Recipe: Corn Chowder

I was entirely spoiled last week by four wonderful days spent soaking up as much Cancun sun as possible. After long (and rough, let me tell you) days of lying out by the pool, my sisters and I dined in the fantastic establishments on site at our hotel.

The only dish during vacation I wasn't crazy about was a corn chowder I had the last night of vacation. I enjoy a sweetness incorporated when I cook with corn and this particular dish was too savory for my taste. The problem for me when this sort of thing happens is that cravings of mine don't go away. If I'm dissatisfied with something I eat it lingers in the back of my mind until I can fix it. This is what lead me to cooking a corn chowder amidst the transition from winter to spring - not your typical time for soup or corn on the cob, but a craving is a craving.

This particular recipe requires corn that's still on the cob. Two great things about this are: 1. In the summer, corn on the cob is one of the cheapest and most delicious (at least for me in the midwest) things you can buy from the produce section and 2. For those of you that get hit with the urge to make this chowder before the stalks are knee high, you can buy corn in the freezer section that is still on the cob.

Corn Chowder

Adapted from Mark Bittman

Serves 4

1 hour to prepare (45 minutes inactive)

Difficulty: Medium

Ingredients:

• 6 ears of corn
• 3 cups water
• 2 tsp. plus ½ tsp. coarse salt
• ½ tsp. ground black pepper
• 4 Tbsp. butter
• ½ cup scallions, chopped
• ¼ cup flour
• 1 quart whole milk
• 1 Tbsp. sugar

Process:

1. Shuck the kernels from the ears of corn. Set the corn kernels aside and place the cleaned cobs into a large stock pot.
2. Add the water, ½ tsp. of coarse salt and the pepper to the pot and bring to a boil. Reduce heat and simmer for 30 minutes. Discard cobs and reserve cooking liquid.
3. Increase heat to medium and melt the butter in the stockpot. Once melted, add scallions and cook for one minute.
4. Whisk in the flour one tablespoon at a time to make a roux. Once all the flour is incorporated, allow mixture to cook until it turns a golden-brown color.
5. Pour in the milk and reserved cooking liquid and whisk to combine with the roux. Increase the heat to medium-high and allow soup to boil, stirring frequently.
6. Stir in shucked kernels, sugar, and remaining salt. Simmer on low heat for 45 minutes, stirring occasionally.

Leftover quality: Excellent, use leftovers within one week

Tips and Tricks:

1. If time allows, let the corn cobs cool before removing them from the stock and squeeze them to ring out any excess liquid the cobs have absorbed.
2. The amount of sugar can be adjusted depending on your taste. If you’re unsure, add sugar one teaspoon at a time and taste between additions.
3. For a leaner, less creamy version, substitute skim milk for whole milk.

Cooking Without Tasting

After being away on business for nearly a week I was really looking forward to coming home and cooking my own dinner again. I planned out my meals for the week including one recipe I'm in the process of tweaking and two that were brand new to me.

Cut to me three days into the week and quickly spiraling downward into a vortex of sinus congestion woe. (For the record, I don't believe that's overstating the situation)
Being sick is no fun in general, but this week has been especially aggravating because I have temporarily lost the ability to taste and smell.

I've still cooked on the days I've felt up to it. Tuesday was seared pork with dijon brandy sauce and roasted fennel (still felt reasonably ok at this point), Wednesday was roasted sweet potatoes with goat cheese and relish (slipping into comfort food mode), and yesterday was linguine with creamy tomato sauce (full on sweatpants-glued-to-rear-end-glued-to-couch mode).

The only problem is I have no idea how any of this food actually tasted. The temperatures and textures I'm well aware of but without a functional nose, the taste is entirely lost on me.

