On doing the bare minimum
Plus this weekend’s group meals, and 100 days of ukulele
Hello, friends! I’m writing this week from a much more scenic location than usual: an Airbnb up in Tahoe, where we are spending the weekend with a small group of friends. Believe it or not, it’s our first time up here (even though we’ve lived in SF since 2016!) and I’ve mostly been lounging by the fire, taking naps and going on little walks around the lake, which is breathtakingly beautiful.
I volunteered to be cooking czar for the weekend, and spent much of my evening time last week prepping meals ahead of time to account for unknowns in an unfamiliar kitchen - making and freezing pressure cooker chile verde and meatballs, prepping marinade & chopping veggies for sheet pan fajitas, making pickled onions for breakfast tacos, pre-mixing the dry ingredients for apple cobbler.
As a result, my last week of cooking has been relatively chill, and I thought this would be a good opportunity to lift up some things I make when I’m feeling less motivated and don’t have the energy to do the pre-planning needed to shop for and then use up a crisper full of fresh vegetables. None of these things are rocket science or particularly novel, but I hope they give you an ace in your back pocket to feed yourself something other than instant ramen when you haven’t shopped in a while.
First up: freezer essentials! I’ll start with the obvious one: during Open Enrollment, I started buying big bags of frozen dumplings at Costco - the Bibigo chicken and cilantro ones are my favorite. They take about 2 minutes to cook between wet paper towels in the microwave, a little longer than that if you pan fry them, and I just eat them tossed with chili oil. I have absolutely never been mad about having a day when this was my lunch - dumplings of all origins (wontons and gyoza and mandu, yes, but also manti and pelmeni and sure, let’s count ravioli) are probably my favorite food.
I started keeping frozen ramen and udon noodles in my freezer a few months ago and it’s made it a little easier to cook myself a quick lunch in the middle of a hectic work day. Frozen noodles cook in about a minute in hot water, compared to 10-12 minutes for dry pasta; that’s not enough of a time difference to matter most days (and I’m a big advocate for taking your full lunch break!) but sometimes when I’ve got back to back meetings, it’s nice to have an option that takes literally five minutes end to end, including boiling water. (If you don’t use an electric kettle for this, why not? It’s way faster and more efficient than boiling water on the stove.)
I usually just toss the cooked noodles with Kirkland pesto - surprisingly good combo! - and add often frozen peas right into the cooking water for a veg addition. (For the Reels-literate among you, I promise I was doing the peas-and-pesto thing before Emily Mariko posted about it this week.) Other times, I reach for a couple of blocks of Japanese curry from my pantry, and I’ll dissolve some instant dashi powder in however much water the curry packet calls for if I’m feeling fancy. The frozen noodles can go right into the curry sauce and cook through in there.
Over the holidays, my brother-in-law made an awesome super-garlicky spinach dish that relied on frozen spinach, and it’s now becoming a dinner staple for us. It couldn’t be easier: you sautée a ton (at least half a head) of crushed garlic in olive oil, then add frozen spinach and salt and pepper and heat through. Buying packets of peeled garlic makes this 10x easier; I haven’t peeled a clove of garlic in months and I’m very satisfied with my life choices.
Because Nick is a more diligent cook than I am, he blitzes the spinach in the microwave to defrost before adding it to the pan; because I am lazy, I just take the spinach out when I start cooking dinner, and cover the pan for a few minutes when the spinach goes in to get it to heat up faster. His way will let you get more water out of the spinach and have a less wet final dish; if you are lazy like me, it will also turn out fine, just crank the heat up to cook some of the water off once things are mostly defrosted.
Alright, what about the pantry/fridge items? I’ve always got onions and canned tomatoes hanging around, and eggs keep long enough that they’re usually present in my fridge at all times. If I can get my hands on some green peppers - preferably cubanelles or shishitos, but a green bell pepper will do in a pinch - that means I’ve got all the ingredients for menemen, a Turkish vegetable scramble that has recently become our go-to weekend breakfast. Kenji López-Alt’s recipe is a decent English-language take on one iteration, though some people make it without the onions or use spring onions instead. I will admit that sometimes when I am too unmotivated to go buy 1 pepper at the corner store, I use just tomatoes and onions; that version is also pretty good.
