Eating real food involves a certain amount of effort, unfortunately. Your great-grandma wouldn’t recognize frozen pizza. Learning to make something that’s good for you and tastes good is a true life skill and a test of your ability to take care of yourself. You can’t just eat cold cereal for dinner or order takeout every night. You can’t go out to eat for every lunch. And you can’t skip breakfast! If you do these no-no’s you’ll spend way too much money, almost certainly weigh more than you should, but, more importantly, you’ll be eating lots of processed food, which means you’ll be eating lots of salt, non-healthy fats, and weird stuff. That’s the technical term: weird stuff.
This isn’t a cooking blog per se, especially for regular weekday meals. Most of the recipes you’ll find on this site as it is going to be re-branded and re-purposed will be for party food, and even then the recipes themselves aren’t the point. You can find recipes all over the web—and I would encourage you to do so—that will give you great ideas on how to provide good food for yourself and your family. But let me emphasize, once again, that you have to change your mind first. If you think that preparing your own meals is just unmitigated drudgery, you’ll never be motivated to get into the kitchen. Here’s a good quotation that illustrates exactly the change of mind I’m talking about, from a young couple who now run their own cooking blog:
So, we realized at the time we had no cooking skills whatsoever. I ate a lot of Hot Pockets and breakfast cereal. Alex ate a lot of Taco Bell, and so we really didn’t have anywhere to start in the kitchen. So, we said, “Okay, let’s learn how to cook something.” (from the Food Blogger Pro podcast, episode 178, quoting Sonja Overhiser of A Couple Cooks.)
“Okay, let’s learn how to cook something.”
That’s all it takes: that willingness to take that first step. You don’t need a fully-stocked pantry, fridge, and spice rack. You just need to start. Maybe you do cook, but a lot of your ingredients come from cans or boxes, so you can start moving towards using fresh items. Yes, it takes more work and time, but I promise you that fresh mushrooms are going to be way better than canned. And making a sauce for a casserole doesn’t have to involve opening cans of condensed soup. Calvin Trillin, whom I know as a food writer (but he’s much more than that), fulminated about “people who pour cans of cream of chicken soup on a defenseless bird who happens to be a chicken already.” (from The Tummy Trilogy) When I first read that, I thought, ‘What’s the matter with canned cream of chicken soup?’ I thought it was pretty good, and we had a treasured family recipe that called for canned cream of chicken soup and cream of mushroom soup. Fancy! Don’t get me wrong—if I were served Chiquita’s Chicken today I’d eat it and enjoy it. But if I made it myself I’d swap out the soup for other ingredients. Here’s what I did several years ago, And here’s a totally-from-scratch version that shouldn’t be any more work than the canned-soup one that I think I’ll use next time.
I just said above that this isn’t a cooking blog, but I’m going to include a recipe below just to give you an idea of the kind of food I’m talking about. If you have several of these anything-goes techniques in your back pocket, you can almost always throw something together. So for the following, as long as you have some kind of meat, some vegetables, and some rice, plus a few pantry staples, you can put together a vaguely-Chinese meal that will be far cheaper and better for you than the stuff that comes in those little white takeout containers. (Not that I haven’t eaten a fair amount from those very containers myself!) I was astounded several years ago when my son, then around 20, said something to the effect of, “Why don’t you make your stir-fry any more? I really liked it. You’d cut up some chicken and vegetables and serve it over rice.” Huh, I thought. I never realized that he even noticed it. It was usually a dinner I’d throw together when I didn’t have any other ideas, but it was pretty good.
So here goes. The two sauces I list below are ones I made up. You’ll note that there’s a lot of commentary for these very minimalist recipes. That’s just me!
STIR-FRY RECIPES
Two simple, fast ideas to use when you’re in a hurry. Use about a pound of meat, cutting into 1/4” slices (across the grain, so that the meat fibers in each piece are short and therefore tender—you can see how the meat fibers are running if you take a look) and an equal amount or more of vegetables. Just use what you have. You can use boneless chicken breasts or some kind of inexpensive steak for the beef. Don’t use chuck roast or stew meat—it will be too tough for this type of cooking. Put some rice on to cook before you start the stir-fry. I love brown rice, but the regular kind takes forever to cook. Instead, I’m going with Uncle Ben’s converted brown rice from now on—not the instant stuff, but the kind you do have to cook. It takes about 20 minutes. Just follow the directions on the bag.
The following should serve four people, more or less. (How’s that for precision?)
Chicken Stir-Fry
1 cup chicken broth (Either from a can or made from Better than Bouillon base—don’t use bouillon cubes, as they’re mainly just salt.)
1/4 cup soy sauce (Taste tests consistently rate good old Kikkoman as the best of mass-produced soy sauces.)
1/4 cup lemon juice (Bottled is fine.)
1 tsp. powdered ginger or 1-2 T. grated fresh ginger (Fresh ginger is kind of a pain, requiring that you peel it and grate it very finely, usually on what is called a Microplane grater. I love it and use it all the time, but if you don’t want to bother with it just use the powdered stuff.)
1/4 tsp. powdered garlic or 1 large fresh clove, pressed in a garlic press (Don’t believe all the guff about how to peel, crush and mince garlic. Just cut off the little hard piece on the top and pull down to take off a strip of skin. Then put that peeled side down in your garlic press and . . . press. Scrape the extruded garlic into your sauce, then open the press up and clean out the inside, throwing the peel away and rinsing off the residue. That way you’ll never have to deal with a gunked-up garlic press.)
1 T. cornstarch
2 T. brown sugar
Stir fry vegetables over high heat in a small amount of neutral oil (I usually use peanut) using some kind of skillet or frying pan–whatever you have–until they’re as done as you like, and cut up the chicken while veggies are cooking. Remove vegetables from pan, cook chicken until almost done, remove it from pan. Stir sauce ingredients together, pour into pan, simmer until thickened, add veggies and chicken back in, cook briefly to reheat and finish cooking chicken (if necessary). Serve over rice.
Beef Stir-Fry
Same as ingredients above except use:
1 cup beef broth (Again, canned or from beef base is fine.)
1/4 cup sherry (instead of lemon juice)
1 T. brown sugar
Same procedure as above, except that beef can still be pink in the middle.
Notes (as if I didn’t already give you enough extraneous info in the recipe itself!):
1. If you have some leftover cooked meat that you’d like to use up, by all means do so. Cut into bite-sized pieces if necessary and just add at the end to heat. You are also free to use firm tofu (cut into small squares and sauteed, use with the chicken sauce) or pork (which would probably work best with the beef sauce).
2. Vegetables that work well are: onions, scallions, shallots, green or red bell peppers, and mushrooms, but you can use whatever you have on hand. Mushrooms give off quite a bit of water, so just keep moving them around with the other vegetables. Carrots are going to take awhile to cook, so you’d need to slice them thinly and add them to the pan first to cook before adding softer veggies, as would also be true of green beans. You might want to add a tablespoon or so of water and cover for a couple of minutes so that the veggies can steam. (No Chinese cook worth his/her salt would do such a thing, but don’t worry about that!) If you want to use zucchini or yellow squash, I’d advise slicing them thinly and sauteing until brown around the edges, as otherwise they’re going to be soft and watery. I like my veggies on the whole to have a little color to them since they have more flavor that way, but you don’t have to do that.
3. Opinions vary on proper technique for cutting up vegetables. I’m including a video below on cutting up bell peppers, showing the only way I’ve ever seen that I agree with!
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Love the technical term “weird stuff”.