I’m very familiar with this way of cooking because that’s what I used to do for other people back in the day when I was a personal chef in Maryland. I used to get up in the morning, go grocery shopping for one of my client families, go to their house with my box of equipment and car full of food, and then cook up enough entrees and side dishes that were freezer friendly for a week’s worth of meals. Then, I’d freeze the meals in containers, clean the kitchen get paid and go home.

It’s not a bad way to do things, but for people who work and are loathe to give up a weekend afternoon–and frankly, I don’t blame you one bit for wanting a weekend afternoon that is NOT spent in the kitchen–it just sounds like too much work. And that’s because it IS work.

I just wanted to let you know that there’s an easier way to go about this, and while it works more gradually, it still works. This “slacker method” of cooking ahead has saved me on many a night when I was either too damned tired to cook anything or too damned busy to remember that I had to cook dinner until it was, oh, a half an hour before dinner time.

All you have to do is this: on a night when you are cooking something that goes nicely in the freezer, cook at least twice the amount you need. Then, when the food is done, you put it in a container or wrap it up and put it in the freezer.

Most foods that go well in a freezer don’t really take any longer if you double or even triple the recipe. Mind you, when I first started using my “slacker method,” I didn’t even do it on purpose: (that’s how you can tell its the “slacker method–” I came upon it by accident!) I wasn’t doubling or tripling my recipes–I was having trouble transitioning from cooking in quantity as a chef at work to cooking for two adults and one toddler at home. So, I accidentally cooked too much and had a buttload of leftovers that I had to do something with.

Rather than eat the leftovers for a week, I started packaging them up and putting them in the freezer to be used the next time I came home from work in time to cook dinner but without an ounce of will or gumption to stand in front of a stove again. On those nights, I could open up my freezer door, find a container marked, “taco filling,” defrost it in the microwave, heat up some taco shells and shred some cheese and cut up lettuce and cilantro, and BOOM! Like magic, a home cooked, nutritious meal seemingly out of thin air, put on the table faster than you can say, Rachael Ray. (With nary an utterance of EVOO in sight or hearing range.)

I’ve since refined my slacker method of cooking ahead. I actually keep freezer bags, reusable plastic (BPA-free, of course) containers, and a Sharpie marker in my kitchen so I don’t have to go hunting around frantically when it’s time to package stuff. (In my early days of cooking this way, I neglected to label some containers thinking, “Oh, I can tell chili from taco filling!” only to find that when I’m tired, headachy and hungry, no, I can’t.) I also buy extra ingredients on purpose and everything.

Dishes that are good for this method include chili, beans, lentils, stews, curries, mashed potatoes, nearly any kind of pasta sauces including marinara, puttanesca, pesto, and bolognaise, meatloaf, soups, rice dishes like jambalaya and pilaf, and casseroles like lasagne, squash (or any vegetable, now that I think on it) gratin, and arroz gratinado.

Lasagne is a great example of the slacker principle at work. It’s already a pain the butt to make and it takes a while. I have found over years of extensive experimentation (that’s a fancy way of saying, trial and error) that it takes no longer to layer noodles, fillings, sauces and cheeses into three casserole pans as it does for one. The prep is also not much more onerous for three pans as it is for one–the prep time doesn’t triple, or even double, but rather takes half again as much time as it would normally. (And for lasagne, I have found that shortcuts like using pre-shredded cheeses–which is not going to kill you–really cut the prep time down considerably.)

That’s a lot of different types of dishes. And truly, most of these dishes, if you double or even triple your recipe, you aren’t doubling or tripling your cooking or even your prep time. In my experience, it doesn’t take twice as long to make a six servings of puttanesca as it does to make three. Nine servings takes maybe five minutes of prep time longer for the same recipe. Pesto–if you make it in your food processor, only takes more time to pick off more leaves from your basil, but really–how long does it take to pick leaves off of basil in the first place?

Yeah. Not that long.

The beauty of this slacker method of cooking ahead is that if you cook five times a week normally, and you double the amounts you are cooking, you have put away meals for five days in the same time as it takes to cook dinner for those five nights anyway, with maybe 15 extra minutes added on.

And personally, I think it’s a heck of a lot less intimidating to spend an extra fifteen minutes five times a week for a total of one hour and fifteen minutes of extra labor, than it is to spend a whole a afternoon–two to four hours say–cooking all day on a weekend when you could be spending time with your friends and family doing something fun. The end result is the same–you fill your freezer over the course of five days with five more days worth of dinners. Do that a couple of weeks in a row and you have built up a stock of really varied, healthy, home-cooked meals for you and your family to enjoy on evenings when time is of the essence, or when everyone is just too damned hot/tired/cranky/or otherwise poopy to even think of cooking from scratch.