This made me realize two things. First, how dependent I am on my ability to taste when I'm cooking. As I should be. Even when a dish is so familiar you can make it without a recipe, one of your ingredients could be spoiled, you may absent-mindedly forget to add salt or you just may be feeling like a little more heat on that particular day. The point is, whether the recipe is old or new, easy or hard, it's essential to taste as you go along. If you notice something that needs adjustment it's much easier to fix it then than when the dish is being served.

The second thing I realized is when I first started cooking, I rarely tasted anything as I was going along. I read and followed recipes line by line relying on a piece of paper, not my own taste buds to tell me if I was doing it right. If it came out poorly in the end I had no way of telling if it was a mistake in the process or a poorly crafted recipe. But I never felt like tasting before completion was necessary, as if it wouldn't taste right anyway because it wasn't finished.

So when should one stop to do a taste test when cooking? Here are a few places I always make sure to taste:

• Before and after adding any seasoning 
• Before placing something in the oven to be baked
• Before and after adding any thickening or thinning agents

Tasting can and should be done at whatever point in the recipe you feel like you need a better read on what's going on in that saucepan down there. If I'm cooking for myself, I don't worry too much about "double dipping" when I'm tasting, but if I'm cooking for others I always have a couple of spoons handy so I can sample without having to lick anything that's going back in the food. 

Happy tasting, dear readers. And when the full functionality of my nose returns, I shall rejoin the ranks of tasting spoon-wielding chefs everywhere.

Discussion: Culinary Identity

Whether you're new to cooking or have been at it for a long time, I think most people tend to follow a basic rule in their kitchen: cook what you like. There are surely exceptions here and there, but if you spend much time cooking food that you don't want to eat, how long will you keep cooking?

When it comes to what kinds of food we eat, there are a variety of factors that influence our choices: tradition,  price, religion, preferences, cravings and many more. When it comes to how and where we eat, even more variables enter the picture. We eat anywhere between the car and the kitchen table off of anything from paper plates to fine china. When you factor in how many kinds of ingredients exist in the world the possibilities of your culinary experiences are quite literally endless.

If there are so many drivers for the choices we make, how do we figure out what kind of eaters we are? On the most basic level, biology breaks it down to omnivores, herbivores and carnivores. As far as classifying eaters goes, this breakdown is where the simplicity both enters and exits the pictures. Herbivores, for example, encompass much more than just vegetarians. Vegans, fruitarians and raw foodists all fall under the herbivore umbrella, but the specific habits of each group have stark differences. Omnivores have fewer mainstream subsets, but based on consumption percentages alone of meats versus plants, the spectrum of eating is fantastically broad. The only group that remains straightforward are the carnivores only because an exclusively carnivorous diet is one that humans do not typically maintain over a lifetime.

It's simple to classify yourself as ominvore or herbivore. It's a far more complicated process to define just what kind of ominvore or herbivore you are. So what is the benefit of understanding your unique brand of omnivore or herbivoreism?

I eat meat, so I am by classification an omnivore. However, I usually eat it for three or fewer meals per week. I'd venture to guess that I also have at least three vegan meals per week. I could break it down into percentages, chart it, analyze it and try to really understand the statistics behind it, but the point is that the percentages don't matter. They don't matter because I eat what I like. Sure, certain things influence my preferences. I like vegetables, so I tend to eat more of them. When bell peppers are ringing up $1.50 each at the grocery store, I avoid them like the plague.

When you cook for yourself or others, your end results are always judged. That's why its so important to have a clue of what kind of cook you are. How can you have confidence if you can't begin to define what you're doing or why you're doing it?

I believe finding your culinary identity is a permanently incomplete process. And it should be! Knowing even one food you like is the starting line. Exploring that food, perhaps introducing a few new ingredients moves you along the path. After a while the exploration will lead to both discovery and a slight comfort with the unfamiliar. Understanding your culinary identity, nebulous though it may be, makes you more confident with anything you're cooking or eating. 

