Or so. It's for a reason. There's a girl involved. Let's call her Alison.
My target delivery date is 28 December so I have 26 days. The good thing is that I already know how to cook.
The goals:
- Everything needs to be quick and easy. Not just quick, not just easy. Both. Ali doesn't have a lot of time, she's always running around from one thing to another and her mental bandwidth certainly isn't focused on improving her cooking skills. An hour on the weekend may work out, but only if it's 20 minutes on the front end of 40 minutes of letting something cook on its own.
- I can't use fancy ingredients. Quinoa is great stuff but it's too hard to find. The average American megagrocery has a limited selection of vegetables. (Mental note: do some research on what I can find at your average Walmart Supercenter.) No fancy tools either. Pots, pans, a knife, stuff like that.
- While we're at it, we're looking for cheap too. Last I checked, artichokes were $2.99 a piece at the store. Yeah... that's not happening too often. Avoiding waste is probably a good thing so I'm going to have to work cleverly around that given that the target audience is a whole two people on a given night.
- Ali has a teenager. They're both super active. That's slightly different from hyperactive, but it means that we're going to need a lot of protein. I hear that's hard in vegetarian food. Vitamins and minerals too: we want to keep as much of them in the food as possible.
I'm sure there will be many more restrictions as I think about it more. Everything's negotiable but the spirit of the task has to remain on hand.
My personal belief is that recipes are for sissies. Well, not completely, but the point is there. This is probably going to be descriptive less than perscriptive. Think of it like empowering someone to cook and giving them some gentle hints. Good thing that the word, "gentle," is rarely used to describe me. We'll see how that all works out for me.
For the most part, I'm going to have to work on this every single day. I don't have all that much time either and I usually come home from work late and tired. I'll have rally on the tired days. Hopefully that'll give me incentive to get through things quicker.
Here are some ideas I already have:
- I cook with a lot of chicken stock. It makes everything taste yummy. Since this is vegetarian, I'm probably going to have to do a lot of research into what makes vegetable stock taste the best. Porcini mushrooms, yeah, I know that already. At $30-50 a pound, we're going to have to stay away from those for the most part. I wonder how much value a bunch of kale would add to stock.
- The slow cooker will be my friend. Little is better than 10 minutes in the morning before work throwing something together for dinner that night. I'm going to take mine apart and turbocharge it. Maybe I can find a way to use it as a deep fryer too. Now there's an idea.
- There's got to be a science to enriched breads. Plain 'ole white stuff doesn't cut it when we're looking at 150g of protein in a day. Maybe by the end of this I'll learn to spell protien too.
- Somehow we're going to have to learn to chop things quickly without learning to chop things quickly. I have an idea. It doesn't involve a food processor or any infomercial gizmos.
For tomorrow, it's Vegetable Stock 101. Since I don't have any, dinner tomorrow will have to be without any. How about vegetarian enchiladas. Cheat for the first day. Cheese is yummy. I have to stop qualifying everything with, "vegetarian." I overuse, "yummy," too. Maybe one day's project will be to hit the thesaurus.
I'll figure out the grocery list at the store tomorrow.