Yes, I’m ignoring the fact that for some of us, spending two to four hours cooking on a weekend afternoon is fun, because I’m not writing for us–I’m writing for everyone else. Or rather, I’m writing for the folks who do think its fun, but have other things to do on the weekends than cook all afternoon. And, I’m writing for the folks who are really intimidated by cooking five or six different dishes and packing them up for the freezer in the span of an afternoon. Let’s face it, that’s lots of prep, cooking and clean-up, and if you aren’t a professional, like me, or someone who just cooks a lot habitually, that kind of cooking marathon can seem like endless, purgatorial and just plain old no damned fun.

In conclusion, I want you to try my slacker method. It’s perfect remedy for busy folks who want good, nutritious, home cooked food, but who just have days when they can’t pick up the knife and saute pan.

As for recipes that work really well for cooking ahead–try these from my archives–I’ve used them for slacker freezer stockpiling exercises for years, and they never fail to taste good.

Taco Filling
Mangalore Chicken Curry
Mixed Greens and Mushroom Dal
Chana Bhatura (you can freeze the bhatura dough before cooking it, then thaw it out and fry it)
Shepherd’s Pie
Jamaican Beans and Rice
Arroz Gratinado
Braised Rabbit With Marsala Wine and Wild Mushrooms

There are plenty more applicable recipes here at Tigers & Strawberries–I just gave you a few to start out with.

Have fun cooking and filling your freezer like a slacker all week, and then enjoy doing nothing this weekend! It’s a good thing.

Slacker Notes:So, uh, when I wrote this post, I was such a slacker, I didn’t really give as much specific information as perhaps I could or should have, so some readers asked a few great questions down in the comments section. I decided that the information was so pertinent, that I should just put it up here in an addendum to the original post just so folks who aren’t in the habit of reading the comments to a blog post get the benefits of it, too.

Casserole Specifics

Okay, for lasagne or other casseroles–a reader asked if I cook it first and then freeze it, or I assemble it and then freeze it uncooked.

The answer is: I’ve done both and they both work pretty well.

And there are several ways to go about it. You can just make your regular one big pan of lasagne, (one that normally serves six people, say, and its only you and a significant other eating) and bake it as normal and then after dinner, cut the remaining lasagne into one or two portion bits and pack them up in containers, and then you can either thaw them in the fridge or microwave them from frozen. Works just fine. I’ve done it with lasagne, arroz gratinado, macaroni and cheese and shepherd’s pie, and none of them have suffered a bit for it.

Or, you can assemble one or two extra whole casseroles in freezer to oven dishes, and freeze then uncooked. To cook them, preheat your oven to about 25 degrees lower than your usual cooking temperature for that particular casserole, and bake it for about 50 percent longer than you usually would. In order to brown the top of your previously frozen casserole, in the last fifteen minutes of baking, turn the heat up on the oven to the regular temperature and that should give you a nice crusty brown, bubbly top.

I’ve frozen moussaka, pastitsio and lasagne this way and baked them both thawed and frozen and they all come out of the oven smelling and tasting divine.

Now, this isn’t very slackeriffic, because it involves prior planning, but if you just know that tomorrow is going to suck big-time at work and you are going to come home hungry, cranky and just plain not in a mood for cooking, you can take one of these uncooked casseroles out of the freezer and let it thaw in the fridge until you get home from work the next evening. Then, you preheat your oven all the way to its usual temperature and bake it as usual, just adding an extra five to ten minutes to the time it spends in the oven.

See–isn’t that simple?

Thawing Out And Reheating Liquids

I didn’t even think about telling everyone how I thaw out liquidy dishes like soups, stews, curries and sauces that freeze into a coherent block of ice until Kim, down below, asked me how to go about it. She’s right–beans and rice or taco filling or jambalaya–stuff that is relatively dry is simple to heat up from frozen in the microwave. But those troublesome liquidy dishes are a pain in the butt, and while yes, you CAN put them in the fridge to thaw overnight and during the day while you’re at work, planning ahead just isn’t a slacker-approved activity.

So, how do you get say, marinara sauce and meatballs that has frozen into a scarlet cube of tomato sorbet to thaw and heat up quickly?

This is going to sound bass akwards, but the way I do it is I use the defrost function on my microwave to get the frozen liquid to mostly return to a fluid state, and then I plop it all into a saucepan and finish heating it up to a boil on the stove.

