and I adamantly insist: It was a delight.

Dear cook, I’m tempted to boast about the thrilling foods I’ve newly added to our rotation—tomato sauce!—and each tiny success—chicken and rice in the same bowl! But it’s more helpful for me to just remind you that underpinning An Everlasting Meal was an embrace of the truth that time passes—that today’s roasted vegetables will become tomorrow’s toast topping, that the bread sliced for that will coat next week’s chicken cutlets. Time passes. Keep cooking elements of meals. Keep setting them beside each other. Rely on helpful starches, and the passage of time. It remains as true as ever that, if our meal will be ongoing, then our only task is to begin.

See you on Saturday, at the Hudson Farmers’ Market!

In the meantime, send me your questions!