A few days ago I posted a comment I had made on another blog about cooking for two and how to deal with leftovers. My advices was mainly to know your appetite, cook the required amount, and if you need to cook more plan what you will do with your leftovers ahead of time. This stuck to the back of my mind and I thought about how we normally handle this here as there is only the two of us. Our goldfishes and the colibris we feed outside do not count…

Here in Mexico the main meal of the day is what we would call lunch in Canada or the US and it is taken at 2-3pm instead of noon. The evening meal, which all of my life was the main meal, is either very light or just some fruits or a sweet bread. I have a tendency to skip it entirely unless I have a sudden craving for something or other. In a way I prefer this style of eating, as you never go to bed with a full stomach and lay there wondering why you cannot sleep because you ate so much. It still feel strange for me to go out to a nice restaurant in the middle of the afternoon, so we normally go out to restaurants in the early evening when we do so. If I go out on a business lunch, I can normally count that the business day will be over at the restaurant. Most serious business is done over a meal, so it gives you a good change to develop solid business relationships and eventually long-lasting friendships.

I am going through this long-winded story to explain the simple fact that during the week I mostly prepare lunches for Normita in the morning and will eat an easy-to-prepare meal in the afternoon as I do not have the time to do anything more involved. I always do single portion dishes so we normally do not have leftovers. When I do have leftovers, normally I use them the next day. On Fridays and weekends things are different as Normita normally finishes work early on Fridays and she joins me for lunch, and we normally plan something more involved on Saturday and Sundays. Friday’s lunch I plan a meal for two and I make sure that I do not have leftovers, so I cook accordingly. The weekend’s meals are a bit different, when we have company I deliberately make more than required, as I never like running short of food for the guests. I tend to use the leftovers the next day or freeze them if we cannot use them all. When we are alone, depending on the dishes we planned, I either will cook just enough, or plan the lunches for the beginning of the week around the leftovers.

Some dishes are much better in larger quantities like stews, soups, roasts, and things like that. I always do a larger portion and deal with leftovers according to their volumes. We used to freeze leftover soups, but now we shy away from doing that as we do not have much room in the freezer and also we ended up with unidentified blocks of ice with bit and pieces in them, and some months later we ended up throwing them away. Now I prefer using them right away and preparing lunches for neighbors and acquaintances.

Lucito

I’ve been trying to post the following on another blog and ran into troubles with their posting system. I’ll try again later when the phase of the moon might be better, and in the meantime I decided to post it here and expand a bit on the subject. I will come back to it in the future as it is an interesting subject that I have to deal with regularly.

Over the years I have found that the easiest way to handle cooking for two is to cook only what you need for the meal you are preparing. We always have a tendency to cook too much for fear of running out, but careful planning of portions can be done with most recipes. To do this successfully you need to know your level of appetite and roughly how much a recipe will yield. This can get tricky when you are very hungry, but after a while you can manage to gauge your appetite against your favorite recipes.

At times it is difficult to cook in smaller quantities, as some recipes cannot easily scale down, so then you should plan what you will do with the leftovers carefully ahead of time. Our normal routine in the kitchen here is to prepare larger meals on weekends when we have more time to enjoy them, and use the leftovers for our main meals during the first few days of the week. I always prepare my wife’s lunches, and normally for Monday’s lunch I use leftovers from Saturday, and Tuesday’s are the ones from Sunday. Whatever cannot be eaten within a day or two we freeze or give away.

As an example yesterday we invited my in-laws over for lunch, and I had prepared some Szechuan hot and sour soup and some chicken Cheng Tu style with some steamed rice. I had deliberately made more to use this week. After the meal, when they were gone, I put some rice in the bottom of plastic containers with the chicken dish on top. I also prepared some containers with portions of soup. There were still some leftovers so I froze some single portions for later use next week, and heated up a meal for a neighbor at lunch time today.

To recap:

1. Know how to gauge your appetite
2. Learn how to reduce the portions of your  recipes to yield less or no leftovers
3. If it is impossible to reduce the portions, then plan ahead to use the leftovers in the coming days
4. Whatever cannot be used in a few day, freeze or give away
5. Make sure that you use your frozen leftovers as it is not worth the energy to freeze them if they will not be eaten in the coming weeks
6. Get a huge dog that can become your ALDU (Automated Leftover Disposal Unit)

One of the things that is the most annoying when cooking is converting the recipes to the quantity of food you want to prepare. We are building our recipe viewer to handle this chore automatically, but since we have not decided when we will release it this does not help much right now. We are in the middle of finalizing a major new release of our business management and point of sales systems, and this is consuming all of our cycles right now. Hopefully in the coming weeks we will be able to assign some cycles to this project and announce a firm launch date. I will keep you posted.

Lucito

Years ago I remember that some friends were amazed that we had talked one afternoon at work and when I learned that they had no specific plans for their wedding anniversary that night, I invited them for a nice meal at home and prepared everything from the time I left work at 5pm to the time they arrived at 7pm, and this included shopping for the food.

There was nothing amazing in the process, and all it took was preparation and organization. Knowing your limits also helps. If you like to entertain at home like I do, you always end up with some failsafe recipes that you can always whip up at a moment’s notice. If you always keep the basic ingredients at hand and you have made the recipes many times before, you can easily make a nice meal after simply shopping for perishables you might not have at hand. This is exactly what I had done that evening. I do not remember exactly what I had cooked, but I remember running across the street from my office to pick up some small shrimps for a seafood first course, then to the butcher for a nice piece of meat, and throwing together some blueberry desert with some nice blueberries I picked from the over 50 acres of brush I used to own at the time. It also helped to have a well stocked wine cellar with a few thousand bottles where I could always match what I was planning to cook with one or many different wines. Like everything in life it only takes a bit of practice and confidence to end up with great results.

Another thing that you should do is to always think about what you can do with what you have at hand in your house. One of my favorite things to do in cooking is to look into the refrigerator and see what we can put together with whatever things we have laying around, including leftovers. At times it can be a challenge, but it keeps you culinary mind well exercised.

One thing to remember though is that if you are planning a special event where you want to show your best, do not try to do a new recipe for that event, unless you practice it first. Not doing so would be asking for big trouble. I have never met a new recipe that I have not fiddled with to make it work the way I like. The time for the fiddling is when you are relaxed in your kitchen and do not have a bunch of guests to attend to. Unless you have lots of experience you should not try to improvise something for that special meal. ‘Iron Chefs’ antics should be left to the pros, and even for them the results can be very hit and miss.

Saying all this, I wrote a new recipe today for a lentil soup that I plan to serve on Saturday when special friends will come over for supper. I am pretty sure that it should come out well, but in a way I am contradicting all that I have said above. The rest of the meal will be tried and true recipes though. I really do not have time to try the new soup beforehand, but I will probably make it either Friday afternoon, or on Saturday morning so if things do not go as planned I can always prepare something else or try to fix the mess without the pressure of our guests being there.

So remember the following, if you have to do something special at the last minute, do some of you favorite recipes that you are comfortable with. Try to have most of the ingredients for them always at hand, so you have to buy a minimum amount of ingredients at the last minute. Always keep at hand a few bottles of red and white wines of different types so that you have something that can match most dishes without having to run around for wine at the last minute. We will talk about what type of wines to keep at hand for regular and/or emergency consumption in the coming weeks. If you have a bit of lead time and want to try a new recipe, practice it before to make sure that it turns out as you expect and you do not run into major problems with your guests waiting at the table. At least, do as I will do next weekend, prepare it with enough time before the guests arrive to be able to cook something else or change the recipe without being under pressure.

Lucito