Ten Little Chances to be Free (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
tenlittlebullets) wrote2009-05-16 07:03 pm
tenlittlebullets) wrote2009-05-16 07:03 pm
A question for my friends list (cooking-related!)
WHAT AM I GOING TO EAT WHEN I HAVE TO COOK FOR MYSELF?
Yes, it's one of those real-world flail questions. Basically I am going to end up cooking for myself a lot next year in Paris, whether I end up in an apartment or with a host family, and in an apartment I will quite possibly be cooking for two people. And I can do basic cooking tasks and follow recipes, but I... don't know what to cook. My usual diet is heavily supplemented with store-bought snack food which is both expensive and, in France, impractical.
So give me suggestions. Doesn't even have to be recipes, although recipes are nice. Staple foods, filling and more-or-less nutritious things, food that can be prepared in huge batches and chucked in the freezer for later, basic easy ways to cook chicken and beef, fun things to do with lentils and beans and rice and potatoes so I'm not eating meat every night... basically I do not want to be eating pasta all the time, because that is unhealthy and also kind of embarrassing.
Restrictions: sadly, I am horribly allergic to milk, as well as nuts and peanuts. If they can be easily left out or substituted (and I'm pretty damn good at finding substitutes for milk and butter, although cheese is pretty much impossible to fake), go for it, but there is no alfredo sauce in my future. I also don't like fish, and... well, I'm kind of squeamish about vegetables but I'm trying to get over that.
I'll probably be taking a cookbook, but I'd really like some real-world suggestions from real people about wtf to put on the table for dinner on a daily basis.
Yes, it's one of those real-world flail questions. Basically I am going to end up cooking for myself a lot next year in Paris, whether I end up in an apartment or with a host family, and in an apartment I will quite possibly be cooking for two people. And I can do basic cooking tasks and follow recipes, but I... don't know what to cook. My usual diet is heavily supplemented with store-bought snack food which is both expensive and, in France, impractical.
So give me suggestions. Doesn't even have to be recipes, although recipes are nice. Staple foods, filling and more-or-less nutritious things, food that can be prepared in huge batches and chucked in the freezer for later, basic easy ways to cook chicken and beef, fun things to do with lentils and beans and rice and potatoes so I'm not eating meat every night... basically I do not want to be eating pasta all the time, because that is unhealthy and also kind of embarrassing.
Restrictions: sadly, I am horribly allergic to milk, as well as nuts and peanuts. If they can be easily left out or substituted (and I'm pretty damn good at finding substitutes for milk and butter, although cheese is pretty much impossible to fake), go for it, but there is no alfredo sauce in my future. I also don't like fish, and... well, I'm kind of squeamish about vegetables but I'm trying to get over that.
I'll probably be taking a cookbook, but I'd really like some real-world suggestions from real people about wtf to put on the table for dinner on a daily basis.
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-- 2 tsp soy sauce
-- 2 tsp rice wine or rice vinegar
-- 1 tsp sesame oil
-- chopped ginger if you want it
And I put a little peanut oil in the bottom of the pan, but since you're allergic, any other oil will work well. (I've used olive oil, canola oil, vegetable oil, whatever.)
You and I have the same deal when it comes to vegetables, hahaha! Most of the time, I just stir fry beef and these amazing noodles I get from Chinatown, but I also love beef with a side of white or brown rice.
Also, lots of chicken thighs. They freeze pretty well and you can try out all kinds of fun sauces on them (I do this lemon garlic white wine thing--the recipe is from Joy of Cooking, but I bet you can find a similar one online.)
Also also: any kind of flavorings for rice, especially Mexican-ish. I love plain rice (especially the white short-grain stuff) but I admit it can get boring to just eat rice a lot. You can either find a recipe to season the rice yourself or you can find yellow rice as a mix in the supermarket (not sure about in France). It's like...you're still eating rice, but it's more interesting rice. :P
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And I love Rice-a-Roni and other variations on plain ol' rice. Sometime in the next couple days (not today because I already ate, oomph), I'm going to try rice and lentils in chicken broth with garlic and onions and herbs. And I have a feeling I'm going to be doing similar things a lot--rice, something else you can stick in there to simmer with it, and some sort of seasoning.
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My rice cooker has pretty much saved my life for the past few years. It's so easy to cook things!
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More seriously, pasta is easy and filling, and you can also toss it in broth with some carrots or celery.
