#4 - Meal planning - basic food groups

Meal planning always seems a sort of math problem to me, the dreaded algebra equation with its silly “unknown” letters.  

I wasn’t always so dismissive of mathematics. Elementary school was a one room country schoolhouse, just like you read about in Little House on the Prairie.  In fact, the school was called Prairie Grove, and I can remember concentrating hard on reciting the multiplication tables while a cruel north breeze swept across the wood floor.  It was good to sit with your feet curled up under you at your desk, even if it meant they fell asleep!  At home as homework, I paced while I learned those tables, and then I used little memory jogs to keep the math in my head, always feeling quite secure that I was correct, because I could always go back and count it up to see if I’d been right.  In the fall of 1963, when I began my freshman year at the rural high school at Bern in Kansas—big, big happenings for me!—algebra entered my life, and I never felt the same way about math again.  I do remember liking what was called Geometry then, mostly because you just had to memorize the formula and the solution made a nice, pretty shape, but I was quite happy to skip any math for my junior and senior years in high school.  This was a rural school, so practically everyone took band and chorus, and I was the only one who could play the piano well enough to accompany the boys’ chorus, so I never took the next levels of math or chemistry—sigh.  Happy Days!  It was quite a shock to be placed in a remedial algebra class when I started college, but the graduate student teacher/tutor was impressed by my ability to traipse across campus, again in cold, cruel winds, to get help, and he probably gifted me by passing me, and then I NEVER DID MATH AGAIN!  Yay!

Still, you can look at meal planning as that sort of formula where multiple solutions depend upon multiple probabilities.  You’ve got your basic food groups located in those three different places:  the fridge, the freezer, and the pantry.  And the affecting probabilities are how much time you want to spend cooking and what you feel like doing vs. what you’d like to be eating at the end of the process.  Let’s just analyze food groups this time, since these various permutations invite long discussion!

There are 6.  I don’t care what the USDA Food Pyramid says.  There are six food groups, and at Supper time, all six have to appear in the meal.  (Lunch and breakfast count only as additions for the day, not as accumulating “credits.”)  Those food groups are protein, a green vegetable, a satisfying vegetable starch or bread, another vegetable, a fruit, and. . .chocolate. When I plan, I think of which things in each group I’m willing to eat and how much effort is required to produce each.

Here’s my working list, with every element reduced to the simplest cooking method.  Yours will obviously be different, because I’ll bet you’re willing to eat things like fish and Swiss chard and even—(shudder)—kale.  Good for you! 

Protein – chicken breast, roasted; pork chop, beef and pork tenderloin, sautéed stovetop; Hillshire Farm sausage; eggs; toasted walnuts, pecans, pumpkin or sunflower seeds; lentils.

Green vegetable – broccoli, blanched (See #3 – The green jewel, broccoli) or roasted;  green beans, delightfully fresh from the farmers’ market in the summertime and frozen French cut, otherwise; romaine lettuce with my own vinaigrette, celery; Brussels sprouts in season; green cabbage, raw, roasted, sautéed with pork.

Other vegetable –  any orange squash, roasted; green, yellow, or red sweet peppers, carrots, cauliflower, raw or roasted; fresh tomato slices in the summertime; tomato sauce or roasted tomatoes, otherwise;  purple cabbage, mostly in salads.

I’m sure you get the idea of my food groupings without my having to fill in all the blanks.  I eat fruits on a seasonal basis, buying just a couple of pieces and letting them come to goodness on the kitchen counter, and they are always eaten raw, in addition to being a separately served course when I’m entertaining or providing a meal for someone else.  I keep rice and instant couscous in the pantry, and when I bake any bread, even cornbread, I cut and freeze what isn’t eaten at the meal. And, finally, everything I bake has to freeze wonderfully—because no one should eat an entire pan of brownies for dessert and they dry out the next day—as well as have chocolate in it. Besides, a chocolate bar hidden in the back of the cupboard is a pretty easy way to keep chocolate around, and why shouldn’t it be great dark chocolate?  It’s good for you!

So, I start thinking, probably about lunchtime, what’s available in each of my hidden storage spaces, and then I put the meal together thinking of the simplest preparation for each choice, adding the caveat of using only one or two cooking vessels; cleaning up is, after all, part of the cooking process, and I don’t want it to be complicated, either!  Some food always stands out as “I want that right now,” and then the rest of Supper has to fall together from that item’s cooking process.  That’s why the roasted chicken breast (See #2 – The protein that never fails) makes a good fallback Supper; I can roast two vegetables with it, and, thus, use only one pan! 

However, wanting pasta for supper works the same way.  I can start the cooking water for the pasta, drop in one of the two vegetables, probably the broccoli, and fish it out before I even cook the pasta in the same water.  Then, when the pasta’s finished, quickly I will drain it, slap its cooking pan back on the heat, add some sausage I’ve sliced off the hunk which lives in the freezer, and after the sausage has browned and made the bottom of the pan all smooshy with its juices and carmelization, I smash some garlic and add some olive oil, both of which will serve as additional flavor enhancement for reheating the pasta and broccoli. If I’ve remembered to save some of the pasta water, that’s even better!

And, yes, I’m cooking for myself most of the time.  However, every technique I’ve shared with you thus far can be multiplied to feed however many you’re needing to feed.

