The Kitchen Counter Cooking School (39 page)

“God, that explains why I hate the cereal aisle!” Shannon said. “I dread it. My kids will come up to me and say, ‘Why can't we have this cereal, Mommy, it's got Cinderella on it? Most of the time, I will be like, Where did you get that? I didn't even see it.”

“Manufacturers also pay for premium space at the ends of aisles, known as the end caps,” Jenny said. “Sometimes this stuff is on sale, sometimes not. A lot of times the best deal is not on the end cap but around the corner in the aisle.”

Terri nodded and took notes. She had said during her kitchen visit that she loathed shopping. “I have never felt like a very savvy shopper,” she said. “I always want to get in and get out and I could never figure out why it took so long or why sometimes I would pick up stuff that I thought was on sale, like on the end stands, and then it wasn't.”

Like Thierry, Jenny pulled leftover items out of the fridge. While Thierry was classically trained via the rigors of the French apprentice system, Jenny had earned her degree from a well-respected program at a local community college. Yet much of their messages were the same.

“If you want to save money and eat well, worry less about buying in bulk or what's on sale,” Jenny started. “The number one way to save money on your grocery bill is to not waste food. You can buy in bulk, within reason, on nonperishables, but for the fresh stuff, just buy less and shop more often.”

Smart shoppers plan meals and use thorough lists. They also stock up on basic staples. The meal plan doesn't have to be a strict “tuna casserole on Tuesday,” but a looser structure that simply means planning five or six meals for the week.

“There's nothing wrong with eating the same things routinely. The goal is to feed yourself and the people around you with real food. Cook on the weekends and use leftovers during the week. If you'll eat the leftovers, cook twice as much as you'll eat and put the rest aside for lunches. Or cook twice the amount you'll eat and feed your neighbors once a week and have them do the same for you.”

“For nights you have no plan, I tell shoppers to figure out a few simple strategies that are quick and use up the bits of food you've got in your fridge. Some require very little cooking. I have some strategies that I call ‘Desperation Dinners.' ”

The first involved a whole wheat flatbread. “You can do this with naan or tortillas, too.” From our leftovers, she added a handful of mozzarella, cut-up tomatoes, some garbanzo beans, some chopped red onion, half a red pepper, and then she cracked an egg in the middle. “I am a trained chef, but you know what I cook with most on weekdays? Our toaster oven.”

She slid the flatbread and egg into the kitchen's toaster oven. She made three different versions using the leftovers: a bit of ham, sliced Parmesan, chopped leeks, zucchini, sliced mushrooms. On each she cracked an egg and then chucked it into the toaster oven. When they emerged, the egg whites and yolks cooked, she topped them with a handful of arugula lightly dressed in olive oil. “It's an easy way to use up bits of greens, and kids like anything that looks like a pizza. Tortillas or flatbreads keep well, or you can always freeze them and then quickly thaw for a few seconds in the microwave.”

Next she demonstrated “Desperation Pasta.” She seasoned the water with salt and pepper. As the pasta started to cook, she cut a few florets of broccoli off the stem and crafted strips of carrots with a vegetable peeler. “I like to do this with carrots. They cook quickly, and they add some nice color.” She dropped both into the water as the pasta finished cooking. After two minutes, she drained the pasta and dropped it into a bowl and tossed it with a handful of greens and grated cheese. “Now I'm just going to top it with some olive oil, some vinegar, and taste to see if it needs more salt and pepper. Vinegar is wildly overlooked. It's great to add flavor, and it has no calories, plus it has great shelf life. Really wakes up food.”

She explained the concept of dinners as “layers.” Her daughter will eat the first layer, say, plain pasta with grated cheese and maybe some broccoli. For Jenny and her husband, she'll “finish” the dish with pine nuts, chopped chilies, greens, sautéed shrimp, and so on. “If your kids are fussy, you don't have to make a completely different dish. Just evolve it into something more suited for adult tastes.”

The class asked about gadgets. She doesn't use many. “A microplaner is great. You can use it to grate cheese, garlic, gingerroot, just a ton of stuff.” We handed out slices of her Desperation Pizzas and Pasta. While everyone ate, she discussed more shopping tactics. Make a list of foods with strong flavors that store well in your pantry—things like capers, artichoke hearts, beans, dried mushrooms, and olives, that sort of thing. Buy basics in bulk, and buy fresh sparingly until you routinely use
all
of your produce, and then add more. “For produce, I look for what's fresh, in season, and hopefully on sale. We buy a whole chicken every time we shop. Sometimes I break it down but usually I just roast it for dinner that night. I have learned endless uses for it. Salads, pasta, burritos, chicken potpie, chicken salad, risotto. The list goes on. Then I make chicken stock, which also has endless uses.”

“Oh, and a basil plant is a great investment,” she said. “Any herbs that you buy regularly, consider keeping those plants in your kitchen window. You can get an herb plant at a nursery for the same price as a package of herbs at a grocery and just use what you need.”

Like Thierry, she advocated trying to force using the last elements in the fridge. “Try this: Open your fridge. Take out three ingredients that sound like they go together. Put them into the search engine of a recipe site that you trust. If it turns out terrible, well, it's just one meal.”