My microwave has a defrost function that sets the time and temperature for thawing a frozen item based on its weight. A true slacker like me guestimates the weight, but if you have a baker’s scale you can tell your microwave the exact (or rounded up) weight of the marinara and meatballs. (In fact, if you are only partially a slacker, and are thus somewhat organized, you could write the weight of the item on the label when you pack it up for the freezer in the first place, so you don’t have to play guessing games or find your scale after work.)

Anyway, use the defrost function on your microwave and when you’ve got your stuff mostly thawed out, with maybe a little bit of ice in the center of the container, just sploosh the contents of said container into a saucepan, turn the heat on high and stir like mad, chipping away at that ice until it breaks apart and melts into the rapidly boiling liquid that surrounds it. Then, you just stir and cook until everything is heated through to serving temperature.

And then, dinner is served!

Tips from Readers:

So, as is usual, I got some nice ideas from readers. Just for the folks who don’t read comments, here’s some ideas that didn’t come from my slacker self, but instead are from the myriad of good, clever cooks who read this blog:

From Jenny V: One thing that can work if you’re cooking an entire extra casserole or lasagne is to line the baking pan with foil before filling it with the food. Then, after it is frozen solid, you can remove the pan from the freezer, leaving the foil-wrapped food behind in the cold, and add it back to your cabinets to use for other meals in the meantime. When you want to eat the leftovers, just pop the pre-formed foil container into the baking dish again and bake.

Caramelized tomatoes are a way to take perfectly ripe, absolutely perfect tomatoes and make them even more amazingly delicious. Caramelizing them concentrates the natural flavors of the tomatoes, and the salt, olive oil, seasonings and the sugar you add at the very end just gently enhance their fragrance and taste. Texturally, caramelized tomatoes are soft and lightly chewy, with slightly wrinkled skins–sort of like sun-dried tomatoes but not so leathery and chewy.

And they are also amazingly versatile: you can use them to make a tangy-sweet pasta sauce, you can use them to top bruschetta, you can toss them in a salad, top a pizza with them, or you can just scarf them down as they are.

However, I must warn you that if you take the last approach and just gobble them down from the baking sheet–they are addictive. I have heard them described as being “like crack, only legal.”

Just be certain to make extra of these caramelized tomatoes if you are planning on using them for a certain dish, because once you taste one, you know, to make sure you got them right, you will find yourself dipping into them again and again. No really–they are that tasty.

They are also simplicity itself to make.

You can use any kind of tomato you want for these: lots of people use cherry or grape tomatoes for caramelization, but I prefer to use roma tomatoes. You could use any other kind you like, but if you use any large sized tomatoes like the beefsteak varieties, or even just average sized round ones, you will have to cut them into thick slices rather than just in longitudinal halves, as I do here.

In addition, you can leave out the crushed fennel seed I used as a seasoning, or you could add any other spice you liked. (I plan on making an Indian version of these with ground up panch phoron. I cannot help but think that would just kick this recipe up about ten notches and take the flavors over the moon.) You can also add fresh or dried herbs at the time you sprinkle the sugar on the tomatoes.

You don’t really need a recipe for this–you just need to learn the method.

So, here goes:

Caramelized Tomatoes

First, you need a quantity of tomatoes: I prefer roma, as I mentioned. (I don’t need to tell you to use ripe, homegrown, farmer’s market, local tomatoes, do I? You know that by now, don’t you? I thought so.)

Take your tomatoes, wash them and dry them thoroughly.

Preheat your oven to 350 degrees F.

Core your tomatoes–I use a little gadget that is called a tomato shark to gouge the core and stem end out of the tomato quickly and cleanly. Then, slice them in half longitudinally. (Or, if you are using larger, round tomatoes, cut them into longitudinal slices, about 1/4-1/2 inch thick.)

After they are cored and cut in half, if you are not using cherry or grape tomatoes, seed them. Just reach your fingers in there and scrape the seeds and gel out.

Lay all of your tomato halves or slices cut side up on the rimmed baking sheets. I used non-stick sheets lightly rubbed in olive oil. You could also line your pans with silpats or parchment sheets that you have rubbed with some olive oil.

Sprinkle the tomatoes lightly with salt–as much salt as you would use to season your tomatoes if you were going to eat them out of hand. Season them with pepper, if you like, and if you like my idea of using a bit of ground fennel seed, sprinkle a little bit of that, too. Then, drizzle with olive oil–about a tablespoon or so. Don’t drown them in oil, but you don’t want them to dry out, either.

Put them in the oven.

