Posted by Robin Bellinger, May 12, 2008 at 1:00 PM
Lately I’ve been wondering if I should add "freezing food in individual portions" to my list of interests on Facebook. For one long, dark year I lived in a Park Slope studio with no freezer, unable to save leftovers and frequently forced to eat entire pints of ice cream in a single sitting. Ever since I have appreciated my freezer and used it as much as possible, although the serving size of ice cream that satisfies me now remains tragically huge.
Since I don’t always have the time or ingredients to pack even a sandwich, my frozen stash of soup, stew, and other leftovers has often been the only thing standing between me and a mediocre but depressingly expensive business-district lunch. Although some things (especially potato-based soups, in my experience) suffer for having been frozen, most come out just fine and are given additional relish by the thrill (okay, for me) of enjoying the fruits of my earlier labor.
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Posted by Robin Bellinger, May 5, 2008 at 3:45 PM
For a month or two now I have been searching for an Asian or Asian-y noodle dish that would make a nice lunch. A few candidates didn't pan out, and the one that did was a soup, which I know some people don't care to bother packing up for work. Finally, though, Deborah Madison came through with her refreshing salad of chilled mung bean noodles with dulse and crushed peanuts from Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone.
I'm afraid it looks as if this week is going to be rainy in New York, but for those of you with happier weather, this is just the thing to eat outside on a warm day: cool, full of bright flavors, satisfying without being heavy. I liked the generous dose of raw ginger, but people who find that kind of thing overwhelming might want to start with 1 teaspoon and work their way up. I also added a few dashes of soy sauce and would not have minded a little more spice; maybe I'll leave the jalapeño seeds in next time. This noodle salad keeps in the refrigerator for four or five days, in my experience, and travels quite well: last week I enjoyed it on an airplane while everyone else made do with a doll-sized bag of pretzels.
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Posted by Robin Bellinger, April 28, 2008 at 1:30 PM
While I’ve been going on and on here about the pleasures of a thoughtfully packed lunch, I have not revealed a shameful truth: at the moment the only lunch I make is my own. My husband is in the home stretch of medical school, which means that he spends long days in hospitals with little time for indulgences such as "lunch." Most days they're given some kind of greasy Chinese food or inferior pizza to wolf down during a midday meeting, and the rest of the time lunch is catch as catch can. My impression is that sitting down and unpacking tasty leftovers or even a good-looking sandwich would be suspect, food being decidedly too frivolous to concern a busy MD (or MD-to-be).
So Andrew asked me to buy him some energy bars, which I have always regarded with distaste and even suspicion. I just don’t think they count as food. I soon discovered that they are rather expensive, and what's more, many of them contain tree nuts, to which Andrew is deathly allergic. Wouldn’t it be more sensible to make something myself, and wouldn’t I feel better about it?
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Posted by Robin Bellinger, April 14, 2008 at 1:00 PM
Photograph from RockyEda on Flickr
I've been working my way through everyone’s suggestions in response to last month’s post about how to eat sardines. With many methods and recipes left to try, I have already discovered one new favorite. Sardines and hard-boiled eggs didn’t sound like a natural combination to me, but since more than one person cited the pairing with some fondness, I had to try it.
It’s really good! Especially on an English muffin. Thank you, hanak and allakarasik. Obviously this is a great source of protein for people who eat fish and eggs but not meat, and sardines are full of the wonderful fish oil we could all use more of. For people like my dad (who said, “Here’s a recipe for sardines: Give the sardines to the cat and order a pizza”), this could be a good gateway sardine dish. The eggs really mellow out the oily little fish, and the texture of the salad on a soft roll is very comforting.
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Posted by Robin Bellinger, April 7, 2008 at 2:15 PM
As a devoted user of How To Cook Everything
, I’m always interested in bloggers’ strong opinions about Mark Bittman. I haven’t run into any anti-Bittman animus in a while, but every once in a while someone really lets him have it. HTCE and the Minimalist have at times led me astray with recipes that were disappointingly bland or didn’t quite work, but successes have far outnumbered failures.
This week I tried his curried rice noodles in hopes that they would make a good sack lunch. I’m afraid, however, that this is the kind of recipe that makes people turn against Bittman. The noodles were completely bland because the curry powder never really got integrated, and now I have a pot completely encrusted with cooked-on noodles. I probably should have used a bigger (10 quart?) pot and gotten it hotter, but I’m not going to try again to find out; the one thing I demand of his recipes is that they be idiot proof. In the meantime, for your lunch I propose one of my old Bittman favorites, red beans and rice.
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Posted by Robin Bellinger, March 31, 2008 at 12:45 PM
You don’t need me to tell you to pack a sandwich for lunch, but lately for some reason I can’t get peanut butter and honey out of my head. Though I’ve been eating it on spelt bread in a gesture towards healthiness, I often dream of eating it on the dreadfully soft white bread we used to use at summer camp.
As a kid and a teenager I spent three weeks every summer in a screen and concrete cabin on the shores of a lake about an hour outside of Austin. The camp cook, Barney, was a little-seen but much-beloved institution. Each cabin was expected to make up a little song and dance in praise of him at least once a week (no joke). We looked forward to certain meals obsessively, but I can remember only a few now: honeybuns for breakfast, chicken fried steak and apple crisp for lunch, and taco salad for dinner. (For some reason out biggest, hottest meal of the day was served at lunchtime, when the temperature usually hovered around 97 degrees. Perhaps the director’s hope was that we would all pass out during the required post-lunch siesta instead of playing pranks on our sleeping counselors.)
