DigsMagazine.com | nourish: $50, TWO BELLIES, ONE WEEK part 2: the meal diary page4

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a home + living guide for the post-college, pre-parenthood, quasi-adult generation

10.23.2000

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what are you making for dinner tonight? jump to the discussion boards to get or share great recipes, cooking tips, and other kitchen advice.

other recent NOURISH articles:
o picky eaters: Get the Milk Out
o $50, Two Bellies, One Week
o Leftover Makeovers
o Cooking without Cookbooks
o Use What's in the Fridge #2:Braising!
o Use What's in the Fridge: Series Intro
o The Lazy Shopper's Kitchen Essentials
o Grilling 101
o When it's Too Hot in the Kitchen
o Cooking for One
o Dumplings for Dummies

$50, two bellies, One week
part two: the meal diary | 1 2 3 4 5
continued from page 3

I don’t have a specific stock recipe. One thing I always do is to save up my vegetable remainders (onion tops and skins, carrot tops and peels, shiitake mushroom stems, celery tops, garlic tops – you know, the stuff you have leftover after you chop, dice, mince, whatever) and, instead of discarding them, toss them into a ziplock bag in the freezer. At this point I’ve got a couple of bags worth of veggie bits sitting in the freezer. I dump one bag full of contents into a pot along with the chicken, throw a bunch of peppercorns and 2 bay leaves into the mix, add water to cover, then bring the liquid to a boil, skimming off the scum that forms at the top. I then turn down the heat and simmer, partially covered, for an hour or so. I salt and pepper at the end, then, after it’s cooled, cover the pot and place it in the fridge overnight. The next day, I’ll skim off the solidified fat layer that’s floated to the top.

DAY 5
Breakfast – Nada
Slept in this morning, then lingered in bed for an hour or so, daydreaming about how nice it would be to have a little servant man bring us French toast and fresh berries in bed. Alas, no food materialized.

Lunch for two –
Pancakes with maple syrup [flour, oil, 2 eggs, 1 cup milk, sugar, baking powder]
Orange juice [2 glasses]
Mmmmmmm, pancakes. I suppose this is more a brunch than a lunch, though why pancakes (and waffles, and muffins, and donuts) aren’t considered dessert is somewhat beyond me. Why is it okay to eat a cinnamon roll at 10 am, but grab a brownie and you’re sure to get chided? Our breakfast biases are so arbitrary. I make a towering stack of golden pancakes; we polish them off slowly during the course of the day.

Dinner for two –
Fried rice [leftover scallion chicken, 1½ zucchini, 1 ½ cups peas, 2 stalks scallions, 3 cloves garlic, 2 cups rice]
I’m a big fan of fried rice. Not that dark, overly soy-sauced stuff you get at fake Chinese restaurants, but real, homemade fried rice. I’m pretty flexible with what I put in my fried rice – carrots, mushrooms, peppers, leftover stir-fries, ground turkey or pork, whatever else I happen to have in stock in my fridge/freezer – my only true requirements being plenty of garlic, and peas. Oh yeah, rice helps too. Tonight, I shred some of the leftover scallion chicken and toss that into the wok. There’s a lot of fried rice leftover.

DAY 6
Breakfast – orange juice
Lunch for one (he’s brought a ClifBar to school for lunch) –
Leftover Moroccan-spiced chickpeas with leftover white rice
The chickpeas are leftover from sometime last week; exactly how far back in the week I can’t say. Food safety experts would no doubt have told me to pitch them by now, but after subjecting them to the sniff test – they pass – I take my chances.

still more this way

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