Leave them in the oven for thirty minutes–check them. If they are a bit shrunken and drying a bit with some toasty dark bits on the edges, they are ready for you to sprinkle on the sugar. If they still seem a bit too juicy and there is no darkening, give them another ten minutes in the oven.

But, if they are ready, then take them out of the oven. Take a couple of teaspoons of sugar–up to a tablespoon or so–and sprinkle it evenly over the tomatoes. At this time, if you want to add herbs, either fresh or dried, this is the time.

Put the tomatoes back into the oven and let them cook for another five to ten minutes or so.

Remove from the oven, and allow to cool until you can handle them–they should still be warm, but not blisteringly hot–and remove them from the baking sheets and set them on a tray or in a bowl, depending on how you want to use them.

Any syrupy juice that you have on the baking sheets, scrape out and drizzle over the tomatoes. (That is the good stuff–if it gets on your fingers, lick it off, for the love of God!)

There you are. Caramelized tomatoes. Easier than pie. Tastier than crack–and legal, to boot.

Farming in the city doesn’t sound as, well, sexy as “Sex In The City,” but it is still a catchy title.

As most of my longtime readers know, I grew up half in the city and half on a farm. On the weekdays, I lived in Charleston, West Virginia, where I attended the closest things to inner-city schools West Virginia has–Piedmont Elementary, Roosevelt Junior High School and Charleston High School. We had drug problems, violent altercations and even bomb scares now and again. Nothing like the school shootings one hears about now, but the schools were pretty rough, and the neighborhood where we lived wasn’t exactly suburban, if you know what I mean.

Then, on the weekends–nearly every weekend–and for weeks in the summer, I lived on my grandparents’ farm in rural Putnam County–only forty-five minutes from Charleston, but a place that was worlds away from city life. Time went slower on the farm, oddly slower, considering all of the activities we managed to cram into each day spent there. Planting corn, digging potatoes, putting up bean poles, mending fences, feeding cattle, hogs and chickens, picking strawberries, freezing peas, canning tomatoes, pulling turnips, making pickles, harvesting black walnuts, catching fish, butchering hogs, building cold frames, cutting and baling hay–the work on that farm was never-ending.

It was never ending, and it was wonderful. Living on that farm was like nothing else you can imagine–the dank, rich smell of the earth in the early spring during plowing, the sound of hens clucking and singing in the foggy still hours of dawn, the sight of maple trees gone to flame in the woods in October, and the sweet, fragrant burst of the first strawberry, warmed in the May sun and filled with juice.

I grew up learning all sorts of skills that were beyond the ken of my friends at school, skills that made it seem as if I lived part time in another century. When I described what I did on my weekends, or worse, during the summer, to the kids at Roosevelt or Charleston High, more than one of them laughed in disbelief and proclaimed that it sounded like I grew up in one of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s books. They would listen, goggle-eyed and scoffing when I would describe rapturously, how much fun it was to hang out with my family and crack black walnuts with hammers or spend back-breaking hours sweating in the potato field, digging tubers.

I could never convey that no matter how much work we did, and how hard it was, we still had time to play. It didn’t matter how much work we did in a day, we still had time for long walks in the woods where we saw squirrels chasing each other, wild turkeys foraging in the brush, and once, a rabbit plucked from the ground by a red-tailed hawk who dove like a flashing arrow from the sky, and just as fast, was gone again. We always had time for swimming or fishing in the pond, or catching tadpoles or toadlets. There was always a moment for a pick-up game of one-on-one basketball with an uncle, cousin or neighbor. There was time to ride the pony, time to run in circles and chase the farm dogs, time to climb trees and time to twirl in the tire swing that swayed beneath the huge black locust tree next to the barn.

And in the evenings, there was time for reading and gathering to watch a television program or two. And there was always time to lay under the night sky and stare up in awe at the stars–the stars that were unimaginably bright and seemed so close, far from the light pollution and smog of the city.

Nor could I make them understand that all of the food we produced tasted so much better. It was too much work, my friends said–why work so much when you can just go to the supermarket? Why grow lettuce from seeds when it was so cheap at the store? Why bother gathering eggs, why butcher cows, why harvest corn, gather walnuts? Why can tomatoes, why freeze beans, why make jelly or jam or pickles? They all are at the store….

I could never convince them that corn tasted unimaginably sweet and sunny when you picked it one minute, husked it the next and dropped it for only a minute in boiling water just seconds later. Or how good eggs gathered from the warmth of a hen’s nest one minute, then fried the next. I could never explain the richness of the yolk–the brilliant orange color that came from hens who gathered bugs and grass and snippets of weeds from the garden. Or how sweet and clean-tasting a catfish you caught yourself tasted. Or how the meat of a steer who was raised on grass and hay and corn we grew ourselves and who was never mistreated, but petted and loved every day of his life was so much better. Or how blackberry jelly made from berries gathered along the edge of the woods tasted exactly like the long days of summer!