I’ve also been on a kick recently of making myself diner-style omelettes for breakfast. If you have never made an omelette for fear that it was too complicated, I assure you it’s actually dead simple as long as you have a nonstick pan and a good spatula. I usually do a version of this recipe but with just two eggs and only cheese inside; the key is to let your butter brown a little and to salt your eggs ahead of time.
Finally, if I’ve got cooked rice in the fridge, meals are a breeze. A little rice and a crispy fried egg in a bowl with some chili oil? Delicious. Canned salmon over rice with a little furikake on top? Delicious. Vegetables make both of these things better but are not strictly necessary if you’re in survival mode. I always keep a packet of Chinese sausage at the back of my fridge, which means if I’ve got onions and eggs and maybe frozen peas I can whip up a pretty substantial fried rice; with better than bouillion and garlic and a scraggly piece of ginger in the crisper, it’s easy to pull together a comforting bowl of congee. Bonus points for adding a soft boiled egg; if you’re keeping effort to a minimum, you can be like me and just drizzle some beaten eggs through and stir until everything’s firmed up.
Say you’ve got room in your heart for one vegetable that will still be good enough to use even if you forget about it in the back of the crisper all week. Can I convince you that this vegetable should be cabbage? You could slice it into wedges and roast it, and then serve it with a lemony-garlicky-walnut dressing; cook it down slowly with onions and turn it into a comforting soup with farro; or shred it and toss it with eggs and flour and whatever leftover meat or straggler veg you have in your fridge for okonomiyaki, Japanese cabbage pancakes. (I highly recommend stashing pickled ginger at the back of the fridge for this purpose.)
If you’ve got red cabbage, consider thinly slicing it, tossing it with olive oil and salt and roasting at 425, tossing it occasionally until it’s pretty crispy. I learned about this method from Julia Turshen’s recipe for red cabbage rice pilaf, but nowadays I mostly skip the pilaf part and just eat it as a side dish. If you prefer a fresh salad, you can toss the cabbage with lemon and vinegar and salt and rub until it starts to change color and break down a little, and then mix with olive oil to taste.
I found myself in the position of having a bunch of cabbage on hand this week and was delighted to find that Smitten Kitchen had published a new recipe for a crispy roasted cabbage and cauliflower salad. I left out the cauliflower, and it was still awesome; if you love garlic, consider microplaning it into the tahini dressing (vs mincing it) for extra punch.
What are your favorite no-energy day / sparse fridge meals? I’d love to hear your thoughts and suggestions as well!
In other news, I recently signed on to the 100 day project as a way to get myself practicing ukulele more consistently. A week in, it’s been fun so far, though I think my fingers are still catching up to not having any days off (we’ll see how that shakes out.) You can do this with any creative project and it’s not too late to sign on - why not give it a shot if there’s been something creative you’ve wanted to delve into? It’s been such a reminder that setting 10-15 minutes aside per day to veg and strum away is reliably great for injecting a little joy into the most stressful days.
Reading-wise, I stormed right through Ann Leckie’s Imperial Radch series and loved it; if you’ve read and enjoyed A Memory Called Empire, I think you’ll like this too. I also raced through T. Kingfisher’s Saint of Steel series, about an order of berserker paladins who are left without purpose when the god they follow dies — for a pretty somber premise, they’re pretty funny, and there’s a romance subplot in each if that’s up your alley. I’ve just picked up The Goblin Emperor and am enjoying that so far as well, though it’s a bit slower going. Luckily, several of my fellow vacationers are also speculative fiction nerds, so I’m leaving with a refreshed to-read list to start in on (thanks, Julia & Brendan!)
That’s all for now folks! See you in a few weeks. In the meantime, I’d love to hear what you think - feel free to pop a note in the comment box!