I challenge you to make your own Food Group list, and, okay, you can drop off chocolate if you really don’t like it, but don’t forget to work in something wonderful you crave each day.  Don’t skip dessert.  Life is to be lived, and you deserve something good each day! 

Next time: Meal planning, tastes and textures.   

   

#3 - The green jewel, broccoli

Ahh, broccoli; how I do love thee.  I’m not sure I should admit to the beginning of that love affair, because I’m afraid to besmirch my reputation as the “gourmet” cook I’ve always claimed to be.  After all, the only broccoli I ever experienced on that Midwestern farm where I grew up was frozen, so how can I explain my great admiration except to confess that I probably loved the Velveeta melted on it more! 

Still there was something about those funny-looking green spears that I found wonderful; they looked like the trees I drew on my pictures of pointy-roofed houses with red birds flitting about and the big yellow sun’s rays beaming onto the whole picture from the left side.  And there was that moment when they were being cooked that they were the most glorious shade of green, almost luminous and bright, as though the vegetable combined both the green of nature and the yellow of the sun’s rays.

When I graduated from college, my one requirement for a place to settle was the availability of fresh broccoli in the neighborhood grocery, which pretty much meant I had to settle in suburban Kansas City on the Kansas side, and I could never move to the small town where I worked the bulk of my teaching career.  How I moved from frozen to fresh broccoli, however, is an event I can’t remember, but I suspect it had something to do with the number of  PBS cooking series I watched avidly in the seventies—several being resurrected now on the Cooking Channel which launched back on Memorial Day weekend this year.  My, it’s nice to hear Julia trill and gasp her way through reruns of the French Chef/Julia Child and Company!

At any rate, I’m figuring it was seeing Julia, or more likely Jacques Pepin, peel the stems of the spears which made light dawn for me.  “Well, hey, it isn’t just the tree part that would be good, then??”  And from there, I went to deciding I liked broccoli only blanched, and not steamed, and so I devised a blanching method that suited both my desire for an evenly cooked product and my tendency to categorize things.  I cut off the little “trees” at the top of the spear and broke them off from each other where they were joined, and, subsequently, placed them into piles on the cutting board, big and little.  Then I peeled the stems, placing them horizontal to the board so that I could cut straight down with my knife—faster and more efficient, and certainly not as ridiculous as that silly vegetable peeler!  Then it was either cutting the stem through horizontally or slicing it into chunks, depending upon how thick it was.  It was again probably Julia or Jacques who taught me to bring lots of water to the boil and salt it copiously, but the system of dropping in the stems first and letting them boil for a minute or two before I dropped in the “bigger trees” pile from my board is all my invention.  . .at least, I think it is!

When you do this, it’s important to get all the “sides” of the little tree parts into the water as it’s boiling because that’s what sets the color, and if you just let the pieces float, they won’t cook evenly.  Finally, you finish up, a couple of minutes later, with the “smaller tree” pile, and when one of those smaller trees can be pierced with a knife, it’s time to abandon the ship and get that vegetable drained, cuz it’s done. . .NOW!  It isn’t long cooking; you can’t mess around, and it really IS two minutes between drops of stems and tree piles.

I was so happy to discover that my daughter would eat raw broccoli stems when she was very small.  Somehow I felt that meant I was better than the average mother and blessed, as well.  So, it made perfect sense to raise her believing that one of the two vegetables on your plate at suppertime had to be green—another of my cardinal rules. She was raised believing it so firmly that when she was a freshman in college and her fellow band members held a potluck pre-Thanksgiving dinner to which she took mashed potatoes, she filled her plate, poised her fork, and then burst into anguished dismay, “I can’t eat this; there’s nothing green on the plate!”  Ahh, mother guilt. . .a great tool for raising children!

I am convinced, however, that even though there is a genetic tendency towards breast cancer in my family, I’m now 61, and I have never been diagnosed.  It’s all that fresh broccoli, I’m tellin’ ya!

You can dress up the broccoli after you’ve cooked it by shocking it in ice water immediately as you drain it and then save the pan in which you cooked it for reheating.  Just as you’ve pulled the chicken out of the oven (see #2 - The Protein Which Never Fails) to rest for its ten minutes, pour a bit of olive oil in the cooking pan, and let it heat for a minute while you smash a clove of garlic and throw it in to flavor the oil, actually peeling and chopping it if you want that much garlic flavor.   When you can feel a bit of heat rising from the oil in the pan, and particularly smell the garlic, throw in the drained broccoli and turn it fast in the oil, taking a couple of seconds to grind on some pepper or sprinkle in a pinch of red pepper flakes.  This is a particularly welcome technique for your broccoli spears at this year’s Thanksgiving dinner.  Peel the stems of whole broccoli spears as much as you can without tearing off flowerettes at the top.  Cut each spear of broccoli in half vertically, and use your biggest cooking pan so that you have plenty of water in which to cook the broccoli.  Salt the water liberally.  When you’re finished cooking—and pay attention so that you undercook and keep that glorious green—save the pan and clear off your cooktop to do whatever else you need to do there.  Ten minutes before you’re calling people to the table, do the oil reheat as previously described, and if you start a little earlier heating up the oil, you’ll have time to add some red bell pepper strips!  Talk about “green on the plate!”  You’ll have no problem feeling healthy as well as beautiful, and you certainly won’t feel guilty about not having eaten anything green at YOUR Thanksgiving Dinner!

Next time:  a meal planning guide