They never understood, and I always felt that maybe they were right–I had grown up straddling two realities, two times, two lifestyles and I never felt quite at home in either. (The rural kids I played with all summer long liked me, but thought I was quite strange, very bookish and unable to speak their language without sounding awkward. I never could call a dragonfly a “snakedoctor,” or say “crick” or “yonder” without making a fool of myself.)

But it seems that some of those kids, and their peers around the country, and some from the generations after us, now that they have grown up, have finally learned what I tried to teach some of them years ago. The old ways that Laura Ingalls Wilder wrote about, of preserving food for the winter, of self-reliance and of being intimately involved in the production of your own food are coming back into vogue, and not just by the “back-to-the-landers” who left the rat race years ago and moved to rural communities and started farms of their own. The folks who have started valuing self reliance and food production, who have started raising chickens, growing vegetables and fruits in their yards and canning their produce are city dwellers.

Kitchen gardening is on the rise; folks are digging up their yards and planting on terraces even more than before, and community gardens are filling up and expanding. In municipalities which allow it, backyard farmers are adding a few chickens for their eggs and their bug-hunting capabilities. (Not to mention their entertainment value–chickens really are fun to watch.) And for those who grow their own food or those who buy too much lovely produce at farm stands or pick-your-own farms or farmer’s markets, it is only natural to learn how to preserve these foods by canning, pickling, making fruit preserves or freezing.

The recession, a growing local food movement, and mistrust in our food supply arising from various incidents of contamination in the food chain, have propelled this burgeoning interest, but the truth is–I don’t really care why all of this is happening.

I only care that it is happening.

Because the truth is–we humans -need- to be connected to our food supply. Having responsibility for some of our food connects us to the cycles of life, the seasons, and the natural world in a way that I believe is as healthy for our minds and spirits as it is for our bodies. I think it is good for our souls to be involved in the growing and preservation of some of our food–it gets outside, in the sun (which helps our bodies make the all-important vitamin D!) and in the air. It connects us with the world in a visceral way, in a way that feeds us, body and soul.

Remember, I believe that food is not just physical fuel for our bodies–it feeds our spirits and minds as well. When we learn new skills, we keep our minds supple and alert–our intellects grow stronger with each skill we study and learn. Our bodies grow fit with work to do, real work, and our spirits, when connected with the world, grow and develop peacefully.

I have read comments from cynics who decry people who grow their own vegetables in their yards or keep chickens or can tomatoes from the farmer’s market as “foolish” at best or “idiots” at worst. I don’t care what people like that say–attacking those who live life differently than you do is not a good endorsement for your point of view. If one doesn’t want to grow food–don’t.

I won’t look down on them for it.

But, the truth is, I will feel sorry for them.

Because I cannot make them understand; my words are inadequate to describe the richness of experience that comes from such a life.

I know I just wrote about soup.

Actually, I wrote about a specific soup, and gave a recipe.

Now, I am just writing about soup in general, because in one of the comments about the Broccoli-Cheese and Kale Soup, a reader told me about something a cookbook author said that just got me all riled up and gave me the twitches.I could feel the indignant Depression-era farm wife who was my Grandma rising up from the grave and urging me to write a harangue worthy of Gram, my city-dwelling other grandmother, whose razor-edged tongue was known to often wither any damned fool ignoramus who dared utter a silly idea in her presence.

In other words, my grandmothers, if they were alive to hear such a thing would be set off on a tizzy of combined laughter and scorn such that I feel moved to speak for them, and stand up for the ideals which I was taught in childhood, ideals which could serve many people well in this desperate economy. Ideals that have made me loathe to throw any morsel of edible food away, because I was raised by people who lived through the Great Depression, and who worked with their hands to grow and produce the food they ate. Such folk do not look too kindly upon the waste of food. Rather, these folk tend to see it as sacrilege, and I most heartily agree.

So, what got me all het up?

Laura said, “I am glad to hear you say all that about older veggies and aromatics. One of my cookbooks, which I like otherwise, makes this big deal about how it is passe or some such nonsense to make soup out of anything less than perfect onions, etc, and every time I throw an older onion into a soup (there’s one in the chicken stock simmering away for the soup I am cooking right now with the older sweet potato) I think well good lord if I listened to that book I’d be throwing away a perfectly edible onion. After all before mass transit those onions would be looking pretty sad by now in the north but people still used them!”

