Food Friday: The Saturday morning fridge cleanout

Sharpie

If you are like me, gremlins put all kinds of food in your fridge that you didn’t even know about until it’s too late.  Ever found a cucumber that’s devolved into a puddle of oozing goo? How about the jar of olives that may be from last week – but then again it may be from last year and it will KILL you?  If you want to save time and money, try to go through the contents of your fridge before you go grocery shopping, be it on Saturdays or whenever.  With the steps below, you may not even have to shop for a few more days.

The first thing you are going to do is get a Sharpie and put it in the flip top butter area of your fridge.   You will see it every time you open the fridge, and from now on you will be way more likely to use it to mark dates on any half-opened food.

Crock Pot

Next, pull out your crock pot.  And, if you don’t own one, order one right now on Ebay or Amazon.  It truly does NOT matter what kind.  Place the crock pot next to your sink because you are about to re-coup between $10-$50 every week and get healthier in the process.  Now, gather ALL of the vegetables that are lingering in your fridge and pantry.  You are about to start a meditative soup practice that will change your life.  The easiest way to accomplish the making of a soup every 7-10 days is by buying either a pre-cooked chicken from the grocery store – eat it up and save the skin, bones, scraps and congealed juices in the bottom of the container – you can just throw the container in the freezer till Saturday.  You can also always have a couple pounds of cheap chicken in your freezer for your soup (usually I buy organic legs, very reasonable at Trader Joe’s – you also often get a discount when you buy 2 chickens at Whole Foods and one of them can be frozen whole – even though it is cooked, it will thaw out just fine-remove most of the meat – recipes below for that- and use the skin and bones for your soup).  I know it’s summer, but crock pots don’t generate much heat and if you start now, you’ll have 10+ quarts by the end of summer – plus, they make really nice gifts for people. Seriously, people LOVE homemade chicken stock.

Start by throwing the frozen chicken into the bottom of the crock pot, add any partially used up bottle of wine (red or white is fine) you may have PLUS 1/3 of a cup of cider vinegar – the vinegar leaches the minerals out of the bones and makes the soup more nutritious and flavorful;  a TBS of salt or a couple packets of soy sauce also add flavor.

Now retrieve all the veggies you have NOT eaten this week – despite your best intentions.  This prep step will go quickly – no agonizing – unless it is gross to touch or smell,  just use it!  Place all the veggies and the bags of veggies and the cans of half used veggies out on your counter and have at it!  The following items are great for making soup stock-here’s how to prep them for your pot:

For the following, wash, scrub and quarter WITH the skins on – the skins have excellent nutrients: potatoes, yams, onions, garlic.

For green/white/yellow/red veggies, rinse well,  throw out the really yucky parts (wilted is fine) and chop roughly: cabbage, parsnips, carrots, parsley, turnips, squash, tomatoes, lettuce, fresh herbs, leeks, peas, beans/legumes, mushrooms and celery (these two veggies are particularly good for extra flavor, always try to have them on hand).

Other items that add flavor: hummus, lemon (not too much, makes soup acrid), canned tomatoes, canned corn, canned artichokes etc.

DON’T add: in my experience green/red/orange/yellow peppers make a strange flavor as do avocados and olives.  I love beets in a soup, but they add significant sweetness and a red that stains.

DO add: Water, to cover the carcass/veggies – then start to cook.  Crockpots vary in terms of how hot they get and cooking time – I usually cook my soup for 6 hours on high.  You can experiment, there’s no wrong answer, but I wouldn’t go longer than 8 hours because the stock starts to taste stale.

If I used legs rather than a precooked carcass, then at the end of 3 hours, I remove the cooked chicken from the bone, throw the bones and skin back into the pot and freeze the meat (I chop it before freezing so it can go in the soup or it makes great tacos or pulled chicken –shred it, then microwave it w/1/3 to 1/2 a bottle of your favorite bbq sauce –  or make it into a chicken salad – more next Friday on chicken salad).

At the end of 6 hours, turn off the crock pot (most stay on on warm so you have to actually unplug it) to cool the stock – cooling often takes 90 minutes, then get a big bowl, put a colander in it, dump out the ingredients into the colander and strain the soup.  You can freeze the stock in quart containers – I skim the fat afterwards, when I thaw it – scrape the fat off just as it is starting to get soft – much easier.   Take the solid contents of the colander and throw the whole mess out into doubled up plastic bags-discard where dogs and other animals won’t get it.  OR, you can compost everything but the bones.

