Helping Home Cooks Save Time and Money
Is there one thing that you always seem to throw away? For my mother, it was cooked rice. She liked to have it on hand, but every few months she found a forgotten jar.
I have gone through stages of throwing out different things. The short answer to, “Why do we throw out food?” is that the food is spoiled. But it didn’t start out that way. Everytime we throw something away, it tells us something about our style of shopping, eating and cooking.
In my last post I explained how to prepare and store the leftover drippings or sauce from your meat recipes. Now that you have it, what can you use it for?
* A base for soup. You can use them in any recipe calling for chicken stock or broth, or make your own by sautéing onions, adding the drippings and whatever vegetables you have on hand.
Commenter Ariela asked how to use the meat juices and sauces—drippings—from cooking meat. I called these drippings “a cook’s secret weapon,” because they are a cheap and easy way of adding meat flavor and protein to food without fat. Technically they are not gravy, which is made by mixing meat juices with flour to make […]
You can try and avoid having stale bread in the house. My mother would keep half a loaf out at a time, and freeze the half loaf of bread after slicing. Then you could take out a slice or two at a time. Still, even with the best planning bread gets stale. A lot of […]
My mother served soup at every meal. For Friday night dinner, she served clear chicken broth with noodles. For dairy meals, she opened a can of tomato or mushroom. But her meat soups were the foundation of her cooking system. What was in the soup? Hard to say. Probably some chicken broth, and odd bits […]
In our house we just finished a round of holidays. I couldn’t bear to put the leftovers into the freezer, but I wasn’t sure I had enough for a full meal. Here’s what I had: 60 grams of cooked chicken breast and a neck. chicken stock with some onion and winter squash several cups of […]
