Later On

I’ve commented here and there that I think I’m less sentimental now in my view of food, and I’ve also commented on the meal skeleton. As it happens, The Wife was seeking my thoughts on meals for her—snacks, lunch, and dinner only, since breakfasts are under control. (Interesting how we settle on a breakfast and enjoy it daily.) I thought my response might be of interest and also trigger some discussion. I think you can see that I have taken a more practical and pragmatic approach to meal planning, and you can see how the meal skeleton helps one design a meal. My goal was to provide ideas for foods to have on hand so that when she wanders into the kitchen and starts thinking about a meal, she can just look around at what’s there and find all the components of a sensible and easily prepared meal.

She had a few requirements: She doesn’t like to cook and chop veg and all that. She likes foods that can be easily packaged on the days she commutes, and she likes meals that she can sort of graze on as she works. She reacts adversely to gluten and some foods (cheese among them, unfortunately).

The first thing is to get the snacks out of the way. Plums are good: 1 plum = 1 snack. Same with apricots, only she doesn’t like them. An apple is fine, though I found I went for half an apple/snack. A banana. There are two snacks a day (mid-morning and mid-afternoon—and maybe a third snack in the evening), so 6 plums (for example) would last two or three days, depending on whether a three- or two-snack plan is adopted.

Next is to take care of the protein. Eggs are one obvious protein source: a dozen boiled eggs is handy to have on hand: protein in pre-cooked 1-oz packages. (She’ll be aiming for 3-4 oz protein per lunch and per dinner.) They can be eaten straight, sliced atop a tossed salad, or chopped up and made into egg salad.

Another thought: buy a boneless skinless chicken breast, cut off a strip you think is an ounce, weigh it, and then cut the rest into one-ounce strips, adjusting the size based on that first strip and how much it weighed. Obviously it doesn’t have to extremely precise: so long as the strips average roughly an ounce each, that’s fine. The idea is to have the food already measured, so that (for example) you can just take three strips and add them to a tossed salad, or make a chicken salad, or use them in a sandwich, or stir-fry with some rice and veg (not really cooking).

Brush the strips with a little oil (sesame oil might be nice, but olive oil is fine), grind a little pepper on them, skip the salt (add that at the end), and roast them in a 300ºF oven for 20-30 minutes (or until done).

She could do the same thing with boneless pork chops: trim the fat, slice into 1-oz pieces, and roast or sauté until done.

Also, one should keep on hand packaged tuna and sardines. I like to buy the ones that come in jars, but Wild Planet has some extremely nice line-caught albacore tuna with no salt added. I keep some of those around, and also their sardines. Both of these work well in tossed salads or in salads of the other sort (with mayo, more or less, though I use yogurt quite often—if it’s runny, just add a little oat bran—and I always add a little mustard and Worcestershire). Tuna is now also available in bags.

So that takes care of the protein, in ready-to-eat 1-oz packets, as it were.

Next, the starch: Simplest thing is to cook up some rice to have on hand. (I use Uncle Ben’s converted rice because it has a low glycemic index.) One-half cup of cooked rice is a serving, but I usually take one-third cup. The rice can be used in a little stir-fry—not really cooking, just heating the rice, veg, and meat in a sauté pan: meat and rice already cooked, just need to heat the veg.

Another starch to have on hand is rye bread (which she can eat): that can be used for sandwiches, or brushed with oil, cubed, sprinkled with pepper and a teeny bit of salt and some garlic powder and then roasted until crisp. These crouton thingies can be kept on hand for salads and stir-fries (using croutons instead of rice). They’re also good atop soups and stews (and can add the starch otherwise not included).

A batch of whole-grain rye could also be cooked ahead of time and used like rice in various dishes. (1 cup of whole-grain rye, 2 cups of water, bring to boil, reduce heat, cover, simmer for an hour, check. Cook until all water is absorbed.) Grains like this (and like rice) also work well in tossed salads as an alternative to croutons.

Crackers are important for morale. Gluten-free crackers are readily available. She has extremely thin rye crackers, and I recommended also having some dark-rye Ry-Vita. One wants more than one kind of cracker, I think.

Okay, protein and starch sorted. Now for the veg. Given the initial requirements, I suggested she look at the cut-up vegetables Whole Foods sells. More expensive than doing it yourself, but well worth it to her.