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Posted by Robin Bellinger, March 24, 2008 at 1:15 PM
Nigel Slater’s luxurious and deeply aromatic noodle dish has been on my poorly-maintained “to-make” list since Amazon delivered my copy of Appetite
four years ago. It was the title that won me over, I must admit, though the pictures are pretty convincing, too: fat shrimp, tangled noodles, a beautiful green purée. One thing and another (lack of Cuisinart, fear of fish sauce) interfered, and I didn’t get around to making it until last weekend. And then—it was too spicy for me to enjoy. I suffered through it with a glass of milk and hoped it would mellow overnight.
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Posted by Robin Bellinger, March 17, 2008 at 1:00 PM
In the fairytales and adventure stories of my childhood, the first thing a character had to do before she embarked on a journey, whether she was a princess or a milkmaid, was pack a small but sustaining bundle of bread and cheese and sausage. Consequently this trio has always seemed very romantic to me, but only recently did it occur to me as a superfast and easy lunch for non-storybook types, too—all shopping, no work.
I would take a hunk of baguette, some rounds of salami, a slice of good cheddar, and an apple. You might prefer ciabatta, mozzarella, prosciutto, and olives. We’re really just talking about a deconstructed sandwich, I suppose, and not a particularly healthy one, but I love the idea of stopping work and really enjoying these few things instead of continuing to type with one hand while the other moves a sandwich from desk to mouth and back again.
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Posted by Robin Bellinger, March 10, 2008 at 1:00 PM
Though I am always looking for new ways to eat quinoa, Heidi Swanson’s lemon-scented quinoa salad from 101 Cookbooks never loses its place in my rotation. It comes together in a flash, it’s healthy and boldly flavored, and it’s substantial without weighing you down. I’ve packed it up not just for work but for long plane trips, too, so far without any objection from the TSA. (I love Continental for trying to serve food, but their mysterious hamburgers and barbecue sandwiches are not for me.) Though lemon and cilantro play leading roles in my kitchen year round, that brightness is, I think, especially welcome in March, suitable for dreary days and balmy ones alike.
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Posted by Robin Bellinger, February 25, 2008 at 1:00 PM
My boss used to tease me when I would bring black beans and rice to work for lunch. He thought, as far as I can tell, that this was my subtle way of asking for a raise, but I had no ulterior motives: I am devoted to beans and rice. Make a big pot on Sunday and you have a remarkably healthy, sustaining lunch set for the week. Long ago, when cooking my own beans seemed like too much of a challenge, I enjoyed Zatarain’s black beans and rice; since then I’ve experimented with many different recipes and have come to enjoy boiling up a bag of beans myself (it makes me feel rather smugly frugal, perhaps a little more self-satisfied than is absolutely attractive, but that is the price we sometimes pay as cooks). Madhur Jaffrey’s recipe for Costa Rican Gallo Pinto (“Spotted Rooster”) has had my eye for some time, and last week I finally tried it.
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Posted by Robin Bellinger, February 18, 2008 at 1:00 PM
One night last month I realized at 9pm that I had no bread for the next day’s bread-dependent lunch. I had intended to make some, but one thing and another got in the way, leaving me breadless. I cursed myself for not having a well-stocked freezer and started flipping through cookbooks in search of an inspired, somewhat-speedy recipe, and sure enough I found one: Deborah Madison’s pita bread from Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone.
This recipe took me two hours start to finish, and most of that was not active time. Though my pita did not “puff” and therefore did not have pockets, it tasted good and was wonderfully soft, despite its generous complement of whole-wheat flour and wheat bran. Adam posted a recipe for white-flour pita here last October: the rising time is slightly longer, but the good tips provided for rolling out the breads properly should work in either recipe.
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Posted by Robin Bellinger, February 11, 2008 at 1:00 PM
Despite the fact that I’ve cut back on meat in the past few years, it rarely occurs to me to turn to eggs as a source of protein. As part of my effort to liberate them from my mental breakfast ghetto, I’d like to share with you a Spanish tortilla (potato omelet) that makes a lovely dinner for two with enough for two lunches left over. So full of potatoes it hardly tastes eggy at all, this substantial dish is good when it’s hot but, by my lights at least, even better at room temperature. (This makes it wonderful to serve guests for brunch, too, since you can have everything ready before anyone arrives without worrying about timing and temperature.)
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Posted by Robin Bellinger, February 4, 2008 at 1:00 PM
Recently I agreed to bring the savory edible of my choice to a baby shower. Due to an advanced case of entertaining anxiety I throw parties approximately once every five years, so I was excited to get to try one of the nibbly party recipes I usually have to pass over in my cookbooks. Calmly I decided on B-L-Teas from Martha Stewart's Hors d'Oeuvres Handbook and pimento cheese sandwiches; calmly I went to the grocery store; and calmly I did some yoga, went for a walk, and took a nap the day before the party. Then I woke up in a panic, realizing how little time I had to make something for dinner, get everything ready for the sandwiches, and finish the baby’s present. It all came together in an intense triathlon of cooking, assembling, and knitting, but on the way to the party, too worn out to tell for myself, I thought, “Are these sandwiches even good?”
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Posted by Robin Bellinger, January 28, 2008 at 11:00 AM
I don’t work in an office anymore, but when I did, I almost always took my lunch. This was partly a function of the alarming rate at which my overly enthusiastic cooking generates leftovers and partly because a sack lunch is so much cheaper (and usually healthier) than whatever you can buy in midtown Manhattan. Eventually I found myself cooking dinner and packing lunch for a husband, too, but this (he) presented a problem: the pot of whatever-it-was that had, once upon a time, fed me for two dinners and two lunches now disappeared between the two of us in thirty minutes flat. And then he would look up as if to say, “Where’s the rest of our dinner?” If I was going to pack lunches, I would have to plan and shop for them separately.
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