blue_dolphin

Very smart to avoid over complicating things! Which makes me wonder why (aside from the presence of a 5 lb cabbage) you want to combine 6 new-to-you recipes into a newly designed and untested creation at what seems like a rather stressful time. Maybe this is a fun activity to keep your mind off of the stress? If so, great. If not, I’m wondering why you’re not leaning into the sameness and freezing batches of old favorites.

In this context, I don’t think the sameness is a bad thing as you probably won’t get tired of having the same thing as often as twice a month or even once a week.

I know you didn’t ask me, but I’m curious. Can you give us some examples of casseroles that use a separate sauce? I don’t think I’ve had one with a separate sauce, let alone two sauces.

Charred sweet potatoes with garlic & herb labne and Calabrian chile crisp. From Samin Nosrat’s Good Things. I used the purple-skin, white-flesh Japanese sweet potatoes. They’re charred after cooking (I steamed them first) by placing them directly on a gas burner for 5-7 min. Not the same as being cooked buried in the coals but the skin is crispy and the flesh underneath has some of that same delicious roasted flavor.

A simple carrot salad from Good Things. Kind of a riff on the classic carrot-raisin salad. This one tosses the carrots with dates, fresh ginger, garlic, ground cumin, cilantro and pickled Thai chiles, then adds a quick dressing of olive oil, lime juice, chile vinegar (from the Thai chiles) and salt. I piled the salad on a bed of baby kale that I dressed with the same dressing. This wasn’t a meal salad, I had it alongside a salmon burger for lunch.

In my experience, it’s usually the texture that suffers rather than the flavor. YMMV For umpteen years, I brought frozen meals to work for my lunch every freaking day. Lasagne, soups, chili, enchiladas, bean stews, lots and lots of pasta with vegetables (chunky shapes, cooked very al dente, both the pasta & veg) hummus and other bean dips. Always accompanied by a zip top bag of raw carrots, celery, snap peas, broccoli, cauliflower, jicama, radishes, cherry tomatoes which offered a nice textural contrast. Not everyone cares as much about texture as much as I do and even those who do may be satisfied with less of it when feeling under the weather. There have been times when I’d have preferred all nutrition be something I could sip through a straw so I didn’t have to chew anything 🙃 Along those lines, if I were having surgery, I’d be filling my freezer with smoothie kits that could be dumped into the blender with juice, milk or yogurt. I’ve got lots of combos with a couple servings of both fruit and veg, protein and fiber. It’s not going to feed the rest of the family but there have been times that’s all I could stomach!

A food item that has been freeze-dried has indeed survived the freezing process. Importantly, it has never been subjected to the thawing process. Instead, the ice crystals are removed via sublimation. Pretty much anything containing moisture can be successfully frozen. Thawing? That’s a different story! If you are keen to dive into making freeze-dried meals, like backpacking or emergency rations in multiple servings, that’s going to require a significant investment in equipment but rereading that thread would be an excellent primer.

A quick search for freezing cookbooks on Eat Your Books and my local public library shows two main types of cookbooks: Preserving cookbooks, either dedicated to freezing or covering freezing among other preservation methods. Cookbooks with recipes intended to be frozen My library had quite a few available for to borrow online via Libby so you might check yours. Another place to find recipes for freezer meals is the Souper Cube site. You don’t need to use their product but they have ideas that might be useful like freezing single servings or freezing meal components separately in “meal kits”

My advice isn’t specifically about cooking but if I were having surgery, I would be setting up accounts with the grocery delivery and errand running services in my area and trying them out with simple orders. I’ve learned that being already sick or in recovery is not the time to set that stuff up. No amount of advance planning can prepare for all eventualities so it’s wise to have some delivery options in your back pocket. Particularly pharmacy pickup or delivery options. For yourself, make sure you’re set up with easily digestible options that might not be otherwise appealing but can get you through. I keep some of these on hand at all times. I donate and rotate them out periodically. Soft fruits: bananas, applesauce, avocado, pumpkin, canned fruit (packed in water not heavy syrup), and melons Steamed or boiled vegetables: carrots, green beans, potatoes, and squash Low-fiber starches: white bread, white rice, saltine crackers, cream of wheat, instant oatmeal, and noodles Unseasoned skinless baked chicken or turkey, scrambled eggs, yogurt and kefir Drinks: bone broth, apple juice, coconut water, Pedialyte, weak tea If you have friends or neighbors who want to help out with something like a meal train for you or your family, give some thought to how you’d like that to work from your end. People like to help and the more you can guide them, the better. Setting up a clear drop off spot, including a cooler can be a big help.

Today’s lunch was the Cauliflower with Olives and Tomato from Six Seasons of Pasta. I had a mix of white, green, yellow and purple cauliflower which this recipe doesn’t particularly show off to its best but it was still a fine lunch. I added a few handfuls of baby kale that aren’t part of the recipe

I hope you like it! Putting salad dressing on hot, cooked veg wasn’t something I ever thought about but it works really well, either as the centerpiece of a salad or on their own. Most of the dressing recipes make a generous amount so I’ve been making half recipes for my first pass, until I know how much I can use up.