I hear you, sister! Preach on, can I get an amen?

Amen.

Passe?

Since when is frugality passe? I mean, really. That is just such utter nonsense, I am half-tempted to just guffaw and walk away, but no, I think that opinions like this need to be confronted and answered because they are so wrong it isn’t even funny.

I mean, I once had a commenter on one of my recipes where I had used dried thyme leaves say, and I am not making this up, “No one uses dried herbs anymore–it is just so passe.”

Well pardon me, Mr. Passepants. That is what I wanted to say, but I refrained, since it was a cheap shot, and I didn’t feel like being a twitchy twit that day. But now, I will say it, not just to that guy, but to the unknown cookbook author and to the one chef in culinary school who saw me use a rubbery carrot to flavor and color a court bouillon for poaching salmon and said, “Garbage in, garbage out.”

(What is it about American’s quest for “the perfect—-fill in the blank with the name of a fruit or vegetable?” This quest for perfect produce is what has led us to beautiful but tasteless Red Delicious apples, huge, perfectly smooth skinned pumpkins with watery, tasteless flesh and giant, sweet-smelling strawberries that taste like styrofoam. It is all a passel of aberrant behavior on the part of food marketers and people who eat with their eyes, not their mouths–in other words, they want food that is pretty rather than food that tastes good.)

So, here I am, saying it, loud and proud–Pardon me, all you passepants-wearing elitist food snobs in the world, but when you go on about how using less than perfectly fresh vegetables and herbs in food is passe, you are making asses of yourselves and are just showing the rest of us how out of touch you are with the fact that food is not just art–it is meant to satisfy and sustain the souls and bodies of human beings.

And lots of those human beings whose souls and bodies need sustenance just as much as the passeposse cannot afford to just use the freshest and best of every little thing in every little dish they cook.

But that doesn’t mean that their food is less able to incite gustatory delight as the food made by the “food is art” nose-in-the-air crowd.

Oh, no, no, no.

In fact, I will tell you that I -know- for a fact that food made with less than perfect vegetables and dried herbs can knock the socks off of any diner, and contains just as much soul-stirring goodness as the rarefied tidbits eaten by the trend-setting wealthy folks. In fact, I might have to say that the food of the proletariat, made from humble ingredients, prepared in a frugal manner might just have a bit more soul in them than the finest dishes from the most fancified restaurants in the world.

And frankly, having dined on both, I have to admit that I prefer the foods of the peasantry to the foods of kings.

So, now you know where I stand on the issue.

Now that we have the rant out of the way, I can take a breath and talk about what this post is really about–avoiding food waste, and making something amazingly delicious out of truly humble ingredients–meaning lesser cuts of meat, dried beans and herbs and vegetables that are a bit past their prime.

And this is a great time of year to talk about it, because we are at the end of winter and the beginning of spring, which is prime soup making season, not just because we have warm days with still cool to cold nights, but because all of the vegetables that have been in storage all winter are starting to show their age a bit. Even the ones from the grocery stores, which have been in climate-controlled facilities for months, where ethylene gas is vented away, and the humidity and temperature are controlled perfectly, are starting to succumb to the hand of time and are losing their crisp nature.

The cabbages are starting to wilt.

The carrots, parsnips and turnips are turning a bit rubbery.

And the potatoes, once crisp and snappy, all know ’tis the season to sprout, so they are getting soft as they start sending forth long-tentacle-like shoots which make me think of B-movie science fiction monsters from the outer darkness of the space-time continuum.

(The onions and the garlic are in the same boat with the potatoes. They know it is time they got planted, so they are going soft and sending out green shoots in an attempt to propagate themselves right there in your pantry.)

What is a poor, frugal householder to do when faced with a bin full of guishy potatoes, pathetic onions, flubbery carrots, rubbery rutabagas, wizened beets and flaccid cabbages?

You all know what I am going to say, so why not join in?

Make soup!

Make soup with a glad heart, because the truth is this–once you have simmered your vegetables for hours, perhaps with some dried herbs–which by the way, have a more concentrated flavor because the water, which dilutes flavor, is removed–(this is only true if your dried herbs have not been handed down from the time of Moses–if they are that old, please compost them) and some old, tough cuts of meat or maybe some bones left over from a roast–you will neither know or care what condition they were in before they were cooked. Their texture will not suffer, nor will their flavor. You may have lost some nutritive value, but not that much, really.