Recipe: Perfect French Toast

Over the weekend, my dear older sister was visiting from Chicago. If we're giving credit where credit is due, then major kudos go out to this lady who has made the drive to Indiana to visit me more times than anyone else (parents, of course, excluded from this count) since I moved. We always make a point to go out to one of several fantastic restaurants while she's in town. Our other tradition is staying in on Sunday morning and making breakfast. This always includes some sort of breakfast carb (pancakes, waffles, french toast, etc.) and deviled eggs.

"Why deviled eggs?" you ask? "Why not?" we respond. We don't typically see them except for Easter and Thanksgiving if we're lucky, so we've made it our own personal tradition to whip up a batch every time she's in town. Because they're tasty, that's why.

Now to do a complete 180: let's talk about french toast! I love deviled eggs, but I'm not totally sold on the recipe I was raised on. Don't get me wrong, they're delicious and addictive and even better when they're oddly colored because they came from dyed Easter eggs, but they're also the only reason I have miracle whip and yellow mustard in my fridge. I'm convinced there's a different (not saying better) way, so the deviled eggs are still on the drawing board for now.

On to the toast! (For real this time)

I call it Perfect French Toast not because I am so conceited that I think I make perfect recipes (though, I must say that my french toast beats the pants off Mark Bittman's version) but because my trusty taste tester, The Vegetarian, told me that I was not allowed to change anything about it because he liked it so much in its original form. It's the only time he's ever forbidden me from elaborating on what could be improved upon next time, so I'm leaving it. For now...

Perfect French Toast:

3 eggs
1/2 cup half and half
1 tsp. vanilla
6-8 slices of day old french bread
cinnamon

1. Whisk the eggs, milk and vanilla together in a shallow casserole dish until well combined.
2. Place a griddle on the stove over medium heat.
3. Soak slices of french bread in the egg batter, allowing them to absorb the batter. Turn them over in the batter to ensure both sides are well-coated.
4. Place 3-4 slices of bread on the griddle at a time and allow to cook for around 2 minutes on each side. Before flipping them over, sprinkle with cinnamon.
5. Flip the toast slices over and continue to cook for an additional 2 minutes or so.
6. Repeat steps 3-5 for the remaining slices of bread and serve immediately.

Helpful hints:

• The older the bread, the better. The "perfect" version was made from a boule that was about four days old. I used day old sourdough for yesterday's version. If you have to use fresh bread, toast it in the oven to dry it out a bit before using it.
• The longer you soak the bread in the batter, the further into the bread it will absorb (and the older the bread, the better it will absorb). I'd recommend soaking for a few minutes on each side.
• If you aren't serving these immediately, toss them in the oven to keep warm. Unlike pancakes, french toast responds to this treatment quite favorably.
• Instead of syrup, try topping with agave nectar. It's a natural sweetener that has none of the red number 40s and high fructose corn syrups that are found in so many commercially available pancake syrups.
• If you need more batter than is made here, but not so much to double the recipe, add 3 Tbsp. of half and half for each additional egg you toss in.

Butternut Gnocchi

Lesson learned this evening: 14 oz. of squash is less than the weight of a typical butternut squash. Trying to make gnocchi with almost three times the squash than I meant to? Well, it makes things difficult. Next time instead of just reading the recipe, I'll try reading AND comprehending. 14 oz. does not equal one squash. Lesson learned. Moving on...

Despite overly wet dough and, well, we'll say "free form" gnocchi as a result, the finished product was actually quite delicious. It was based of of the Buttercup Squash recipe out of Barbara Kafka's Vegetable Love. The color of the gnocchi, a bright orange-yellow, was bright and beautiful. The sauce she recommends along with it, really just a combination of ricotta, parsley, and reserved cooking liquid from the pasta, balanced the color and flavor very nicely. The only change I would make to the sauce is the amount of parsley she recommends - she says half a bunch. Which, if her supermarket bunches are anything like mine, that's a heck of a lot of parsley. I went for something closer to a quarter cup and would do a little less (around 2 Tbsp.) next time.