Condiment Creep? Hey, I resemble that comment! 🤣 In advance of the book publication, NYT Cooking shared three of the salad dressings from the book. Here are gift links if anyone wants to try them out: House Dressing - This is a modification of the Via Carota restaurant dressing that was very popular when their cookbook came out a few years ago. It’s not a WOW dressing, it’s less acidic than a lot of vinaigrettes which makes it quite versatile, working well with both sweet and bitter flavors, both of which appear in the Autumn Chicory Salad that includes both bitter greens and sweet fruit (pears, apples or persimmons). I made that salad with a variety of fall fruits, cheeses and nuts for multiple parties over the holidays and everyone loved it. Creamy Sesame-Ginger Dressing - This is one of my favorites. The book uses a pickled Thai chili vs the jalapeño in the NYT version. Either give a little background heat that’s really nice. I’ve made versions of the crunchy cabbage slaw that accompanies this recipe several times. I also tossed it with roasted delicata squash and toasted sesame seeds for a quick and easy side. Creamy Lemon-Miso Dressing - I like this one with about half the amount of sugar. The book offers the option of making a preserved lemon version of this dressing using preserved lemon paste in place of the fresh lemon juice, zest and salt. That version is particularly good on roasted veg. Here’s the video that accompanied the NYT article. All the recipes are also linked in the video description.

Very much so.. Especially those first sections. I’ve described it to others as a mash up between This Will Make It Taste Good and the Abra Berens books, Ruffage and Grist that use condiments similarly and tuck a lot of ideas into the recipe variations.

I’ve been chatting about Good Things (eG-friendly Amazon.com link) here and there and apparently I’ve convinced @Smithy to pick up a sale-priced copy so I figured I should share my thoughts. This is Samin Nosrat’s second book, following Salt Fat Acid Heat (eG-friendly Amazon.com link) which was quite successful and spawned a 4 episode TV series. The first 4 chapters of that book are an excellent intro to the elements of cooking. There are plenty of recipes that follow but IMO, the real meat of the book is in those first chapters. In a way, Good Things is similar with a lot of interesting condiments up front and less interesting recipes that follow. I see it as an “Idea” book rather than a “Recipe” book. I was initially frustrated by how many of the recipes I wanted to try required one or several of the condiments or dressings in the front of the book. I reset my focus, spent a few hours making a few of those “good things” and set off to use them. The pickled Thai chiles and pickled red onions were hiding in the fridge but were also part of my first prep session. The preserved lemon paste takes a lot of hands-off time to make the preserved lemons but that NYShuk brand is readily available at Whole Foods or online. The Calabrian Chile Crisp requires a fair amount of hands-on time but it’s awfully good. I ordered the Calabrian chiles from Oaktown spices but she offers substitutions. Back to the book, most of the recipes for these condiments are followed by multiple suggestions for their use and the index is very complete in listing all the uses of each condiment, sauce or dressing by name and page number. Even the page of general substitutions is listed. A lot of my cookbooks have similar sections of basics, condiments etc used throughout the book but such a complete index is fairly rare. I’ve spent hours with some books (looking at you, Six Seasons) basically making my own index for stuff like this. The Good Things index is complete, easy to read, and greatly enhances the utility of the book. There’s a section of vegetable “recipes” by season that are mostly simple cooking suggestions and ways to incorporate those condiments. Nothing fancy, but I picked up a few tips like roll cutting carrots for roasting. I routinely do that for stir-frying but it also makes perfect thin edges to brown while roasting. I make marinated or pickled beets often but her use of the preserved lemon paste instead of vinegar was intriguing to me. Included in those veg sections are a number of flow charts for assembling salads or cooked veg dishes. Generally, I don’t find flow charts, diagrams or spreadsheet arrangements to be the best way to communicate recipes but for some reason, these have resonated with me and I’ve been using the roasted veg salad pages in particular for lots of salad ideas. These matrix pages are accompanied by examples that demonstrate restraint in choosing a few ingredients and not something from every category. Those are my highlights of the book, so far. I intend to work through all the salad dressings and play around with her uses for each. There are plenty of other recipes, a whole chicken chapter, and desserts, too. The harissa chickpea stew and spicy tuna pasta were both excellent but the ideas I’ve gotten from those condiments, dressings and salad matrix pages are the best parts of the book for me. The book’s not perfect. Its use of metric measurements is spotty which is annoying since it was published at the same time overseas with complete metric measurements so they could easily have been included. I thought the popcorn was way too salty, the olive oil fried bread was too oily and my first pass at the preserved lemon paste was inedibly salty but the wins exceed the misses by a lot.

Sounds like a recipe for a soggy bottom, but there are plenty of people who don’t mind that.