What you have done, however, by using these unfortunate foundlings of your pantry, however, is saved yourself some money by not throwing them out and buying new stuff all over again. You have saved money, you have helped out the environment by not wasting all of the resources that were used to grow them in the first place, and you made something delicious and nutritious to eat.

How can that be a bad thing?

Now, here are a few pointers on how to determine which vegetables are safe to use because they are just a little bedraggled and which ones are just plain old nasty and need to go very far away from your kitchen.

One: Follow your nose–it always knows.

If it smells bad, throw it out. If it makes you gag after one tentative sniff, then it has gone well beyond past its prime and travelled into the realm of “Oh, dear God, no!” Once it stinks, it is a candidate only for a toss into the compost pile.

Two: Let your fingers do the walking.

Your less than optimal, yet still usable vegetables will be softer than perfect vegetables, but, they should not give way under a nice, firm squeeze. If this happens, and your fingers sink into vegetative flesh that has deliquesced into primordial ooze, then bury the slimy remnants of a once proud foodstuff into the compost heap at the back of your garden. Say a few nice words over it and move along to washing your hands. The texture of a properly useful yet less than fresh vegetable is lightly soft, perhaps somewhat spongy, but the integrity of the skin should hold. You may find some bruised spots, and those can be cut away and composted, while the rest of the vegetable is then a candidate for the soup-pot, but overall, the flesh should be firmish, yet yielding. Trust me–your fingers will know that texture when they feel it.

Three: Seeing is believing.

Your eyes can finish telling you what your nose and fingers cannot. They will tell you if the onion is spotted with powdery black mildew, or if the wizened skin of a moldy potato has cracked and let the rotting agent inside the flesh. Surface mold and mildew can be cut away–in the case of the powdery black stuff on onions, it is usually only skin deep, and can be removed with the papery skin and perhaps one layer of flesh which has started to go slimy. Those bits, just like a moldy bit of potato, go into the compost, while the rest can be saved, rinsed and used. Your eyes will also warn you of potatoes what have been exposed to the light and have gone green–those can be used, but the green parts need to be completely removed and discarded, because they contain a mild alkaloid which will make you sick if you eat it. (The green part also tastes bitter–which is your tongues way of telling you not to eat something.)

Which brings us to–

Four: Taste the difference.

Yes, give your subjects a cautious taste. You will find that sometimes rubbery carrots have gone a bit bitter, or mushy apples taste a little alcoholic. (That would be because they are fermenting in their skins a bit. That won’t hurt you if you cook the apples, the alcohol will be boiled off, but still it is nice to know.) Sometimes the taste is too radically icky to be useful and away the comestible in question goes, but sometimes, you may find that there is just a slight to no discernible flavor difference between the perfectly fresh specimens and the ones you are trying to save from the landfill. Often, the only difference is in texture, not flavor.

So you see that your senses, paired with a bit of common sense from your brain, can combine to tell you which vegetables are safe to eat but less than pretty, and which ones are possibly hazardous to your health and should be discarded. The only sense left out is your sense of hearing, which is because it is pretty worthless in this exercise. So as to keep your ears from feeling left out, how about putting on some nice music while you engage in your pantry-gleaning, vegetable-saving and soup-making?

For more tips on keeping food waste down in your kitchen, take a look at these posts from Jonathan Bloom’s excellent blog, Wasted Food.

And please, whatever you do, don’t tell him, or me, for that matter, that worrying about wasting food is passe.

Because it bloody well isn’t.

And I suspect that the folks who thought it was passe a few years ago to use less than splendid carrots in a soup may just be changing their tunes in the coming months, and perhaps people will return to an appreciation for the frugal ways of the plebeian kitchen.

This year, I planted a whiskey barrel with Thai chilies and basil; eight starts of Thai Dragon chilies, a dozen of Siam Queen basil. These relatively few plants kept us in fresh Thai ingredients for the entire summer and early fall. The rainy early summer resulted in lush growth but the first chilies were fairly mild; however, the drought that fell upon Ohio in the late summer (something like eight weeks without appreciable rain) made for smoking-hot ripe chilies.

The same was true for all of the farmers around here–their first chilies were mild, the ones harvested after the drought, no matter what variety, were at the hotter end of what that variety can be.

It all has to do with water content in the fruits. The less water the plants get, the less water is able to be stored in the tissues of the fruit. The less water in the fruit, the more concentrated the essential oils and flavoring components in the chile, and the better they will be.

By the end of September, there were so many chilies on the plants that they were leaning over, unable to support the weight of the plethora of ripe fruits. Because we are going out of town for ten days, I decided yesterday that I needed to go ahead and pick the ripe chilies and preserve them somehow and leave the green ones on the plants to pick when we came back. Once I got close to the plants, though, I noticed that there were very few green fruits, except on one plant that is still covered with blooms.