This one is still an "in-the-works" recipe for me if for no other reason than I want to get the gnocchi looking a little nicer. For the next time around, I'm planning on adding a little bit of potato to the squash for two reasons: 1. I think it will tone down the squash flavor just a touch. 2. I think it'll be a slightly fluffier texture inside and make it a bit easier to work with. I hope it doesn't affect the color too much, as that is an impressive looking feature of the recipe. I'll probably do 3/4 squash and 1/4 potato. I also plan to make the dough drier and roll out the gnocchi into logs. This may require some guesswork with portions and may be aided by a brief refrigeration, but Mark Bittman has some lovely illustrations in How to Cook Everything: Vegetarian that show gnocchi-making.

A couple of things I messed up and wish to not repeat next time. First, squash is ridiculously hot when you take it out of the microwave. Don't touch it until it cools a little bit! I'm still working on really learning that one...next time around I'll probably cut the squash and potato down, boil it, let it cool, and then process it to start the dough.

Once those tweaks are in there, I think it'll be good to go. And in the meantime, my sister will get to enjoy the not-so-beautiful version when I cook up the leftover dough for her this weekend.

Why I'm a crappy blogger.

I am a terrible blogger. There. I said it.

But it's true! I am awful about updates often enough to keep any audience coming back. I'm no good at keeping it brief and spend way more time than any human should agonizing over every word in my posts. I always think about things that would make a great blog post but when it's time for the fingers to hit the keys, I instead become interested in that massive pile of (previously ignored) laundry.

I am Emily and I suck at blogging.

I would like to say for the record, there are things I am good at. Cooking, for one. Singing is another. I like to think I'm pretty good at my job. I also excel at eating peanut butter, being a complete type A, ignoring speed limit signs, talking very fast, and picking the fastest line at the grocery store. 

I want to be a better blogger. I have a lot to say when it comes to food. And let's be honest, I have a lot to say about things period. Talking about food and teaching people how the heck you cook it are passions of mine. I get excited about perfect french toast, irritated at people who think twinkies are a fine dessert, and feel compelled to tell anyone who will listen how simple it is to make you own pasta sauce.

I am Emily and I love to talk. About food.

The main purpose of this blog is to give me a place to talk all about food and cooking, but I hope it will also function as a place for lively discussion, a home for my favorite recipes, and, most importantly, a place where people can learn something that inspires them.

Is the fourteenth time a charm? I'm pretty sure that's how many times I've tried to start a blog. Whatever. I'm trying! That's the first step, right?

Recipe: Roasted Sweet Potatoes with Goat Cheese and Pecans

These roasted sweet potato discs come out of the oven crisp on the outside and fluffy and tender on the inside. The dressing and goat cheese cut the sweetness of the potatoes while the celery and pecan enhance the texture with a satisfying crunch. Leave any unused potatoes undressed. If warmed up in the oven, their original crispy crusts return and you have leftovers much fancier than typical reheated fare.

Roasted sweet potatoes with goat cheese and pecans
25 minutes, serves 3-4 as a side
Adapted from Smitten Kitchen

• 2 large sweet potatoes (weighing around 1 lb. each)
• 1 tbsp olive oil, plus a bit more for brushing
• 1 tsp. red wine vinegar
• 1/2 tsp. dijon mustard
• 1/4 cup chopped pecans
• 2 stalks celery
• 2 oz. goat cheese

1.   Preheat oven to 450 degrees.
2.   Rinse and scrub sweet potatoes and slice into 1″ discs.
3.   Line a baking sheet with foil and coat with cooking spray. Brush both sides of the sweet potato discs with olive oil and lay on the foil.
4.   Sprinkle the discs with kosher salt and fresh ground pepper and place in the oven for 15 minutes.
5.   While the potatoes are roasting, whisk together the olive oil, red wine vinegar and dijon mustard to make a dressing.
6.   Finely chop the celery stalks and add the celery and the pecans to the dressing. Crumble the goat cheese and set aside.
7.   Remove the potatoes from the oven and flip them. The tops should be browned and slightly puffy. Sprinkle with a bit more salt and pepper and return to the oven for an additional 10 minutes.
8.   Remove potatoes from the oven and transfer to a plate. Top with the celery/pecan mixture and goat cheese.

