Dickerman - Secrets of great second meals: flexible modern recipes that value time and limit waste

Contents

Contents

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SARA DICKERMAN is the author of Bon Apptit: The Food Lovers Cleanse and Dried & True: The Magic of Your Dehydrator in 80 Delicious Recipes and Inspiring Techniques. She cooked in restaurants for many years, starting in California at Campanile and Chez Panisse before moving to Seattle. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Saveur, Seattle magazine, Bon Apptit, Food & Wine, and Slate, for which she won a James Beard Award. She has also served as the restaurant critic for The Stranger and the food editor of Seattle magazine, and she has been a regular guest on her local NPR affiliate. She lives in Seattle with her husband and two children.

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Bon Apptit: The Food Lovers Cleanse

Dried & True: The Magic of Your Dehydrator in 80 Delicious Recipes and Inspiring Techniques

SECRETS OF GREAT SECOND MEALS . Copyright 2019 by Sara Dickerman. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

Cover design by Mumtaz Mustafa

Cover and interior photography by Sarah Flotard

FIRST EDITION

Digital Edition FEBRUARY 2019 ISBN: 978-0-06-267299-5

Version 12212018

Print ISBN: 978-0-06-267297-1

For Andrew

theres no better companion

for second (and first) meals

Hey, have you checked your refrigerator today? Are there any enticing offerings chilling in there? Some rice from takeout the other night? Maybe a few chunks of rotisserie chicken? Or half a bundle of herbs you bought a few days ago and need to use soon? That stuff is golden: those odds and ends are the seeds of your next glorious meal. You could simmer it all into a soothing, lemon-scented soup. Or for something friskier, you could break out your spices and fill your kitchen with the delicious aromas of a gingery curry. Perhaps youd like to make two different meals from your refrigerated bounty. No problem: try coconut waffles with the rice, and a scallion-sesame chicken salad for lunch. Is it possible you have some overripe pears in the fruit drawer as well? If so, trim them up and roast them with chai spices for an aromatic fruit compote that you can use to top your morning yogurt or late-night ice cream.

I take uncommon delight in putting together memorable meals out of the morsels in my refrigerator: its creative work with just a hint of virtue embedded in it. I hope to sway you with some of this enthusiasm. Secrets of Great Second Meals is a cookbook dedicated to a spirited engagement with whats really in our refrigerators: its here for inspiration to put our food to its best possible use, to limit waste, and to get the most out of our valuable time.

My first goal is to help home cooks transform yesterdays meal into tonights dinner, and an enticing one at that. My other goaland this one is a little more of a lifestyle adjustmentis to inspire you to start planning for those extras. Ill show you foods that are versatile and worthy of stocking. Remaking them into a second meal becomes its own exciting ritual, saving you cooking time and shopping in the end. The recipes in this book are designed to be flexible: they can handle all sorts of tweaks and additions. Throughout the book, Ill share cues for how to improvise with whatever golden tidbits you have in your own kitchen. And with those creative skills, you can start to save time and money in your home.

Welcome to the world of great second meals!

I know how hard it is to cook regularly. Even I fall out of the habit from time to time, and Im a food writer who works in a home office. But sometimes when Ive spent hours driving the kids from activity to activity, when volunteering and work pile up, dinner is just another chore at the end of a tiring day. If I have nothing cooked in the refrigerator, the result is usually takeout. But if there is somethinglets say some cooked beans, or a few ounces of salmon from last nights grillingthen I feel rooted again. I know that its easier, healthier, less costly, and frankly, less boring to work up a delicious dinner than to call out for another pizza.

Theres nothing I like more than figuring out the right way to reframe a good meal into another satisfying meal. Theres the self-congratulatory pleasure of reducing waste in my kitchen and producing a frugal meal. Theres the anticipation of new flavors and textures at the next meal to come. And most distinctive, theres the eureka! moment when I fit together disparate extras into a delicious new context. At my house, reinvention might mean crafting a beautiful salad with some second-day salmon, stuffing cooked whole grains into a gorgeous summer squash, or pureeing extra beans into a dip to share as an after-school snack with my daughter.

Now, how you deal with extra food in your refrigerator can be a touchy subject.

On one hand, thoughtfully saving and repurposing food is environmentally and fiscally responsible. But sometimes warmed-over seconds can also feel a little boring, obligatory, or even miserly. In this book I want to add the element of play to the whole equation. Is it good for your budget and the environment to throw out less food? Of course it is. But its also the best way I know to make home cooking work in busy modern lives. If you cook intentionally, knowing some part of one meal is destined for the next, you have a step up when its time to cook again. By the way: Ill try to avoid using the word intentionally from here on out, lest I sound too much like a recently certified yoga instructor.

As I got started on this cookbook, I had to help my mother move out of her house and into an apartment. Helping her downsize made my own childhood kitchen memories percolate. All these objects that crackled with memory: her tattered sea-green copy of Joy of Cooking from the postwar years (with techniques on how to cook beaver and opossum, advice trimmed from more recent editions), the perfect, heavy French tart pan that she still wont give me even though her new kitchen is tiny, and the yellow spatter-ware bowl that was the start of every baking project in our home.