So, using scissors, I cut the heads off of all the chile plants, except the one that was still blooming, and brought the bundle of plant tops, all filled with brilliant scarlet fruits, inside.

I spread them out on the dining room table, put on latex gloves and went to work stripping the chilies off of the stalks.

Every now and then, a green fruit would appear, and those I set aside, with their stems intact, to be frozen. The red fruits, however, went together in a bowl, to be turned into my own homemade chile-garlic sauce. The red fruits I very carefully separated from their stems and the little green caps that attach the fruit to the stem–these tough bits of plant matter would not be tasty ground up inside my Chinese-style chile garlic sauce.

I had help in my work from Delia, who decided to gnaw upon a green chile after she picked up one of the plant tops and dashes away with it.

Karma was instant and brutal; the kitten jumped straight up in the air and dashed away.

She didn’t stay away long–while I was still patiently snapping green caps off of the red chilies, she jumped up on the table and watched the proceedings intently, while she batted at the chile leaves idly with her polydactyl paws.

It is imperative to wear gloves even when harvesting chilies–the oils, especially in really hot varieties like these Thai chilies–can be very irritating to skin, and even if it doesn’t bother your hands, if you should rub your eye or nose, you could be in for a world of pain.

(Can you tell I have done that before? It really, really sucks, so now I am quite cautious.)

But, let us talk about how to make Chinese Chile-Garlic Sauce.

This is one of my pantry staples, and last year, I decided to go ahead and make my own. One may ask why, since it is easily obtained in the store, is cheap and tastes pretty darned good. Well, it has to do with the satisfaction of doing something yourself–of growing something from a seedling to a ripe fruit, picking it and turning it into something else. Not only is it satisfying on its own, every time you use the results of your efforts over the next year, that satisfaction from a little bit of self-sufficiency returns to you. Besides–as good as the store bought versions taste–the homemade ones are better.

The version I made last year was fairly tame, but very flavorful, since I made it with red New Mexico chilies, serranos and cayennes. This year’s version was made with my own Thai chilies and two types of cayenne, both bought from the Farmer’s Market. I put together mixed red chilies with fresh garlic, also from the Farmer’s Market, with some salt, some sugar and some locally made apple cider vinegar (rice vinegar is more traditional, but apple cider vinegar is local and works fine, too), and ground it all into a thick paste in the food processor.

While grinding the chilies, it is a good idea to put the vent hood on in your kitchen and open the windows, especially if you are using really hot chilies. Otherwise, you might find it hard to breathe, and if you have asthma, the capsaicin in the air my trigger an attack of wheezing. So, keep your albuterol handy, and keep the ventilation going, even if it is cold outside. Better to put on a jacket and breathe, I say!

After everything is ground together, I add more vinegar–enough to make the sauce somewhat fluid–it thins as it ages–and then I stir it all up well. Once it is stirred, I scrape the resulting sauce into a jar, screw on or lock down the lid and let it sit on my counter for a day in a slightly warm place. After that, I let it finish aging in the refrigerator–it is ready to eat in about a week, but it tastes best after a month. I still have a tiny bit of the gallon I made last fall, and it is divine; this batch will be hotter, but with an amazing garlicky aroma from the hardy German garlic I used this time around.

I use this Chinese chile-garlic sauce in lots of my stir-fries, and Zak loves to put a big spoonful into his ramen. It can be used to spice anything up, but I like it best in my Chinese recipes–it tastes better than any store-bought version I have ever had. The chile fragrance is just amazing, and the garlic is much more pronounced than the commercially made types.

Of course, this is not the only way to preserve the chile harvest. I also made kimchi Hunan salted chilies and frozen chilies. Last year, I also made kimchi-style cucumber pickles, which I just opened two nights ago. WOW, were they amazingly good–they tasted great on bulgogi burgers with lettuce, tomatoes, homemade chile-garlic sauce and ketchup. I also discovered that I really like just snacking on these pickles, when I need a pick-me-up during the day. They sure are an eye-opener.

But this recipe is probably the easiest to manage for a beginning pepper preserver. While the Hunan salted chilies are technically simpler, having only two ingredients, I have heard from folks who have had them go awry. This can happen with lactic acid fermentation, so if you are wary of losing a batch of chilies to the problem of not enough salt and rot, I suggest you try this sauce. The vinegar keeps everything chilled out and fresh.

Chinese Chile-Garlic Sauce
Ingredients:

Mine lasts about a year if properly refrigerated.