by James Simpkins
This will be the first calendar year of my adult life where I didn’t work full time in professional cooking and it feels a bit strange. And while I don’t miss it that much, I think the saying starts ‘you can take a cook out of the kitchen….’
Over the last couple of weeks I’ve discovered that the skills that were once assets in making good food can double in living a Green lifestyle. If the idea of the Green chef is hard to imagine, it shouldn’t be. No matter the style of restaurant, the rudimentary job description of a chef is pretty much the same everywhere: serve stellar (…or amazing, immaculate, extraordinary) food that looks good, tastes good, and makes the restaurant money. Home cooks can think about it as making as much good food as possible for the least possible money. Even if you don’t believe there are Green chefs, this idea should sound familiar.
To be successful in professional kitchens, you have to monitor what doesn’t get used as much as what does. Beginners in the culinary world will miss the hidden creative and financial potentials of uneven vegetable cuttings and leftover fish portions and assume them to be garbage. Put those same items in front of a veteran cook and in a short time—together with bacon, potatoes, water, herbs, sea salt and a few liters of cream—you might have a traditional Cape Cod Chowder for patrons over the next few nights. Soup is known to be better the day after it is made, and keeps for almost a week in the fridge!
So here’s my case for taking on some serious culinary practice and developing your personal gastronomy a bit: As your knowledge of food and cookery increases, so does your ability to use it to its fullest potential. While not everyone likes soup, there is always a way to use what’s left for what’s next.
Here are a few of my favorites:
Stocks
Stocks, whether vegetable, chicken, duck, beef, or any other are a great way to extract every little ounce of flavor out of something before you trash it. But, stocks should be made from a recipe or trusted formula like almost everything else. Stock is not simply made from cutting scraps of random foodstuffs. On the contrary, stocks take some time to craft and make other things.
Those “dumpster soups” mostly just taste bad and end up ruining more food. Instead of just throwing in onion peels and some bay leaf, stash recipes of a few stock variations and keep them within reach in your kitchen. Most stock ingredients you will have at one time or another and just knowing the recipe, you are more likely to buy groceries in groups of things that make sense being eaten together.
For instance, if you pick up a rotisserie chicken one night, you could get some fennel, carrot, onion, garlic and dill and have the makings of a nice grill vegetable accompaniment. Buy a few more vegetables than you might normally and you’ve got a roast chicken stock in the making using the carcass as a base. Put it all in the stock pot in the right proportion (use your recipe) and simmer for four hours while you eat, clean up and watch the latest episode of Weeds.
At the end of that time, you’ve eaten, cleaned, been entertained and now have a couple gallons of fresh roasted chicken stock. I recommend traditional recipes like the ones found in Larousse’s classic Gastronomique, Julia Child and James Beard cookbooks, as well as modern refinements by Thomas Keller (try his vegetable stock!), Charlie Trotter or Jean-Georges Vongerichten. You won’t go wrong with any of those folks helping you!
Greens/Salads
A doctor I saw a few years back suggested I eat as much leaf lettuce, broccoli, spinach, kale, and chard as I could handle. These famed and fabulous farmland staples, plus a little protein and some exercise, and my body will thank me for it. I’m behind on the exercise part, but eating greens all those greens has been great.
Greens of many types can be planted more than once in a growing season, they have great vitamin and nutrient content, and provide an internal alkaline balance for the high-acid diet that most of us eat. In his latest book In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto, author and journalist Michael Pollan shares his personal eating motto from his research into America’s food systems: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” While I won’t get into his full explanation here, it suffices to say that eating ‘mostly plants’ carries with it a mandate of learning to err on the side of vegetables. Mashed potatoes or baked potato? Neither, thanks. Just more asparagus, please. Not to mention green vegetables and leafy greens are readily grown sustainably or organically.
Also, you may want to change what constitutes a “salad” in your mind. If you think of this and a bowl of Iceberg lettuce with sliced tomatoes, cucumbers and Ranch dressing pops into your head, well…shame on you. I’m talking about salads like sautéed kale and beet greens mixed with sweet onions, a handful of lentils and goat cheese crumbles and drizzled with beet vinaigrette and wild green onions from your tree line out back. That is a salad.
Simplicity
I think it may surprise some people to know that recipes can be needlessly complicated. A mixture of twelve spices in a bread mix may not taste much different than one with eight, while the omission of garlic or sea salt from a late summer tomato sauce may result in a vaguely recognizable product of infinite blandness. Knowing where flavor makes the most impact can make a difference in both in the recipe itself, and in your monthly grocery bill. There are no hard and fast rules to this, and yes, occasionally a recipe really does need all of its components—but use your best judgment. And whether it works or not, remember to write it down for next time!
In general, learning to cook is learning how to conserve and be prudent with the food resources that you’ve got. Working smarter with what we have is less an ideal these days than an economic reality for some of us. While the state of our country’s economy may leave a certain bitterness that lingers longer than it should, it doesn’t mean we can’t add the sweet of capital modesty and the richness of greater personal awareness. As in most things, a balanced attitude is always wise.
Plus, if life is anything like chocolate, bittersweet is the best anyway.
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