Jam Jar Vinaigrette

Next, find all the jam jars with most of the jam gone – use them to make great sweetened vinaigrette for your upcoming week’s salads (classic vinaigrette ratio is 2/3 oil, 1/3 vinegar plus some dijon – about 1 to 2 tsp – to bind the dressing together and give flavor – shake vigorously to emulsify.)  Ditto with almost gone mayo, hummus, peanut butter and tahini jars, even unsweetened yogurt or the last bits of a commercial salad dressing you love can become a homemade salad dressing.

Eggs

Eggs – I hard boil any that I haven’t used that week – my kids like deviled eggs – I often substitute avocado for half the mayo. We can use up a lot of leftover eggs quite quickly by making up a batch.  I also make frozen breakfast sandwiches – easiest way to cook the eggs is baking them – just drop each egg into the individual compartments of a well-greased, non-stick muffin tin – I often place on top of each egg a mix of the following: any leftover ham and cheese or salsa, or frozen spinach that I’ve thawed and squeezed to get rid of wateriness.  I then bake the whole thing till the eggs are quite firm, pop them out and place them on toasted english muffins.  I freeze them individually wrapped in wax paper so they can be thawed/heated by microwave – voila, great breakfasts and/or snacks for the following week.

As mentioned before, half a bottle of bbq sauce over leftover shredded chicken makes a perfectly decent fake pulled chicken.  Salsa over cooked ground beef or shredded chicken makes for great easy tacos.

Chop old bread up into croutons and bake them or fry them – nice on top of salads and soups or as the basis for a panzanella salad, bread pudding or egg and bread frittata.   Turn any leftover pasta or rice or potatoes into salads with cut up peppers, onions, celery, herbs and salad dressing- if you like an old fashioned taste, your jam vinaigrette can be made thicker with yogurt, mayo or a pureed avocado and used for these salads- add tuna or chopped chicken for a complete meal.

Food Friday-Eating after 50

A friend who is studying to be a nutritionist and had been at JP+ (aka JuicePlus-a vitamin brand) advocate recently wrote to say that there is more to the story behind vitamin therapy when you consider what goes on with vitamin uptake at the celular level.  I haven’t taken any nutrition classes, so I won’t make any comments other than to say you have to be careful not to overdo it or you may have reactions, particularly with other meds you may be taking, so keep your doctor informed.  However, it is always amazing to me how frequently the vitamin fad of the month gets countered by further research – Vitamin E was all the rage a while back as was red wine and yet the medical community has backed off from each of these recommendations with caveats in recent years.  Personally, I worry about mercury and heavy metals in fish oil – how do we KNOW that our fish oil pills are being tested appropriately for toxicity? What I do find when I read about vitamins is that it is fun and stimulating to learn more about the best food sources for the vitamins that are being touted. Face it, there are only so many yams you can eat on a busy day – waaaay harder to get beta carotene poisoning from a handful of yams.  Plus, I’m no expert on what else is in a yam, but it is likely that you’ll ingest other unidentified chemical compounds that are also beneficial and possibly work synergystically with the beta-carotene. As I age and get more worried about the impact of diet on both myself and my family, I tend to look to vitamins in pill form as a kind of dictionary of compounds that I should be trying to get from my foods. I then try to work back to the easiest  food source for that vitamin and eat more of the food than I may have been before.  For instance  – sweet potatoes for beta carotene – or carrots – sardines or low mercury tuna-usually that’s tuna fished from the Mediterranean, in glass jars if possible, for the benefits of fish oil – etc.  My goal is to try to eat “medicinally” 2 meals per day, eating whatever I want the other meal and trying not to snack, which is my downfall.  (RE: Snacks, did you know we are conditioned to snack before bed?  Great WSJ article today on your bio clock: http://www.wsj.com/articles/your-bodys-witching-hours-1433198297)

This mode of thinking – where I “owe” my body 2 meals a day that are about health – is a tip of the hat to Mark Bittman’s idea of eat vegan till dinner, aka his VB6 program (read here for more info: http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/02/27/vegan-before-dinnertime/). Not being vegan or even a vegetarian – I like protein sources like eggs and steak – I found his daytime choices not filling enough, but I did like his sentiment.  What I took out of his writings was that we would be far healthier if we viewed food as both a nutritional fuel AND a pleasure source.  The big issue I faced was that while Bittman, a restaurant reviewer and NYT reporter, needs to leave his dinnertime free to go to Spago or Nobu, I as a mom of 3 and part time worker needed to be more flexible with the timing of my pleasure to fuel ratio-based diet.