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My diet consists mostly of stuff I scrounge from my childcare job in the afternoon: bagels, fruits, cereal, string cheese. Occasionally I will have a turkey sandwich on them, and some salad. Sad that you do not like vegetables, for when thinking of recommendations I realize that basically my true joy in life is like, eating cucumbers and tomatoes with some vinaigrette. Or spinach with apples and raisins, that is also yummy.
But yeah, I'm going to have to go with "pasta" with "emergency can of whatever sauce you like" as best choice.
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The real-world flail, it is the best.
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Also, you can make a quick pan sauce, after sauteing chicken or whatever, by melting "butter" (and I have done it with Earth Balance) and mixing in a bit of dijon mustard and a bit of lemon juice or a vinegar that isn't too horrendously strong (I've seen recipes call for balsamic, I tend to use cider vinegar - white is nasty is really all this means). I usually do this with fish and green beans and pour the sauce over all of it (yes, I like haricots verts with mustard sauce). You can also do a quick pan sauce with strawberries and balsamic vinegar.
I'm not sure what you can access as I haven't been in a French grocery in over ten years. I don't know if vegan margarine exists in France, I don't know what kinds of sauces in a jar/bottle are cheap to make things easier (I admit, I buy my stirfry sauces in bottles and my stirfry veggies frozen even though maybe I shouldn't on the sauce thing but when you're one person with limited storage space, sometimes it doesn't make sense to buy all the ingredients rather than the pre-made version).
Plan for this week - beans and pasta for three days, need to buy tofu or chicken (I want chicken but will probably only pay for tofu) and will then have stirfry for three days. I intend to pick up some frozen fish (which means I'll probably end up with tofu instead of chicken) and have a few fish and green beans with mustard sauce meals (these take 20 minutes including thawing the fish). Do you eat shrimp? Shrimp saute fairly well and quickly from frozen - no thawing actually required (yes, I do this frequently). I still haven't determined what I'm doing for lunches.
I have been known to take a can of black beans, mix it with a third of a jar of salsa, and dump that over brown rice. Roughly three meals to a can. Cheaper if you can be arsed to actually cook the beans yourself.
Sometimes I'll eat a sweet potato with stuff on it - often tofu and spinach with some stir fry sauce. But again, you'll be on a different continent, and while sweet potatoes are cheap here, you'll have different options over there. If I were in the UK, I'd probably have "Indian" a little more frequently. I totally have made ghetto channa masala by mixing a can of chickpeas with Ready Bite's tikka masala sauce plus rice. The sauce is $1.99, but the chickpeas are 60 cents. Very filling because of all the fibre from the beans and the rice. And I only permit myself to buy brown rice, so it's a little healthier.
I'm trying to think what else I eat, because I can rarely be arsed to seriously cook, but I can't afford ready meals. But I fear a lot of what I do, while easy and convenient in the US, may not have corollaries in France. I may come back to this as I remember other things I eat that are more exciting than "throw pork chop with a sprinkle of herbes de provence in oven at 350 for 25 minutes and check and see if it's done".
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I have the feeling that a well-stocked spice rack is going to be my best friend; after all, with enough curry almost anything becomes edible.
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also, you don't actually need pans for baking meat in the oven - foil packets work perfectly fine if you don't care how pretty the result is.
Oh, and the Washington Post food section has been doing a monthly feature on "Cooking for One". Check the archives, because it's nice to see the ways in which food professionals adapt when living alone. They give recipes, of course, since it is the food section, but the articles are nice because they're often as much about strategies as about particular dishes. I also like the Dinner in Minutes recipes because they are fairly easy, they try to have a variety in there since there's one every week (so not everything is pasta or stir fry and they try to exhibit a variety of meats and non-meat proteins), and often they are easy to halve or even quarter.
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(Anonymous) 2009-05-17 08:51 am (UTC)(link)no subject
As a general suggestion, have you tried quinoa? I love it, you can use it in just about any dish where you would use rice or couscous, and it's full of protein and good things like that. Also you can cook it the same way as pasta so it's super easy. :D
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Trust me, I know. I eat out a lot and I eat lots of frozen dinners and pizzas. If you go to the frozen foods section, you can find a lot of full meals that just need to be heated up that taste fine. Lean Cuisine meals are often quite tasty, in addition to being all healthy.
Also, if you like hamburgers, you can get patties and buns at the store and those are fairly easy to make. Oh, and if you can have eggs - scrambled eggs or omelettes. Those two are my favorite easy, after-work meals.