Comfort Food

While I am a bit sad that Christmas has now passed (though, admittedly relieved that the end of the sugar cookie coma is now in sight), I am thrilled that I returned from Illinois with many servings of leftover soup packed away with the rest of my holiday loot. Today’s lunch was chicken tortilla, tomorrow will be chili. Wednesday evening will be two servings of red pepper soup (That’s how Tom knows I like him, I’m willing to share my favorite soup), followed by potato sausage. The list of soups I got to try while I was home goes on and on. Have I mentioned how much I love the holidays?

With the conclusion of the holidays also comes the conclusion of my financial wiggle room. After Christmas presents, plane tickets, and trips home have been paid for I’m feeling the need to channel Ebenezer Scrooge for the next month when it comes to any flexible spending. Groceries included. So I’m eating out of the pantry this week. Which I should probably do a bit more often anyway, so it’s a good exercise. I figured I might like a supplement to my leftover baked chicken, but was looking for something really tasty, as the chicken, well, it had left something to be desired the first time around so I was not expecting anything magical for round two. Enter my favorite standby side dish: poppy seed noodles. But, alas, tonight I encountered one minor problem just as I’d finished tossing the egg noodles through the melted butter: I was out of poppy seeds.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I am not above eating butter and noodles and calling it a meal. In fact, it wouldn’t be the first time that had gone down in my kitchen on a cold Monday night. But poppy seed noodles with no poppy seeds? I mean, it’s just not right. I scoured the contents of my spice cabinet to see what else I could work with. I began coming up with several additions that would have surely been delicious: garlic powder, italian seasoning, nutmeg. But when I moved back the first row of spices to reveal the taller containers, I knew the answer was clear.

Are you ready? Because this will actually blow your mind. Or at least your tastebuds. Maybe not. But it’s an improvement on poppy seed noodles. So give me a break.

Butter. Noodles. And crushed red pepper.

It’ll change your life. And I may or may not have eaten tomorrow’s lunch helping as my second dinner serving. Oops.

My overactive imagination sees this as the moment that changes the hearts for all of those poppy seed noodle haters of my past. In all actuality, it will probably be just one glorious night in the kitchen where I discovered a food that will make me lick the spoon, the plate and the pot I cooked it in. I do think I may be on to something here…but for now, I have a twist on an old, comforting standby. Maybe I’ll wait a while before I pick up more poppy seeds.

Cook Book Confession

One of my favorite things about post-college life is the fact that I have been able to go many, many semester-length segments without packing up my entire life and moving it down three flights of stairs and four blocks over. When I did have to move, I have extremely vivid memories of my least favorite box to pack: the books. Why? Because it’s so satisfying to pack a box perfectly full of them (and their shape makes them the easiest thing to pack, in that way) only to realize it weighs about 200 pounds. The books always seemed to get spread out over many other boxes and thus, when I unpacked, I never had all of them out of the boxes at the same time.

And maybe this is how I became the lady that owns 31 cookbooks.

Literally, 31. The top six sit in my kitchen and the rest are stored just around the corner. And the rest’s rest (because even my overflow has overflow) are in the bookcase across the living room. Might I have a problem? Absolutely not. I swear.

The part that I really hate to admit is that while I have definitely thumbed through all of them and cooked something from almost all of them, I’ve never really gotten into very many of them to figure out what the heck is going on between all those pages. And for the effort I’ve put in dragging those cookbooks up and down stairs and over state lines, I think we should be a bit better acquainted.