If it helps at all, here are some short cuts that work in my quest for the “nutritional fuel” piece of eating.  Note that whenever I write about food, I suggest you try and find organic or locally grown options.  HOWEVER, unless I specify organic, which I will do for the particularly “dirty” foods i.e. those where the grower is most likely to use heavy loads of toxic pesticides (NOTE here a great shortcut list for the Dirty 12 and the Clean 15: http://www.ewg.org/foodnews/dirty_dozen_list.php), what I’ve found in my own life is that it is better to eat more vegetables and whole foods that are conventionally grown than to reduce your range of eating if “organic” seems too difficult.

1) Poached Eggs – I make up 10-12 of them at a time (putting a bit of vinegar in the boiling water and having a deep enough pan means they won’t spread as much or stick to the bottom) – remove with slotted spoon and drain them on paper towel.  I poach them quite firm and store them in the fridge.  Sliced, they can be reheated in the microwave.  They will pop a bit so cover them and microwave 15 secs at a time as it doesn’t take much  or reheat them in a small pan of boiling water. If cooked firm, they can be used for egg salad for the kids and serve as easy protein for breakfast lunch or dinner over greens or in a spinach and bacon salad or a Cobb salad for all of us. I find they last just fine for 48 hours in the fridge.

-Sweet potatoes/yams.  My life changed forever when I started buying the really huge yams/sweet potatoes (note, the orange ones are usually yams, true sweet potatoes are typically cream color inside).  You can microwave or bake a few yams easily. The revelation was when I went to a paleo-dieting friend and they’d SLICED their yams, skin and all:

You can slice them raw (harder to slice when raw so have a good knife or cleaver) and bake them – before you cook them add olive oil or butter, salt, pepper, cayenne, or maple syrup etc.  Even easier is to bake or microwave them on the potato setting BEFORE slicing, seasoning them once they are cooked.  Once in cooked slices, you can also easily dice the yam into cubes and fry them up into hash browns with just some chopped onions, garlic and peppers – delicious with the eggs you’ve made and unlike white potatoes, yams freeze nicely so you can freeze leftovers for future meals of yam hash.

Another way to improve your nutritional eating: any and all cruciferous vegetables – known for their high vitamin A carotenoids, vitamin C, folic acid, and fiber as well as Vitamin K, a potent anti-cancer agent, they are mostly the more bitter greens including: Arugula, Bok choy, Broccoli, Brussels sprouts, Cabbage, Cauliflower, Collard greens, Kale, Mustard greens, Radish and Watercress.  Chopping these in the Cuisinart or with a big knife, solo or in combinations, and turning them into a slaw goes a long way towards upping your vitamin intake.  The key is a great dressing that you leave on for 3-4 hours so that the rough texture softens.  I recommend a purchased dressing you like – miso based is often nice as is tahini, or a homemade vinaigrette using an organic cider vinegar (cider vinegar may be quite healthy – read here to learn more: http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2009/06/02/apple-cider-vinegar-hype.aspx) or organic lemon or lime takes little time and is tasty.  Want to up your probiotic intake?  Add yogurt to the dressing OR use just the watery whey that separates off the yogurt for fewer calories and a lighter taste – never throw away the whey – it is great way to get probiotics into kids who won’t eat yogurt as you can add it to most foods and they won’t notice.  Like a sweeter taste? Add Craisins, or raisins or grated carrot (the shredder on your Cuisinart grates 5-6 carrots into loads of GORGEOUS shredded carrots) –  to the mix.  Want more body and chew – add chopped nuts or mushrooms.   For a hot meal, I also stir fry the leftover shredded brassicas with sesame oil, red pepper, garlic onion and grated carrot – yum!

Finally, fish instead of fish oil for omegas.  How to avoid the heavy metals?  First, fish from the Mediterranean seems to be safer.  Want to avoid BPA in the cans?  I like tuna in a glass jar – often it comes flavored with olive oil, lemon and/or hot sauce. Here’s info on BPA free packaging: (http://www.treehugger.com/green-food/7-companies-you-can-trust-to-use-bpa-free-cans.html) Even lower in heavy metals are sardines and the Crown Prince brand now guarantees their cans are BPA free.   While most of us don’t LOVE sardines, remember, you are eating medicinally and a few meals a week with a can of sardines added goes a long way towards upping your omegas in the proper ratio as well as all the calcium and magnesium you will get from those tiny bones.  If you are really adventurous, anchovies make a nice salty addition too.  Don’t like fish? There is always flax seed as long as you grind it since flax goes rancid quite quickly.