I suggested one box of the chopped celery, onion, and carrot mix. That can be used in egg salad, tossed salad, chicken salad, tuna salad, stir-fries, and so on.  And one of the plastic bins of baby greens for tossed salads. And I suggested getting one head of kale and cooking it ahead of time—bring home, rinse off, put in pot, cook 30 minutes, put in fridge: not really cooking. But she didn’t go for that.

I said she could just rinse the kale, chop it fine, and sauté it with some rice, and top with fried egg or chop some chicken or pork in with the sauté.

And as I described that—it being dinner time—it started to sound pretty good. Below I’ll describe what I did with it.

Next are the things to have on hand. You can take a dish in many different directions with added condiments, and while they add a lot of taste, they don’t put on many calories. Some things I always have on hand:

Vinegars (Chinese black, sherry, balsamic, rice, etc. I get Eden Foods Brown Rice Vinegar because it has the right taste and no added sugar. Vinegar—or lemon or lime juice—can brighten a dish.)
Bac’Uns (I buy ‘em by the pound—very good on eggs, for example, or in salads)
Worcestershire sauce (I make it myself, but then I’m retired)
Pepper sauce (ditto)
Liquid smoke (adds great flavor to chili)
Soy sauce (I like the Eden Foods Organic Imported Organic Shoyu Sauce)
Mirin (Eden Foods sells real mirin, not the fake stuff)
Cyprus Flake Salt or Maldon Salt (rather than salt food as I cook, I put just a few grains of this on top)
Bragg’s Vinaigrette (I like the sesame and ginger one)
Galeos Ginger Wasabi Salad Dressing (but note the lawsuit)
And lots of spices and herbs: crushed red pepper, various chilis, curries, traditional herbs, etc.

In the fridge:
Mustard(s)
Mayo
Chutney
Sriracha sauce
Penzeys Chicken Soup Base
Yogurt (as a topping)

Obviously, I measure everything, though after a while you often can measure by eye—still, I use measuring implements quite frequently and always for any critical food (I never simply pour the vinaigrette on a salad; it is always measured: it contains oil.) I have the usual measuring spoons and also 2 tsp, 1.5 Tbsp, and 2 Tbsp. I find I use those a lot. (2 Tbsp is also a standard coffee measure.) And I have a digital scale always available on the counter.

So, my dinner. I went to the kitchen and immediately put 1 cup of water with 1/2 cup Uncle Ben’s converted rice on to cook. I normally would have added 1 tsp Penzeys Chicken Soup Base, but forgot. I did pepper the water, though.

Once it boiled, I reduced heat, covered, and set time for 20 minutes. I stood around a bit, and then it occurred to me that I could go ahead and sauté the kale (1 bunch very fresh kale from my CSA share) while the rice cooked, and just add the rice at the end.

I got the kale from the fridge and that reminded me of a large green garlic I had, and that sounded good.

So I chopped the green garlic finely, and found 1/4 large sweet onion on the chopping block, so chopped that as well. I put 4 tsp toasted sesame oil in my large sauté pan (I figured this would easily make enough for two meals), heated it, and then added the garlic and onion and let them start to sauté over medium heat. I washed the kale and dried it in the spin-dryer.

I was about to add that, when I thought of the mushrooms I had on hand. Those would be good. I got out the three large domestic white mushrooms, chopped, and added them to the pan and let all sauté while I chopped the kale.

I use all the kale, including the thick center stalk, but those I chop quite small. Once all the kale was chopped, it went into the pan. I stirred with a spatula as the kale cooked down.

It occurred to me that I could pep this up a bit. I added some Chinese black vinegar, grindings of black pepper, a few shakes of crushed red pepper, about a Tbsp of Worcestershire sauce. Soy sauce work work as well as the Worcestershire sauce: the point is to add some umami.

I continued to cook for another 5 minutes or so. By then the rice had only a minute left, so I dumped it into the pan with the veg and stirred it in, turned the heat down, covered, and let it cook a bit longer.

While it cooked, I got two eggs from the fridge, broke them into my teflon egg skillet with a little truffle oil, and cooked them over easy. (I’m getting pretty good at using the pan to flip the egg gently.)

I spooned the rice/veg mix into a bowl, topped that with the two eggs, sprinkled on some Bac’Uns, and enjoyed a tasty, balanced, and unsentimental dinner.

UPDATE: See also this related post: Food as grub.