We had two particularly snowy weekends the first two Saturday of December in darling Indiana (isn’t avoiding this crap weather so early in the season part of why I moved here?). I took the opportunity to shut myself in my apartment, curl up with some hot tea, put a movie on, and thumb through cook books. I was reminded of some recipes and techniques that I’ve been meaning to try out and haven’t gotten around to as well as things I have tried and loved (or didn’t love so much), but mostly I discovered a ton of recipes I am now dying to make. 172 of them to be precise. And I was being a little picky about which ones made the list. Maybe it would help if the list of ingredients I didn’t like was closer to the number of cook books I own.

I have no particular goals in mind with these recipes in terms of getting them cooked within a certain amount of time. I’m sure I’ll feed my addiction and buy more cookbooks in the meantime, not to mention all of the little treasures I’ll come across in my food blog trolling. I must say, though, it’s nice to feel like I’m getting to know the cook books better. (I realize that statement sounds simply silly. They’re books, not people. I get it!) I’ve always had a familiarity with the style of each, but really peeling through the pages makes me feel like I’ve sharpened the tools that are at my disposal. Do I need a quick 30-minute weeknight recipe? Do I want to challenge myself and my dishwasher’s load capacity? Rutabagas were on sale…who will know what to do with these? These are the kinds of things that get a bit easier to tackle when you know what resources you already have.

So, while I don’t necessarily hope you find yourself snowed in (or having to box and move cook books, for that matter), I do hope you take some time to dust off those old recipe receptacles and see what you come across. If it’s anything worth sharing, I’d love the ideas. After all, I have many more than 172 meals that I’ll need to eat in 2011.

Meal Planning

I have found there is one element of cooking that does not discriminate on any level. It is the same whether you cook once a day or once a month, if you cook for one or a family full of teenage boys, if you’re a beginner or a seasoned chef. And that is that the best intentions in the kitchen can go amazingly awry without a plan.

Now, before you assume I’ve just turned a painfully obvious statement into an entire blog post (yawn), hear me out. How many times do you go to your fridge, open the door, stare mindlessly at the contents until your face begins to get clammy only to shut the door and sigh “I have nothing to eat.”?

I have the same phenomenon happen with the clothes in my closet. And if you know me, you know the statement “I have nothing to wear” is absolutely false. But it feels that way more often than it should when it’s ten minutes until I need to be out the door and I’m just staring…waiting for an outfit to jump from the hangers and onto my body. The fix for my wardrobe’s lackluster appeal in the morning was pretty easy – pick the outfit out the night before. Not only do I select something with a brain that’s been firing on all cylinders for several hours (not like the pre-coffee brain I have in the morning), I’m more likely to stick to it because it’s already out and waiting for me. No running around for that cardigan that I swear I just washed or a pair of pantyhose without a run in them, just the simple act of getting myself into an outfit, topping it off with accessories, and moving on with the rest of my morning.

The same logic can be applied in the kitchen. If you plan ahead as to what you’ll be cooking in the coming week, you’ll be much more prepared when it’s actually time to step up to the stove. I’m sure if you ask ten people how they go about meal planning, you’ll get ten different answers, but there will be a few things that will stay more or less the same:

1. Inventory of ingredients on hand
2. Decide what meals will be made when
3. Create grocery list

Inventory of ingredients on hand: Often times, this is the best place to start. It gives you an idea of what you have on hand and, if refrigerated, what you need to use up before it hits its expiration date. I make some notes of what I’ve got and then let the wheels start turning. For more seasoned cooks, recipes will come to mind pretty easily. For beginners, this can be the hardest step. Luckily, there are a few resources that should help you out. One is the index of any cookbook (any one worth its weight in paper, that is). Look up the ingredient or ingredients you’re working with in the back and see what recipes your book has to offer. Many recipe sites have search engines based on ingredient. Allrecipes.com has one I’m particularly fond of because you can search by multiple ingredients and also set ingredients to exclude. If you’re a little more comfortable with tweaking recipes, you can search for recipes that call for similar ingredients to what you’ve got on hand, i.e. you have tomatoes and the recipe calls for red peppers. Though, on a personal note, I would never pick a tomato over a red pepper. Just saying.