Jenny summed up the evening with one message. “You have to define what value is to you in your food. Is it cheap? Or are you going to get a lot of enjoyment from it? Maybe I'll splurge on some great flank steak, but then we'll get three meals from it. But the key thing is to think of food as money. You wouldn't toss a five-dollar bill in the garbage can, would you? If you throw a head of lettuce and some dead cucumbers in the trash, it's exactly the same thing. It adds up.”

Shannon took a lot of notes. She had told us that she spent about seven hundred dollars a month on food, which turned out to be average for a family of four, according to the USDA. But she was always looking for ways to extend her budget. “Everything that we've been learning in class has been so helpful, but thinking about this whole leftover piece is a big thing for me. I've never been one of those people who could open the fridge and figure out stuff to make from it. I think that's how stuff goes bad, by not knowing what to do with it. This is all super helpful.”

Trish had been trying to plan more meals, but she had recently figured out the problem. “My husband likes to be spontaneous. I'll have dinner halfway done, and then we'll go to yoga. Afterward, he'll say, ‘Let's go out.' But I have dinner half-finished at home. So that's still a challenge for me.” On the positive side, they rarely throw away food thanks to his fearless approach to sell-by dates. “Oh, he'll eat everything, even stuff with mold on it!”

The morning after Jenny's class, I took everything out of my fridge, from the condiments to the last remnants of vegetables from the crisper. I remembered the heavy use of Post-it notes throughout the commercial kitchen. I estimated the cost of every item and tagged each with a price on a Post-it. In the course of two weeks, if I had to throw an item away, I'd take the Post-it note and stick it to an area inside one of my cabinet doors.

Almost immediately, tossing something signaled defeat by surrender. My mind-set changed: Oh, no, I don't want to put that Post-it for this bell pepper on my door. Hmmm, what can I do with it? At the end of two weeks, I'd thrown out about sixteen dollars in food, less than usual but still nothing to make me proud. Among the culprits: remnants of hummus of unknown origin, the estimated cost of leftover bits from dinners, the end of a bag of red grapes, a smudge of mesclun salad left in the container, a nearly full package of sour cream, half a lime that turned brown, leftover chicken salad, half a sandwich brought home from a restaurant that got pushed behind our bread dough, and crumbled bleu cheese that had taken on a disturbing consistency. But the exercise forced me to use some items that I might have tossed: bits of bread pulverized into bread crumbs, the last of a jar of horseradish added to mayo for a spread for sandwiches, black bananas puréed into a kind of ice cream, limp carrots and green onions forced into duty in stock, wizened apples cut up and baked and topped with brown sugar on top of oatmeal, and half an avocado whipped with olive oil and sparkling water for a kind of dressing. One came directly from Jenny, her ersatz “pizza,” with the last half handful of just-starting-to-wilt spinach.

During the process, I started to read
More-with-Less Cookbook
by the late Doris Janzen Longacre, a classic cookbook developed in the early 1970s with the Mennonite Central Committee that's still in use twenty-five years later. Longacre preached avoiding heavily processed foods, eating simple meals and more whole grains, and relying less on meat. She advocated shortening the shopping list and developing a stable of recipes on which to rely rather than trying to reinvent the culinary wheel for every single meal. In an opening scene, she describes a four-color advertising pitch she received in the mail for a new recipe-card set that promised to “make cooking easier and more exciting than ever before!” The ad stunned her sensibilities. “The pitch indicates again how we try to turn eating into a super-experience,” she wrote.

It reminded me of an old issue of a food magazine that had offered a week of “fast meals.” The lineup included a shrimp curry, Moroccan spiced lamb chops, a Mediterranean fish sauté, a beef stir-fry, and seared scallops with braised cabbage. The shopping list next to it contained more than fifty ingredients. Sure, some people might have some of the ingredients on hand as staples, but I examined the recipes closer. If you made all those dishes, among the leftovers you'd be left with half a head of cabbage, half a can of coconut milk, the remainder of bunches of cilantro, parsley, and basil, among other things. So what exactly to do with all of those extra remnants of food?

When I thought about Longacre's views, why would I take on a set of menus that would leave me with so much? Does anyone need lamb, scallops, beef, fish, and shrimp all in the space of five days?

Chef Thierry, Jenny, and Longacre all had a point. While exploring my crisper drawer, I found a nearly full two-pound bag of organic carrots tagged with a four-dollar Post-it. Half an onion beckoned. Rosemary sprigs sat waiting on my counter. Rosemary and carrots together? I would never have thought of that combination if I had not been forced to figure out how to use them up. The result was a savory yet sweet chilled soup. I didn't know what the volunteers had learned through these classes, but I had learned something important. We all can do more with less.

 

2 tablespoons olive oil
1 medium onion, chopped (about 1
cups)
2 leeks (white and light green parts), chopped
1 pound carrots, diced
Several fresh rosemary sprigs
1 bay leaf
2 quarts chicken or vegetable stock
Coarse salt and freshly ground black pepper
Pinch of cayenne (optional)
cup quality plain yogurt (optional)
Croutons (optional)