Serious Eats
Cooking with a Friend: Brisket and Burned Beans
"Is it against the rules to drink wine while we cook?"
J. and I were trading a flurry of emails in order to set the week two menu last week when she sent that email through. I laughed, and replied no. She brought a bottle of wine, and I already had the beef brisket going in the crock pot.
Due to our weekend schedules, J. and I were getting together on a Monday night to cook our week's meals and get everything ready. We planned on eating dinner together in the middle of our cooking. I handed J. the recipe for "Dad's Fish Stew," a foolproof recipe from Elise at Simply Recipes. It's an incredibly quick meal to make and lovely and satisfying in flavor.
J. got our dinner ready while I set about making chicken under a brick—another recipe that I use on a regular basis. As you'll soon figure out, my default habit is to make proteins that I can reheat and put in a corn tortilla, and the chicken satisfied this requirement. It also worked well for J., as she ate it as an entrée later in the week with oven-roasted asparagus.
As I mentioned last week, one of our goals was to prep meals instead of pre-cooking everything. To this end, I prepared the separate ingredients for a wheat berry salad and packaged everything to be mixed later in the week. J. did the same for soba noodles with peanut sauce—we packed up dried noodles to be cooked later and prepped the peanut sauce in the blender.
It took us about 3.5 hours to prep all foods and eat our dinner, which I thought was extremely reasonable for a week's worth of dinners. While I had started a bean soup using Rancho Gordo beans and a smoked turkey leg from Diestel, it still wasn't ready to go by the time we were cleaned up and finished. J. left, and I promised to bring her the beans the next day after the dish was finished and cooled down.
That plan completely failed as I distractedly let the water cook off the beans two times. The second time, the beans were completely burned and ruined. With deep apologies to J., we were one dish down for the week. We actually ended up having plenty to eat, so the beans were not missed terribly.
Our costs were much higher this week. Last week they were $31 each, and this week they were $13 more per person. Both of us absolutely love asparagus so I splurged on one bunch of asparagus each (local, organic asparagus for $4.99/bunch). Also, our protein costs were high this week. The brisket was pretty expensive, but we have some leftover in the freezer for another week.
Both of us were okay with the costs, and overall we had a good mix of food available for the week. Both of us are adjusting to this concept of menu planning. I'm adjusting my front-loading my cooking for the week, and J. is adjusting in prepping food more than she usually does. Even the salad assembly and the soba assembly are more than she tends to to in the kitchen. She loves food and cooking, but had just gotten out of the habit of spending much time in the kitchen.
Even though we're only officially on week 2 of this project, the goal for next week is going to be to eat out of the freezer. I am a lucky, lucky girl as my dad lives in Alaska and sends me a good-sized shipment of frozen fish about once a year. That shipment is coming next week and I am in panic mode trying to make room in the freezer and use up anything that I can. But you won't find me complaining -- a shipment of fish is a great problem to have!
Final Menu, Week 2
- Dad's Fish Stew
- Chicken under a brick
- Bean soup with smoked turkey
- Beef brisket
- Wheat berry salad with citrus, toasted pine nuts, feta and spinach
- Soba noodles with peanut sauce (adapted from this Epicurious recipe)
- Asparagus
Cost: $44 each.
Goals for Next Week
1. Eat out of the freezer.
2. Quick meal prep as we both have busy weeks.
About the author: Jennifer Maiser writes about locally and sustainably grown food. She is the founder and editor of the Eat Local Challenge website and writes at Life Begins at 30, her personal weblog.