Decide when you’re making what: Once you’ve selected your culinary creations of the week, pick out when you’ll make them. I have a dry erase board that lives on my fridge that I fill out for the week that notes what I’m planning on having for lunch and dinner each day. Before I start, I mark out any days I’ll be out of town or nights I already have dinner plans. All of the sudden that week you’re planning for can go from fourteen meals to eleven and that can make a big difference when you’re planning what to cook when. Another important element in this step is to figure out how many servings each recipe is going to make. The recipe itself is usually a good guide for number of servings. Consider that number minus any additional mouths you’ll be feeding and you’ll know how far that dish is going to go for you. Plug your servings in to your calendar accordingly, rinse and repeat until the calendar is filled

Create grocery list: Now that you’ve figured out when you’re eating what, you’ll be able to figure out when you need what ingredients. Unless you have a necessity for super-fresh ingredients, shopping for the week will usually work. Look at the recipe to determine how much of each item you’ll need and write a list out accordingly. Also, a handy trick I learned from my momma: Write your list in the order that you come to the items in the store. It may take a few trips before you have the lay of the land, but being able to get everything on your list in one pass at the grocery store sure makes things easier.

Perhaps actually putting this process into words is making it sound more complicated than it is? Let’s look at this week in my kitchen as an example. This is more or less the thought process that happens whenever I sit down to plan:

1. Inventory Ingredients:
   Leftover mac and cheese, a couple of zucchini, and mashed potatoes needed to be eaten up. I was also out of milk and needed to restock on fruit. I also have a spaghetti squash on hand.
   Recipes for the week? Haven’t had a taco night in a while. And that’s a good enough reason for tacos, right? I can use up that spaghetti squash with that Lentil and squash recipe.
2. When am I eating what:
   This week I’m having dinner out on Thursday, so no cooking for me that night.
   Mac and cheese leftovers will be good for two lunches and I’ll take some veggies to supplement it. Potato pancakes will be good for two meals as well.
   I’m eating tacos with Lily on Tuesday, so there will be plenty of leftovers – I’m probably good for three nights of that. Three night of tacos? I can make one a taco salad to break it up a bit. The lentils and squash will be with Tom. We’ll probably split the leftovers, so I think I can plan for two servings of that.
   Let’s plug it into a calendar:
   • MONDAY: leftover mac and cheese (lunch), potato pancakes (dinner)
   • TUESDAY: leftover mac and cheese (lunch), taco night (dinner)
   • WEDNESDAY: leftover potato pancakes (lunch), lentils and squash (dinner)
   • THURSDAY: taco salad (lunch), dinner out
   • FRIDAY: leftover lentils and squash (lunch), leftover tacos (dinner)
   • SATURDAY: pancakes (lunch), chilli (dinner)
3. Create Grocery List: Mac and cheese and potato pancakes are taken care of. For tacos I’ll need lettuce, cheese, tomatoes, black beans, refried beans, and taco shells. For lentils and squash I have everything except the onion. I need to pick up milk as well, plus some fruit for the week. Bananas and tangerines should do it. I can probably hold off on buying the chili ingredients until the end of the week.

There are plenty of things that can go wrong even when you plan. “Boy, that onion cooked way faster than expected”, “I swear there were three cups of chicken stock left in here”, “Oops! Didn’t remember to pull the fish out of the freezer”, “That’s what I forgot to pick up at the store”, “how long has that lasagna been in the oven for…”, etc. Any of this sounding familiar? In addition to helping you save money on groceries and reducing waste, having a plan in place from week to week will help you avoid many of the pitfalls that can make cooking frustrating.